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Electronic Democracy and the New Citizenship

Lewis A. Friedland

Lewis A. Friedland is a professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a member of CPN's editorial team.

Reprinted with permission from Media, Culture & Society Copyright © 1996. (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Dehli), Vol. 18: 185-212.

Contents

Introduction
Democratic deliberation and the new technology
Models of citizen networks
Conclusion
References

Introduction

The concept of 'electronic democracy' connotes a radically new form of democratic practice modified by new information technologies. Democracy is substantively changed by new technology, but in the discourse on electronic democracy that difference is rarely specified in detail. The parallel to the broader concept of the information society is striking. Much as 'information society' implies a rupture with industrial capitalism and a new social formation, electronic democracy suggests new citizenship practices.

Whether such a break exists is an open question. Just as some have criticized the notion of a postindustrial social formation organized around information (Webster, 1994), new forms of democratic practice are best addressed by theoretically informed empirical inquiry. There are three broad perspectives from which we might enter this question. First, the growth of information inequality threatens broad democratic participation. Second, the power of state and corporation to engage in electronic surveillance in civil society threatens both the rights of groups to speak and organize and the privacy rights of individuals. Third, new forms of citizenship and public life are simultaneously enabled by new technology and restricted by market power and surveillance.

The argument that the growth of a privatized information infrastructure will lead to growing disparity between information haves and have-nots, or information rich and poor, is rooted in the perspective of political economy. In the end, according to this view, only public provision in information infrastructure and public subsidy for information services can ensure that the benefits of access to information will be distributed equitably and democratically (Schiller, 1984; Webster and Robins, 1986; Gillespie and Robins, 1989; Garnham, 1990a).

The second perspective argues that the growth of a privatized information structure, even if aided by some government infrastructure planning, is likely to lead to the spread of greater systems of surveillance and control. One current draws from Foucault's concept of the panoptic society to argue that the spread of information technology is likely to lead to a loss of autonomy in many realms of political, economic, cultural and social life (Gandy, 1994). A related argument holds that a form of 'digital individual' is emerging that simultaneously opens new forms of communication and increases the threat of surveillance (Agre, 1994). A third variant, rooted in Anglo-American libertarianism, argues that although privacy is threatened from many quarters, government surveillance is the primary threat (EFF, 1995). [1]

These first two perspectives hold important warnings and implications for the theory and practice of democratic polities that addresses the spread of information technology. But I wish to develop a third perspective in this essay, one which is organized around the concept of citizen participation in the public sphere. I ask under what conditions might existing and nearterm configurations of communications technology be used to extend democratic practices and lead to a broadened public sphere. I focus on empirical eases of democratic practice current in the United States, all of which are movements for the renewal of civil society, or 'new citizenship' movements. My argument concerning the democratic potential of new communications technologies is linked to the dynamics of real social movements actively engaged in local problem solving, and the democratic traditions that underpin them, more than to technology itself. I explore how the social uses of that technology within those movements shape our understanding of their potential for expanding democratic practice.

The eve rights of citizenship and criticism of the basic structure of communication have been powerfully linked in the work of Raymond Williams, who argues that the basic rights of citizens to speak and hear are linked to the power to transmit and receive information (Williams, 1963; Sparks, 1993). The close connection between the organization of communication and provision of information and the social rights of citizenship is also implied by T.H. Marshall (Murdock and Golding, 1989; Marshall and Bottomore, 1992). In the British tradition, these core rights are tied to the theoretical critique of the political economy of information and the political movement toward privatization of the 1980s and 1990s. Garnham links the criticism of interactive systems to the agenda setting power of 'the controller of the network' (Garnham, 1990a: 127). Murdoch and Golding likewise identify technological convergence and privatization as major threats to social rights in communication.

I argue, however, that to understand the democratic potential of new communications technologies we need to suspend our assumptions concerning linkages between privatization and convergence, on the one hand, and control and interactivity, on the other, in order to examine the actual uses of emerging networks for two reasons. The first, which cannot be developed here, is that even in a highly integrated communications system like the United States, we can no longer think of control of 'the network' as resting at the apex of a series of oligopolistic peaks. Control itself is increasingly exercised through the horizontal extension of network alliances. [2] The second is that, even though they are embedded in an oligopolistically networked capitalist marketplace, new communications technologies are being used in ways that sometimes extend democratic communication practices. As networks become structurally decentralized, ever wider publics gain access to them in ways that lead to an increase in the rate and density of public exchange. This, in turn, threatens to undermine the control of information as a discreet, privatized commodity (Keane, 1991: 162).

Since the 1970s and 1980s, new citizens' movements and practices have emerged that challenge our understanding of this fundamental relationship between communication and democracy. This same period has also seen burgeoning community-based technology projects whose democratic potential has been rarely explored. [3] These two elements—new citizens movements and community-based technology projects—push our theorization of the public sphere in a direction that is both richer and more complicated than the existing literature suggests.

Democratic Deliberation & The New Technology

During the 1980s, two frameworks dominated the US discussion over the relationship between democracy and new communications technologies: the plebiscitary and the deliberative (Arterton, 1987). In the plebiscitary framework, individuals directly express opinion through an expanded 'electronic marketplace'. If the network is cast widely enough, the sum of individual opinion will allow for the rapid expression of the common will. This notion of 'teledemocracy' was actively promoted in the 1970s and 1981)s by proponents of expanded democracy (Williams, 1982; Barber, 1984), 'futurists' (Tomer, 1980; Naisbett, 1982), and corporate cable television interests seeking municipal franchises (see Elstain, 1982). By recasting classical liberalism in futurist terms, teledemocracy appears to offer a robust democratic framework. This model of democracy, however, mirrors the advertising marketplace in which those best able to mobilize the mass media are in a superior position to control the outcome of electronic plebiscites (Abramson et al., 1988). The plebiscitary vision is alive and well, embraced by both conservative populists, including H. Ross Perot and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and technologists who see electronic communication as a democratic end in itself.

