FORUMS AND WATER COOLERS

What am I talking about? You'll see, in just a few minutes. I have to approach it gradually because I'm still in shock.

Most of you, by now, have had some direct experience with the personal computer. Maybe through GIS interfaces or with CADD, or with plain vanilla word processing, or Lotus 1-2-3, or games. So it's not a big mystery anymore. Most of us have met Dorothy Comstock (aka Dot Com), we have email addresses and we've asked Yahoo to search for something.

We speak of all this in a very casual manner, as if it has been all around us since before Euclid. But, of course, it is all still very new.

In 1993, at the National Planning Conference in Chicago there was one session on computers, held on the last day of the conference, in the sub-basement of the conference hotel. In 1994, in San Francisco, there was a session in a room designed for 45 people - into which 150 people tried to push their way in. It was a major course correction. In 1995, in Toronto, there were seven computer sessions, all fully attended. In 1996, in Orlando, the numbers continued to grow - and today, in 1997, there are, at this Conference, 23 sessions dealing with some aspect of the use of the computer in planning. And, miracle of miracles, the American Planning Association has joined the new world with a reasonably respectable website.

I speak to just one part of all this excitement.

Ten or fifteen years ago they were called Electronic Bulletin Boards. Now they're called Newsgroups, or Listservers, or Forums. Despite variations of enormous importance to technically minded people, these basically are places where people, logging on, can leave a message or respond to a message which has already been posted. They can be likened to a gathering around the office water cooler, or tacking something up on the message board in the foyer of the office, or heading for happy hour at a friendly pub.

My experience with this phenomenon began in 1983. I contacted the CompuServe people in Columbus and told them that I would like to have a place where urban and regional planners might congregate online, to exchange messages. They told me to contact a man named Noel Adler, who, just a year or two earlier, had established The Legal Forum. He said, "Sure", and promptly created a special section in that Forum, labeled Municipal Planning. It was Section 10.

It took awhile to grow that Section. It called for a kind of sharing that planners hadn't had much experience with, unless you happened to have had ham radio experience and knew what it was like to get to know someone quite well without ever having met in person. But gradually it began to catch on. The number of participants grew, to the point where, along about the middle of 1994 there were 200 new messages per day being posted. Some long stretched out, interesting, discussions took place on subjects ranging from the meaning of community, to protecting the environment from undue pollution, or regulation - whichever you prefer.

But, in the Spring of 1995 all hell broke lose. The World Wide Web became easily accessible, and the number of providers who, for $20 per month, would give you unlimited time to surf the web, just exploded. So everyone scattered, and the participation in the planning forums on CompuServe, and America Online, plummeted. In three weeks time, in Section 10 on CompuServe, we went from 200 messages per day to 20. Today, although the Section still exists, there is very little traffic of interest to planners.

It was a no compete situation. For 10 bucks a month you could go to CompuServe or AOL; for 20 bucks a month you could access websites all over the whole damned world. I doubt if anyone has a reliable count on how many websites are available. For the price and time it takes for a coffee break, anyone can create a website, and once created it will probably be picked up by Yahoo, Alta Vista, Dejanews - or one of the other search engines.

Those of you who have ventured into the wonderful world of the web will agree with me, I'm reasonably sure, that it is mixed bag. As you follow the trail of Lucious Links, you find that some are laden with highly useful information while others are, shall we say...under construction. The big search engines do not qualify the links as to whether or not they are useful...they're just there. I predict that in the very near future, if it hasn't happened already, there will be specialized search engines which focus on a single area, or a family of related areas, which have been evaluated, and perhaps rated as to the character and currency of what they offer to the serious surfing researcher.

These websites will come in many colors. Some, maintained by governmental, educational, corporate, or organizational units, are usually staffed. Someone is paid to keep them up to date with the kind of material they think their subscribers would be interested in. These are information repositories. They have data, records, files, articles, indexes - all of which we, as professionals, can use to inform and illuminate our work.

Other websites, full of promise, are operated by volunteers who want to meet a perceived, and specialized, need that larger, staffed, providers can't be bothered with. These specialized web sites are still emerging; and perhaps they will ripen simulataneously with the specialized serach engines that will attach some evaluative criteria to them.

The website that Ray Quay and I have set in motion is not an informational respository in the sense I've just used. It has two features. We have an International Online Planners Directory, which presently has about 1500 names. It can be searched, and downloaded. As to exactly how unique a thing this is, I don't know.

We also have what we call The Cantina. This is our "electronic bulletin board", our water cooler, our pub called Cheers, our cafe where people stop by for coffee and a danish on the way to work - a place where planners can post messages and respond to messages already posted. It's clunkier than we would like it to be - but we keep exploring ways to making it run smoother because we're convinced that this kind of function is one of those community building functions, the proverbial Third Place. And every profession needs a sense of its own community.

I'd be astonished if there weren't others on the same track as we are, seeing the same need we see and looking for the best way to meet it. How this will all shake out remains to be seen. But I'll clue you right now. I predict that in another four or five years there will be four or five of these Third Places which will survive as forums where planners will go to pose questions, respond to questions and ideas posed by others, start arguments like you can hardly imagine, archive think pieces - in general create a cyberspatial pub which will release our needs to say something, and hopefully add to our knowledge, and our capacity to function as a professional.

And I will predict further, that in another four or five years every single one of you will be a participating member of one of those forums where everything goes, and also a participating member of at least one specialized forum, probably cut along the lines of the Divisions of the American Planning Association.

Now, since this is all predicted and ordained, you might just as well get started now. All you have to do is go to the store, buy a modem, plug it in and turn it on.

Thank you....and, Cheers.