In contrast to plebiscitary democracy, deliberative models take representative democracy as a starting point and ask how it might be strengthened and made more participatory. Although Barber advocates teledemocratic measures, he does so only within a series of measures oriented toward 'strong democracy', including the use of new communications technologies to develop strengthened neighborhood assemblies, televised town meetings, a national civic communications cooperative, a civic videotex service to equalize access to information and promote full civic education of all citizens, and electronic balloting (Barber, 1984: 273-81, 307). Barber does not offer these measures as ends in themselves, but as means to develop stronger citizen participation in democratic governance in a society in which national scale precludes direct democratic assembly. Abramson et al. (1988) argue for a 'communitarian' framework, which emphasizes deliberation over direct voting and is rooted in identifiable communities and a concept of the public good that goes beyond both individual and group interests. Nonetheless, they identify the pluralist concept of interest group competition as an important corrective to the communitarian view, even if pluralism is limited by a reductionist vision of democracy to the competition of interest groups for scarce resources. Fishkin's (1991) concept of the deliberative opinion poll among a statistically representative sample of citizens (yet one not too large to preclude meaningful discussion) attempts to model what the general public would think if, hypothetically, it could be immersed in deliberative processes. Habermas's (1962/89) major statement on the public sphere had relatively minor impact on the US debate until its English publication in 1989. Habermas offers a broader theory of the rise and decline of public life in the West and its structural causes, including the decline of a print-based public sphere in the early 19th Century. [4] But he addresses the implications of modern communications technologies in only a cursory and fragmentary manner (Calhoun, 1992; Peters, 1993). Carey (1989, 1990) addresses the intertwined relations between technology and democracy from the viewpoint of democratic culture, anticipating the emergence of new issues raised in democratic practice.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s when theoretical discussion still centered around the plebiscitary and deliberative models, changes in both social structure and technology began to raise a new set of issues. The deliberative debate had stressed participation in public discourse, but it was primarily concerned with the representativeness of speakers at the level of theory disjoined from considerations of practical activity and direct impact on policy (Arterton, 1987). At the same time, civic innovation had been blossoming primarily as problem solving activity among grassroots stakeholder groups. Within this 'civic laboratory' carefully crafted experiments with deliberative processes were rooted in ongoing relationship- and trust-building work. Thus, real actors capable of drawing upon practical experience, mobilizing community assets and committing to common action to solve problems are at the center of democratic innovations—not statistically representative samples and hypothetical publics deliberating on the basis of cursory familiarity with a range of alternative opinions (American Civic Forum, 1994; Mathews, 1994; Sirianni and Friedland, forthcoming).

As Boyte (1992: 341) has noted, within the deliberative model as well as its insurgent counterparts, 'the middle ground of pragmatic motive and action found within civil society disappears'. Citizens are seen as 'permanent outsiders, detached from the actual practices of decision making and action involved in solving the problems of social reproduction'. Mansbridge's (1980) classic study also contains a similar lesson that was generally passed over by deliberative theorists: democratic discourse in the New England town meeting could simply not be understood apart from the ongoing relationships of reciprocity and trust that permitted people to rely on each other to solve everyday problems'.

In the context of the crisis of professionalized social welfare and top-down regulatory models in the 1980s and 1990s, increasing attention has been focused on social capital and community assets-based approaches. 'Social capital' describes the durable networks that form social resources through which individuals and groups strive for mutual recognition (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 19). As such, social capital is the necessary infrastructure of civic and community life that generates 'norms of reciprocity and civic engagement' (Putnam, 1994: 167). Assets-based development (Kretzmann and McKnight, 1993; McKnight, 1995) stresses locally generated knowledge that permits communities to mobilize their assets, broadly conceived, to address problems. An increasing number of local projects, as well as funding programs in foundations and federal agencies, have begun to incorporate these insights. By treating communities as social capital networks, rather than strictly as discourse communities, we can begin to ground the connective elements of new information technologies in social life and social structure.

New technologies increasingly play a central role in the mediation of social networks. Because a general increase in the complexity of social relations results when those relations are mediated through electronic communications systems, any socially grounded theory of the public sphere will have to take into account these social network structures, and the communications systems that bind them (Calhoun, 1986, 1991a, 1991b).

As we move from a model of public life grounded in discourse toward one that expands to include greater emphasis on social networks, the role of knowledge brokers within the communications system becomes more central. Garnham distinguishes two critical communicative functions in the public sphere: the collection and dissemination of information and the provision of a forum for public debate (Garnham, 1990c: 111-12). In order to prevent high quality information from turning into a private good, Garnham proposes greater access by public and quasi-public bodies to direct presentation of information, including the idea that organizations might maintain their own journalists to 'clarify current issues for the general public'. In the case studies, below, I point to emerging models of democratic information brokerage that begin to satisfy these criteria.

At the same time since the mid-1980s computer networks have become so widespread that they challenge our earlier views of the democratic potential of new information technologies. The plebiscitary and deliberative discussions focused primarily on interactive television, paying only secondary attention to the possibilities of group communication inherent in the emerging computer-mediated communications systems (CMC). Now, a sufficiently broad base of community organizations and citizen practitioners has adopted CMC so that we can begin to study the democratizing effects of their diffusion. In the sections that follow, I develop four models of the use of new communication technologies by a broad range of citizens' organizations.

Models of Citizen Networks

My analysis of a broad range of citizen- and community-based information networks yields four broad models: first, networks that have created new information out of advocacy in the service of problem solving and action; second, networks that have been driven by technology in local or regional communities; third, networks that have grown out of broadly defined governmental or local planning activity (including economic and community development); and fourth, electronic public journalism models that have grown out of new network publishing practices.

Each model suggests a social learning trajectory defined by varied points of origin, diverse purposes and goals, and the different communities that they serve. Despite different social locations, however, the groups located in each model share some common characteristics. Practitioners within each type of network have learned from each other as activities have developed and crossed paths in the past decade. Because of this, these models begin to converge on some central themes, particularly the agreement that networks must be rooted in social capital development, practical problem solving and new forms of citizenship.

Advocacy and problem solving models

Two networks exemplifying the model of advocacy networks oriented toward problem solving through the sharing of information emerged in the mid-1980s. The Institute for Global Communications (IGC) serves individuals and groups engaged in advocacy for social justice, human rights and the environment. HandsNet grew from a group of California-based community organizations working locally in the areas of hunger and nutrition, homelessness and housing and community economic development. From its inception, IGC looked outward toward the world, HandsNet toward the California region, then the USA.

Because both HandsNet and IGC hold a central place in the discussion of democratic use of new technologies we devote somewhat greater attention to their formation. Both have organized new models that generate information out of the needs of their members. Both draw their information, at least in part, directly from their members and represent :few forms of what I call 'distributed responsibility', which makes widely decentralized nodes of the network primary information gatherers. Finally, they address specific organizing problems (in very different ways) and have been driven by this practical problem focus. IGC and HandsNet, then, grew out of the specific needs of progressive movement and community organizers. IGC emerged from the mid-1980s efforts of four organizations that operated 'Peacebase', a central database modeled on larger commercial services like Dialog (for a good history and analysis of this first phase see Downing (1989). Peacebase planned to provide a database for all peace and disarmament groups that would be available nationally, and succeeded to some extent. However, the Peacebase project taught that maintaining a central information database of high quality and low cost was too difficult.

The failure of Peacebase was partly linked to the economies of maintaining a high quality, centralized database. The centralized model works for corporate and bureaucratic organizations because their information needs are driven by strategic imperatives derived from the need to exert control in markets or networks of political relations (Burt, 1992). These users have no intrinsic need to learn from each other or to share information. Indeed, in many cases, they are in strategic competition. Further, centralized databases require large fixed staffs to gather and organize information and bring it to market. The needs of users are identified only indirectly through their market choices. Similarly, in the Peacebase project, a general 'need' for data was identified before the specific needs of users.

Learning from the problems of Peacebase, PeaceNet was formed in 1986 with a different strategy: 'A number of anarchists in the original group wanted to get the technology out there, let people plug in and talk about whatever they wanted', according to IGC Executive Director Geoff Sears. 'With only S60,000 to start, having member organizations build the content was the only way' (Sears, interview, 1995). Both the labor of information gathering and editorial decision making were in effect distributed across the network. In 1987 PeaceNet merged with EcoNet, a nonprofit network dedicated to sharing information on ecology issues, to create the IGC.

Several specialized networks were subsequently added: ConflictNet in 1989, LaborNet in 1992 and Women's Net in 1994. Sears says in many ways they are 'all the same thing. They share information resources, give people a sense of community and a feeling of membership' (Sears, interview, 1995).

The IGC networks have a radically decentralized model providing no content at all directly. PeaceNet hosts more than 1000 conferences in which members post newsletters, news releases, legislative alerts and news services. Each network has a similar structure, with EcoNet, for example, hosting the Greenpeace conference and news service. During the Persian Gulf War, the peace and human rights organizations on PeaceNet converged with Greenpeace on EcoNet to offer a virtual worldwide alternative news service. [6]

Today, IGC has about 13,000 members, including 300 to 500 organizations, and incorporates other specialized networks under its umbrella, including the Playing To Win network (discussed below), UNICEF, the Advocacy Institute, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and several dozen others. Each of the specialized networks is incorporated into the larger IGC structure, which serves as an internal communications network for its own members, a general communications system to talk with others with related interests and a source of news and information.

Both IGC and HandsNet are technologically mediated forms of community organizing. According to Sears, IGC has a 'vision of helping build a stronger movement' and it serves that vision by being service provider for its constituent individuals and organizations. IGC provides a community resource for progressive organizations in order to help them 'make use of computer and communications technology to further their own agendas' (Sears, personal Interview, 1995). But while IGC emerged as a loosely networked coalition of groups, HandsNet grew out of a group of California community organizations that shared a substantive focus: hunger and nutrition, homeless and housing issues and community development. In 1986, 35 leaders of the hunger and homeless movement in California decided to build a network that would use emerging computer network technology to sustain their work. The group approached Apple Computer, which had been giving away computers to community organizations since the early 1980s in an effort to stimulate community networking. Most of these projects had failed for several reasons (see Rubinyi, 1989 for this history). Networking technology in the mid-1980s was not as advanced as the networking vision. More important, there was a lack of community focus. The projects set out to 'network' without a clear vision of who the social base to be networked was. According to HandsNet founder Sam Karp 'Connecting boxes didn't make them talk to one another. Someone had to facilitate' (Karp, interview, 1995).

In its first year HandsNet gave computers to 100 organizations, 80 in California and 20 elsewhere in the United States (primarily state-based groups working on hunger and housing). The Washington, DC based Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) and Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) were each chosen to receive computers because they shared values, constituencies, memberships and colleagues with other HandsNet organizations. By 1989, HandsNet included 500 additional members. Because HandsNet organizations needed specific high-quality information delivered efficiently, a 'distributed' database was created, parceling out the labor of information gathering to specialist organizations like the FRAC and CBPP. Both became 'forum facilitators' in 1990 for the food and nutrition and homelessness forums respectively, managing the flow of policy and program information from Washington, DC, and collecting and gathering information for redistribution to other members of the network. The facilitators also managed ongoing electronic discussions. They did not censor participants, but worked to keep group discussions focused on issues in ways that could lead to practical problem solving. As of 1995, 50 forum managers provide network support for nine separate top level forums, each maintaining complete editorial control to manage its respective areas. Today HandsNet has almost 5000 member organizations across the United States in the areas of children and families, community and economic development, rural issues, poverty, youth, community organizing, welfare, and AIDS/HIV, in addition to areas already discussed.

HandsNet also operates its own editorial organization, digesting and abstracting 300-400 articles a day from US newspapers and magazines for network members. The CBPP offers reports, summaries and state-by-state information in multiple issue areas, all cross-referenced with other stories and issues areas in HandsNet.

From its inception HandsNet conceived of itself differently from IGC as a 'business network', whose users had specific rather than general communication needs. HandsNet chose to minimize network building to concentrate on developing a sophisticated graphic-user interface because, according to Karp, "We knew that the biggest barrier was how busy people are. Part of what would make us successful was the quality of information, how accessible it was, and how people could use it strategically in their work.' The technology was not an end in itself: 'It was just another form of community organizing' (Karp, interview, 1995).

Both IGC and HandsNet were creating networks that led to new formations of social capital—durable networks that form social resources. As each organization built its computer network, it was simultaneously building an organizing network out of loose sets of social relations. As more partners were added, a critical mass began to be reached which transformed loosely connected organizations into learning networks producing their own information. [7] The social capital base developed through these networks has allowed new models of information brokering to emerge, based on distributed responsibility. As networks solidify and new social capital relations emerge, the production of information begins to be radically decentralized, since each point in the network becomes a potential information gathering and distribution node. At the same time, distribution itself takes on richer horizontal and vertical forms as regional and national organizations feed local ones, and local ones, in turn, move information up and across the network.

The NCexChange project demonstrates how these new models of information brokerage have emerged from the advocacy model. In 1990, a North Carolina network of social action groups on HandsNet requested funding from the Rural Telecommunications Initiative of the Ford Foundation to help community organizations in the Raleigh area to obtain access to HandsNet and train key people in each organization on how to use it strategically. The core included housing, women's, rural development and health organizations. As NCexChange focused on developing broad community-wide approaches for using telecommunications for sustainable economic development in particularly distressed areas, the project expanded from seven to 160 organizations across the entire state, which forced a rethinking of the direct hands-on support that NCexChange had been providing.

NCexChange organizers began to notice recurrent barriers that kept the network from working for some community groups, while it seemed to work for others. They found that, given the realities of work life for many small organizations, electronic networking didn't always make sense because of different patterns of communication, literacy and time allocation. Most organizations, however, were already using existing community social networks and technology (e.g. the telephone) well. The question was whether and how to appropriately integrate computer networks. There were many legitimate reasons why local groups did not want to participate, according to Executive Director Terry Grunwald (interview, 1995). They could only benefit from specific, selected information, but the necessary investment of time involved in being trained and accessing a general network like HandsNet did not necessarily bring commensurate rewards to small organizations.

In response, NCexChange began to develop locally-based intermediaries across North Carolina, celled 'community information brokers', to provide the communication support that local groups needed. Local community information brokers could gather and disseminate information through both social and electronic networks, increasing the information efficiency of the entire community network. Over time, specific groups could be trained and encouraged to learn network communication skills for themselves as they saw the need. This new model of information brokerage expanded the local and regional public sphere, by bringing disenfranchised, minority and rural groups on to the net. It also illustrates the dual principal of critical mass: as the community base expanded, so did the utility of the network to its members.

The NCexChange focus was on organizations rather than individual citizens, on distressed areas and on the ways that telecommunication could be used strategically. Grunwald believes that, increasingly, resources in the private sector will provide computer access at reasonable rates. The most important issues are how to disseminate information strategically to address community needs and to develop a strong information source around community revitalization.

Community and free-nets
While the advocacy networks are clearly focused, the term 'community network' covers a range of institutions: free networks, civic networks, community bulletin boards and others (Rheingold, 1993; Morino, 1994; Schuler, 1995). Their rough significance can be gauged from their total number of users. The major umbrella group of community networks, the nonprofit National Public Telecomputing Network, now has more than 380,1100 active service subscribers. If it were a commercial provider it would be the fourth largest user network in the USA (Civille, interview, 1995). The existence of such a large block of nonprofit computer subscribers suggests a significant potential for democratic participation outside the commercial system.

Our concern is to analyze the social learning trajectory of community networking. The community networks emerged from different social groupings than the advocacy networks described earlier. If the advocacy networkers were rooted in social movements and community organizing, the community networkers were oriented toward local geographic communities and alternative technology. Some early community networkers blended an individualistic and libertarian vision of community and government with a technological utopianism that held if individuals could be connected and communicate with each other, expanded democracy would follow. The dominant barriers to expanded democracy in this view were technological access to network tools.

Many community networkers came from 'techie' culture, in which early computer adoption and use was the primary bond. Operators set up lowcost community bulletin boards in their homes, working in their spare time, in the belief that connection per se was a community benefit. Some operators remained relatively isolated from broader social movements and community organizations, and their networks evolved into local bulletin board cultures. Even today many groups 'represent only the interests and views of the people who organized and built the network' (Morino, 1994: 11).

From the standpoint of democratic communication, the most successful community networking projects are those that have moved from early concerns with technology to a broader social and community orientation. Each of the models considered here has broadened community support (whether those communities are local, regional or virtual). And many observers and practitioners of community networking agree that for community networks to avoid implosion under an onslaught of commercial providers they will have to deepen their local roots (Morino, 1995)

The community networking movement began in 1980 with the Old Colorado City Electronic Cottage. Using cheap, outdated equipment, David Hughs set up an inexpensive community bulletin board system. Hughs saw the online discussion as a 'springboard for local action' which would take place in streets, neighborhoods, and public institutions (Rheingold, 1993; Morino, 1994: 10). Hughs believed that the availability of networks would facilitate democracy by creating the virtual public space in which conversation could take place. [8]

The first major urban test of the community network movement was in Cleveland in 1984 when Tom Grundner founded 'St. Silicon's Hospital', a local medical information bulletin board and early test of the concept of health information delivered via computer. By 1986, St. Silicon's had grown into the Cleveland Free-Net, which became the model for many subsequent community networks. The networks spawned by the Free-Net coalesced into the National Public Telecomputing Network (NPTN) in 1989. The NPTN was modeled after US public television and radio—it is a user supported, community-based, alternative medium embodying the core idea that computer access should be free to all (Rheingold, 1993: 2723). NPTN today has more than 45 affiliate Free-Nets, with more than 120 in the organizing stages (Benson Foundation, 1995).

The first wide-scale rural application of the free-net philosophy was in Montana with the 1988 founding of Big Sky Telegraph. Big Sky began as a project to link rural Montana schools. Today it has expanded to include 40 rural schools (ten Native American), public libraries, hospitals and organizations for the disabled, economic development and legal services offices and soil conservation organizations (Odasz, interview, 1995).

Despite the institutional success of Big Sky, founder Frank Odasz points to limits of community networking made evident over the years: 'Most community networks consist of individuals doing things related to personal information gathering, not purposeful group activities. Community networks are not group activities. The dynamics of engaging purposeful group activities are only beginning to emerge' (Odasz, interview, 1995). Odasz sees the ability of groups to sustain purposive network communication with each other—as groups—as the next major challenge for the community computing movement.

The theoretical implication of this statement is that the impact of a community network is measured not so much by the number of users, but by the ripple effects of secondary social network influences. This view—that community networks must be measured in social rather than computing terms—is central to the concept of 'civic networking' developed by Richard Civille. The Center for Civic Networking has concentrated on moving the community networking movement from the initial stage of 'networking for networking's sake' to a broader concept of networking that emphasizes the use of networks by citizens for public activity (Civille et al., 1993). The Center has worked at both the state and federal levels to insure that public access language is written into any new telecommunications law. As the US debate over the shape of the National Information Infrastructure (NII) began in earnest in 1993, the Center also played a central role in integrating public access language into the NII Agenda for Action (Information Infrastructure Task Force, 1993).

The Center has also pushed the community networking movement toward issues of sustainable economic development, using the network to create regional micro-enterprises. As community networks move away from what Civille calls the 'sandbox' of community networking towards greater responsibility for public life including economic development, they assume a stronger democratic role (Civille, interview, 1995). But at the same time, they become imbricated in the policy issues that reside with government.

Government-community economic development models

The US government continues to play a central role in the regulation and control of the information infrastructure in the United States (Horwitz, 1989; Drake, 1995). The role of the state remains central in capitalist democracies and its position in these multiple areas strongly shapes the possibilities of democratic outcomes at the regional, state and local levels. Our primary concern here, however, is with the building of public space through community and social capital networks and those elements of government that open the possibilities of democratic participation through the medium of communication networks. Toward that end, we will focus on the local end of the government spectrum and on those higher level programs that support local activity.

In the United States, local government still holds many powers. Some of the most important democratic innovations have come from local and state governments in new forms of economic planning and community development (Bruyn and Meehan, 1987; Osborne, 1988; Krumholz and Forester, 1990). Community Development Corporations (CDCs) have grown from a handful in the 1960s, when they were first promoted as part of the 'War on Poverty', to perhaps 5000) today, with extensive national networks for training, finance and technical assistance. The CDCs both coordinate local government planning initiatives and provide a source of government subsidized capital for small businesses and cooperatives at the local level, especially for minorities and impoverished communities, and function as mediating structures between government and community networks.

The case of Burlington, Vermont, offers one clear example of these interrelationships. In the early 1980s, Burlington elected a socialist mayor, Bernie Sanders, as part of a broad, economically diverse coalition. Sanders made economic development a central focus of his administration. Neighborhood Planning Assemblies and the Community Land Trust became centers of activity (Clavell, 1986). At the same time, Town Meeting Television, a local government access channel grew out of a group of 'radical tv makers' trying to develop and sustain a new community institution (Davitian, interview, 1995). The group began with deliberative and access concerns, but moved quickly toward an emphasis on sustainable development. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the renamed Chittenden Community Television (CCTV) evolved into a community television access center that produced programs for nonprofit organizations.

By the early 1990s, the limits of public access television were becoming apparent. CCTV Director Lauren Glenn Davitian says the real issue is no longer access and the First Amendment, but economic and community development (Davitian, interview, 1995). The CCTV strategy focuses on developing job training and community computing centers in settlement houses, libraries and other community settings, based in part on the model of the South Bristol Learning Network in England. Through community meetings and short courses in computer literacy, word processing, electronic publishing and the Internet, community members are recruited and taught basic job skills.

When Vermont began a statewide telecommunications planning process in 1992, Davitian became convinced that 'If we were advocating that the phone companies provide a measure of public service, then we had to provide a demonstration of what that really meant' (Davitian, interview, 199S). In 1994, with the assistance of a grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which had come to place increasing emphasis in its community development grants on assets-based strategies, and the City of Burlington, CCTV established a public access telecomputing center as a model of how to move disenfranchised communities from a focus on housing development issues to ones of sustainable community economic development. The project is run as a cooperative, with members who cannot afford to pay for services able to contribute their membership fee in labor.

CCTV continues to actively participate in a citywide telecommunications planning process. Davitian sees this as an essential moment, one that allows the city to make legitimate claims on cable and telephone providers for both better service and a percentage of gross revenues. She also links the planning process to Burlington's socialist city government, without which Davitian says CCTV would have become marginalized.

The case of the Playing to Win network (PTW) further illustrates the complex interplay between local democratic planning and federal programs. Begun in 1981 in a public housing basement in Harlem in New York City, PTW was designed to get technology into the hands of those who wouldn't otherwise have access. Throughout the 1980s, as hundreds of grassroots community organizations began to experiment with computer technology, a need arose to connect them. In 1991, the National Science Foundation gave PTW a $1 million grant to connect these centers together. Today PTW has 56 affiliates, some outside the United States. PTW is open to 'anyone who cares about low income, center-based, community technology', according to director Peter Miller (Miller, interview, 1995). Because PTW maintains a specialized network on IGC, affiliate organizations gain access to the Internet and to other IGC networks.

PTW has also played an active role in planning and implementing the Boston-area CWEIS grant, from the Community Networking Initiative of the US Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CWEIS grants were designed to stimulate telecommunications partnerships between local public television stations and community organizations, as well as to stimulate local democratic planning using the assets-based model. The Boston project, a partnership between PTW and the Boston public television station, focuses on literacy. Six low-income organizations in African-American, Latino, Asian and white working-class neighborhoods, half of them PTW affiliates, will integrate computing skills into existing literacy programs.

Beyond this, PTW is attempting to play a catalytic role, to get the base of community networks affiliated with NPTN, discussed above, to think more in terms of the full range of community constituents and to move in the direction of center-based models. Miller calls this a 'marriage that has to be made over and over again', as community networks understand the limits of open computing and community centers seek the benefits of broader community access.

A third case illustrating the relation between local planning agencies and democratic networking is the Institute for the Study of Civic Values in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Institute was founded in 1992 by Ed Schwartz, a former head of the city Housing and Community Development agency, to apply the values of democratic accountability and populism to organizing in neighborhoods and citywide coalitions. Concurrently, Liberty Net was being developed in Philadelphia by a group led by the library, city community development agencies, schools and the local public television station. The goal of the network was to wire the city's institutions together in a public information network. But, according to Schwartz, 'Unless somebody took responsibility for fighting for neighborhood access it wouldn't happen' (Schwartz, interview, 1995).

To develop a citywide strategy for getting network access, the Institute organized a series of workshops and briefings to inform neighborhood organizations about Liberty Net. More than 50 groups responded in the first several months of the campaign. The first action was to get money set aside to provide free accounts for nonprofit neighborhood groups and to provide network training for nonprofits. Since then, the Institute has worked to develop neighborhood 'home pages' on the World Wide Web, [9] to give residents access to learning tools about themselves that they themselves control. The goal, says Schwartz, is to

have every nonprofit neighborhood group online . . . the objectives are not just media itself. Congress has been stripping dollars from poor people. The question is: is telecommunications a helpful vehicle to bring groups around the country together and mount a more effective opposition? (interview, 1995)

These three cases—Burlington, Playing to Win and the Institute for Civic Values—have drawn from the resources of government and its power to legitimate grassroots organizing through community economic planning and grantmaking. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and, in particular, the Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program (TIIAP), is the federal program that is most directly responsible for supporting the type of community and citizen networking that we have been discussing so far. [10] The first projects funded by TIIAP in October 1994 included many types of public services, from economic development to homeless services to education. According to TIIAP Director Laura Breeden, the 'focus is on equity issues in underserved communities: rural regions, impoverished urban areas, linguistic and ethnic minorities, and the disabled' (Breeder, interview, 1995). Echoing the views of other community and civic networking activists, Breeden said the barrier is very high for community-based organizations. They are strapped for cash, with no technical resources .... There is a need to create a social network of people who are thinking about community networking, link them together, help them conduct experiments, and facilitate learning processes. Then they will take care of themselves.

The TIIAP funding is concentrated at the local grassroots, with a strategy of building up to regional and then national experiments. Because public sector projects have a difficult time getting access to capital, the TIIAP seeks to reduce risk by providing a 'venture capital fund for public sector projects that can be widely replicated' (Breeder, interview, 1995). The TIIAP's mission is to provide hard information and capital for community organizations. The NTIA/TIIAP program is a significant source of support for community and citizen efforts, and has been under attack by conservatives in the Republican congress. The funding strategy has—to date—favored more innovative and active grassroots efforts, as opposed to more centralized institutional coalitions. Funding for programs like NCexChange is rare at any level of government, so the NTIA serves to both fund and legitimate these community efforts at electronic democracy. Still, we need to distinguish between state support for infrastructure development and state support for grassroots democratization. NTIA still conducts only a portion of the federal government's overall information planning. Much of the development of information services—democratizing or otherwise—will take place in the private sector, especially in those emerging technologies that are directly concerned with information services.

Electronic public journalism
American journalism is rapidly moving into electronic distribution. As of July 1995, 70 US newspapers were publishing online editions either over local dial-up services or over the commercial information utilities such as Prodigy and Compuserve. Critics have begun to demonstrate that a privatized electronic information network may well narrow access to that portion of the population unable to afford computers and attendant infrastructure costs (Wasko and Mosco, 1992; Civille et al., 1993; Benton Foundation, 1995; Cisler, 1995). While this fundamental equity issue remains central to the current debate, we wish to focus on another possibility. The falling cost structure of electronic infrastructure, analogous to the spread of the telephone, might make electronic publishing more widely accessible to a broad array of groups than it is today.

One such experiment in the democratization of electronic publishing is ONline Wisconsin, an electronic news journal started at the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism and Mass Communication in January 1994. Online Wisconsin was one of the first Internet news journals on the World Wide Web alongside the commercial Raleigh (North Carolina) News and Observer. As an early model of electronic public journalism, Online Wisconsin explores three potential democratic properties of the new medium. [11]

First, Online Wisconsin demonstrates the potential for publishing beyond the simple home-page format still dominant on the World Wide Web. A team of students was able to design, publish and begin to distribute a news journal world-wide for less than $5000, demonstrating that the capital cost of Internet publishing is minimal. The significant costs are the labor necessary to sustain editorial work.

Second, by using 'distributed responsibility' discussed earlier, news sources generated on the Internet can be gathered together and republished, establishing a model for a local, regional, national or international citizen's wire service. As noted, this has occurred during moments of international crisis, such as the use of PeaceNet and EcoNet during the Gulf War and the use of the Internet by human rights organizations today. But these efforts have been episodic. Online Wisconsin offers one less volatile, more stable alternative publishing model.

Third, Online Wisconsin began to explore the hypertextual possibilities of multimedia journalism to tell stories that emphasize multiple viewpoints and sources to build context. This allows a vertical layering of information, different from the earlier models of electronic democracy criticized above. Using hypertext, a story can be layered vertically, with a journalist's topical narrative account that attempts to synthesize the multiple sources of a story in a more or less traditional manner; columns of opinion, or more partisan accounts; original sources and documents, including the statements from which the story was composed; and hyperlinks to other documentary sources. In this way, the reader is able to read a 'simple' narrative account, but also to pick it apart to investigate both its veracity and its underlying narrative and ideological construction.

This layering is linked to practical solutions. By presenting citizens solving problems in a narrative structure that builds context and historical understanding, a model begins to emerge for journalism that merges the two functions of the collection and dissemination of information and the provision of a forum for public debate identified by Garnham earlier. A collection of views can be archived, reread, explored and connected in new ways that offer new models of problem solving that expand the narrative boundaries of traditional journalism. These models offer an alternative to the plebiscitary model of electronic democracy that is both deliberative and practical.

This opens up new avenues for understanding the networks of social relationships mediated by electronic communication by mapping them graphically. By bringing together levels of discourse originating at local, state, regional, federal and international levels, electronic journalism begins to make the interconnection of public narratives clearer for the citizen-reader. This is particularly apparent in several experiments in electronic public journalism conducted by Online Wisconsin.

The public journalism movement in the United States, some five years old, is an approach to news that sees its main goal is 'making public life go well' (Rosen and Merritt, 1994). Rather than describing the breakdown of public life from the position of neutral spectators, public journalism news organizations seek to engage in a dialogue with citizens and to provide avenues to participate in public life and civil society. Public journalism has characteristically focused on projects centered either around developing citizen agendas for elections, or around specific community problems and issues.

Two special sections of OLW have explored the issues of immigration and welfare from a public journalism perspective. Each blends the hypertextual qualities of electronic journalism with the public journalism approach to stories. Each organizes a debate on the issues, but rather than the restrictive either/or logic characteristic of most news stories, the new format allows many sides to be expressed. In the welfare reform section, for example, which focuses primarily on the state of Wisconsin, statements of the Governor, a conservative advocate of punitive welfare reform, are juxtaposed with welfare mothers describing their own experience of the system. The state's own documents, including studies, are posted online. Multiple viewpoints critical of state welfare reform sit alongside a photo essay exploring life on welfare in Wisconsin. The preface of a noted scholar and critic of the welfare system is online, framing the debate on women and welfare from a more complex perspective than would normally be found in a US newspaper (Gordon, 1994).

A further experiment in electronic public journalism will be conducted during the year leading up to the 1996 presidential election. Wisconsin Public Television is producing a national series of democratic forums for the US Public Broadcasting Service, Citizens' 96 Campaign, to develop a citizens' agenda for the 1996 election. The format will combine deliberative forums, town hall meetings and magazine-style documentaries in nationally televised forums. To expand citizen participation, Citizens' 96 is developing an electronic forum to parallel the televised one, in cooperation with the Pew Center for Civic Journalism. In addition to citizen access to multiple sources of information and points of view, the Citizens' 96 electronic forum will allow discussion before and after each televised program, in order to expand the voices in the public debate and provide continuity that can lead to meaningful action. By linking to the Civic Practices Networks, discussed below, and other civic networks, Citizens' 96 will also provide a national opportunity for viewers and citizens to connect with other citizens' movements locally, regionally and nationally, providing a link to democratic practice that can counter the passivity of the television medium.

The Civic Practices Network (CPN) has been developed out of the recognition that robust social learning and capacity building require civic and community organizations to engage in a more structured exchange of participatory models and practical lessons. A learning collaboration for civic renewal on the World Wide Web, CPN is predicated on the idea that citizens need access to the best cases and practices of public life in a multiplicity of forms: first, the development of a networked public space; second, the reconstitution of public narratives; third, new models of citizen-journalism and information brokerage; and fourth, the development of an 'electronic storehouse' of practical social capital building tools, systematically cross-referenced and readily accessible from any computer connected to the Internet.

CPN has emerged from the new citizenship movement. It was first proposed by Carmen Sirianni in his capacity as research director of the Reinventing Citizenship Project which brought leaders of civic and community organizations into a dialogue with the White House and federal agency officials in 1994, with the support of the Ford Foundation (Sirianni, 1994). Initially, no one in the joint working group understood exactly how new networking technologies could be utilized. Several members of the group, including Harry Boyte the director and Dorothy Cotton the former director of citizenship training in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference under Martin Luther King, Jr., traced their long histories in community organizing back to the SCLC leadership schools in the South in the 1960s. As the joint project with the White House ended and civic leaders went on to found the American Civic Forum, CPN began to build a network of teams and practitioners and academics within the forum and then within the Alliance for National Renewal, the other major national citizenship federation. This network views CPN as helping to constitute 'citizenship schools for the information age', and seeks to create a 'networked public space' that is not itself the product of technology (Sirianni et al., 1994). Rather, CPN focuses on community problem solving and civic capacity building, and generates a new set of opportunities and responsibilities for utilizing and generating learning tools for this.

As such, the first task of the CPN is to help develop a reconstituted public narrative—stories that stimulate people to imagine a more active, public identity as citizens which, in turn, points toward new entry points into practical public work. The working premise, drawn from the new citizenship movement, is that people need to see themselves and people like them as problem solvers, rather than as problems. This requires the use of more traditional journalistic forms and narratives that humanize the work of problem solving. CPN provides stories of civic projects in areas ranging from community organizing and civic environmentalism to youth leadership and public journalism. It includes case studies of complex partnerships involving community groups and government agencies, as well as state- and county-wide health reform projects based on citizen participation. It provides action and training manuals from its network of affiliates, and 'civic maps' of projects and partners around the US—by state, city, county and even neighborhood (although the capacities for the latter are in the early stages). And it includes critical assessment and participatory evaluation of projects. These stories and other tools, gathered from CPN affiliates and from the broader range of participatory innovation, are designed both to directly aid in capacity building and to encourage ordinary citizens to locate themselves as civic actors in the communities and institutions in which they live and work.

CPN develops a model of citizen-journalism and information brokerage that differs from both traditional journalism and a more purely distributed model. HandsNet, for example, serves its specific client base, modeling one space of democratic, distributed information brokerage. CPN is a more general public network with goals that are broadly pedagogical rather than purely informational. As such, information gathering cannot be simply distributed. CPN draws on the lessons of the public journalism movement in general, and the electronic public journalism experiments at the University of Wisconsin specifically. Public journalism has opened a dialogue about the proper relations between journalist narrators and those citizens about whom the story is told. By inverting the role of detached experts gathering news about communities played by traditional news organizations, public journalism moves news reporting toward a more active role in constituting public space for discussion, debate and problem solving. The experiments at the University of Wisconsin provided a model of electronic public journalism that CPN could build on both practically and theoretically and continue to provide the technical site from which CPN is published.

The content of CPN is gathered by networked teams of 'citizen-editors' in each issue area. All editors are practitioners with rich organizing experience and broader networks from which to draw, or intellectuals whose work is focused on democratic innovation. No editors are professional journalists, with the exception of the public journalism team and they, too, have experience organizing within the public journalism movement. These citizen-editors work with other practitioners and academics to gather and develop case studies and other materials. At the same time, using narrative forms, they craft stories to make them accessible to a broader public, adding value to social capital in their respective areas.

CPN develops new tools framed in a common, pragmatic language about what is and is not working in the practice of rebuilding public and civic life. Whenever possible, stories on CPN are hypertextually linked with both other stories that can provide broader horizontal context, and case studies that analyze the stories in greater depth. For example, a story of personal involvement from the grassroots organizer of Mothers of Children with AIDS is linked with case materials from the Orphan Project and the revised New York State Guardianship law, which both organizations subsequently helped craft as a way of empowering affected families and debureaucratizing procedures. Stories from volunteer youth in the national Americorps are linked to training manuals, companion readers and participatory evaluations.

The Oregon health plan is presented from its initial stages of community meetings and citizen health care parliaments through the formal health values deliberation process established by the legislature and to current citizen focus groups who are refining the plan.

Users can perform cross-referenced topical and geographic searches on a map of the 50 states. In this way they can browse easily within and across domains and locations, but are also presented with in-depth information on problem solving and organizing. Topic areas also have selections of 'civic perspectives' essays that can be used to help frame larger conceptual issues involved in a myriad of civic practices, and thus enhance the everyday theorizing that citizens invariably engage in as they attempt to transform the world practically.

By combining stories and cases CPN attempts to bridge the divide between expertise and public action in a networked 'electronic storehouse' of practical social capital building tools. The collaborative design provides opportunities for practitioners to tell their stories. But it also demands responsibility for providing these as part of an ongoing commitment to visible, reflective practice in a broader public area. In this sense, it seeks to add an additional normative dimension to social capital strategies—one that is appropriate to a public sphere of increasingly complex and mediated social relationships (Calhoun, 1991a, 1991b). Civic actors have a responsibility to provide discursive accounts of what it is that they do, so that actors in many different and cross-cutting networks have the opportunity to learn, evaluate and devise new ways to collaborate to solve public problems. And, CPN seeks to set standards for discursive 'civic accounting' within other sectors. Thus, CPN has built its network of citizen-editors in such a way as to extend to those civil servants who have been most committed to citizen participation. One brief illustration that reveals the potential, but also the enormity of the challenge in transforming the ways that public bureaucracies work: CPN currently has more stories and case studies of civic and community-based environmental approaches, including those initiated by the US Environmental Protection Agency than the entire online server of EPA itself.

Conclusion

This analysis leads to an altered conception of the relationship between new information technology and democracy. Despite the important contributions that deliberative models of the public sphere have made to advancing this discussion, our focus has been on the distinct enabling relationship that new technologies have to the building of social capital on the one hand, and new citizenship capacities on the other. Each of the four models—advocacy, community, and government and economic development networks, and electronic public journalism—challenge and deepen deliberative democratic concepts. The new social capital relationships that emerge from these networks ground deliberation in the concrete practices of citizens, a much richer set of relations than could be developed through polling and the mass media alone.

These new social capital networks are empirically identifiable and can be understood in the context of the larger communication networks in which they are situated. These findings suggest that access to network tools which is rapidly widening, is beginning to create public spaces in which new forms of information and relationship-building can circulate. This allows for both the practical strengthening of grassroots democratic organizing and its growth and extension to new citizenship groups. Further, although the mass media remain the dominant institutions for the circulation of both news and the cultural resources that help create identity formations through 'imagined communities', the electronic networks begin to provide networked nodes that can offer accessible alternatives. This suggests several tasks for both empirical research and theory. Empirically, we are challenged to map these networks as social networks. Social network theory offers a set of tools to evaluate the formation and circulation of social capital in ways that move beyond the suggestive theory of Bourdieu, Coleman and Putnam (Bourdieu and Coleman, 1991). By evaluating electronic networks through the frame of how they concretely contribute to new social network formations that, in turn, lead to new forms of social capital that can be deployed by differing groups, we begin to forge a criterion for understanding their effects that moves beyond the broader but abstract debate over information equity. We have suggested one framework for tracking and evaluating these emerging networks here. ~I he major question then, is to explore how deliberative and social capital models can reinforce each other. Social network theory offers one set of tools that has not yet been used in this way. [12] Theoretically, we are challenged to understand these emerging 'networks of social capital networks' in the context of the rebuilding of civil society in the West. By locating social capital formation in the broader context of citizenship, we can begin to move beyond purely deliberative and normative frameworks to ask how practical citizenship activity advances social networks of democratic participation on the one hand, and whether new social networks lead to expanded democracy on the other.

Appendix

Electronic addresses of organizations discussed or cited

Alliance for National Renewal: http://www.csn.net
Apple Computer: http://www.apple.com/documents/solutions.html
Big Sky Telegraph: telnet://l92.231.192.1
Center for Civic Networking: http://www.civic.net; gopher//gopher.civic.net
Corporation for Public Broadcasting/CWEIS: http://www.cpb.org/cweis
Civic Practices Network: http://cpn.journalism.wisc.edu
Electronic Freedom Foundation: http://www.eff.org
Environmental Protection Agency: http://www.epa.gov
Institute for Global Communications: http://www.igc.org
Institute for Study of Civic Values: http://www.libertynet.org/~edcivic/
LibertyNet: http://www.libertynet.org
Morino Institute: http://www.morino.org
National Public Telecomputing Network: http://www.nptn.org
National Telecommunications and Information Administration: http://www.ntia.doc.gov/tiiap/
ONline Wisconsin: http://journalism.wisc.edu
Playing to Win: http://www.igc.apc.org/intercambios/appeal.html; for CWEIS: http://www.wgbh.org
Raleigh News and Observer (NANDO): http://www.nando.net

Interviews (conducted spring 1995)

Laura Breeden, Director, Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program, NTIA, Washington, DC

Richard Civille, Director, Center for Civic Networking, Washington, DC

Lauren Glenn Davitian, Director, Chittenden Community Television, Burlington, Vermont.

Terry Grunwald, Executive Director, NCexChange, Raleigh, North Carolina.

Sam Karp, Executive Director, HandsNet, Cupertino, California. Peter Miller, Director, Playing to Win Network, Boston, Massaehusetts

Frank Odasz, Director, Big Sky Telegraph, Western Montana College. Ed Schwartz, Institute for the Study of Civic Values, Philadeiphia, Pennsylvania

Geoff Sears, Executive Director, Institute for Global Communications, San Francisco, California

Carmen Sirianni, Managing Editor, Civic Practices Network, Boston, Massachusetts

Notes

The author would like to thank Carmen Sirianni and Sheila Webb for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

1. Throughout this article I refer to the electronic information sites of organizations discussed here. These cites refer to the 'Electronic Addresses' section of the appendix.

2. This argument draws from an analysis of the network ties of more than 4000 information and communication corporations now in progress. This work draws from the social network analysis of corporate structure to suggest a transformation of the nature of corporate control over information flows (Levine, 1972; Berkowitz et al., 1979a, 1979b; Levine, 1984; Mintz and Schwartz, 1985; Berkowitz, 1988; Bagdikian, 1990; Burt, 1992; Branscomb, 1994).

3. For an overview of 1980s projects from the viewpoint of expanded democracy see the special issue of the Journal of Communication, 'The Information Gap', Vol. 39(3) 1989.

4. Because of its late translation into English, Habermas's work had only an indirect influence on the American reconceptualization of public life, which drew much more heavily on the pragmatist critique of liberalism. This was a direction that Habermas' own rethinking of his theory of democracy would take in the form of the theory of communicative competence. In Britain, where public sphere theory was linked to ongoing debates over the role of public service media, it had a stronger influence in the early and mid-1980s (Garnham, 1990c).

5. The method of empirical evaluation draws from both depth interviews, participant observation and participatory action research (Whyte, 1991). Twelve phone interviews with leading community, civic and government practitioners were conducted during spring 1995. They are cited in the 'Interviews' section of the appendix. Documentary evidence was gathered through the Internet, as well as by traditional methods. Network locations are cited as in note 1 above.

6. For related examples of human rights organizations' use of the Internet see Freedom Forum Media Studies Center Research Group (1994).

7. The concept of 'critical mass' holds that as communication networks grow in size and density, their utility for participants increases accordingly. Drawn from social movement theory (Oliver et al., 1985), it has been applied to the diffusion of new technology by Markus (1987). A full discussion of the theoretical implications of this concept is beyond the scope of this article.

8. For a useful treatment of this concept see Lenert (1993).

9. The World Wide Web is the portion of the Internet that allows users to read and write hypertext, linking multiple documents and sites together, in a graphical user format that makes it easier to navigate. Home pages are the electronic publishing sites of individuals or groups on the Internet and range from the simple to the elaborate.

10. For an excellent discussion of the National Information Infrastructure see Drake (1995), who discusses the policy process that led to the inclusion of citizen groups and their shaping of NII implementation.

11. A series of experiments in democratic participation and new technology have been associated with the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism, including the Wisconsin Collaborative Project, ONline Wisconsin and The Civic Practices Network. The author has been involved with each of these as both researcher and participant observer.

12. See however Emirbayer and Goodwin (1994) for an overview and promising starting point.

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