07/12/94 RMIUG Meeting Minutes - Boulder Community Network

Our featured speaker was Neal McBurnett (AT&T, neal@drmail.dr.att.com), along with Wally Wedel (US West, wwedel@uswest.com), and Madeline Gonzalez (BCN, madeline@spot.colorado.edu). The presentation gave an explanation and demo of Boulder Community Network, a free online library of community information.

Boulder Community Network (BCN) is a cooperative effort involving Boulder educational, social, civic, and non-profit groups. Current participants include the University of Colorado, the Boulder and Longmont Public Libraries, the Boulder Valley School District, Boulder County and City governments, the Boulder County United Way, the Boulder County Civic Center (BCCC), and KGNU. BCN is also working with the Knight-Ridder Information Design Lab, Cable Labs, OneNet, the Boulder County Business Report, the Daily Camera, Apple Media Labs, and national labs.

Currently available online information includes Boulder City Council minutes & agendas, CU-LINE, Boulder County Employment and Training Center information, KGNU schedules, and Colorado Music Festival information, etc. BCN also provides links to CARL and other Library systems, the Boulder Valley School District's Web site, and other sources of information on the Internet, including a pointer to RMIUG's Web site. :-)

BCN is based on the World Wide Web technology (WWW), and includes multimedia capabilities and hypertext links to other resources. The BCN online presence started on April 1 as a prototype and will begin Phase 1 on July 18 with a press conference at the CU Computing Center at noon. Phase 1 includes Boulder Public Library patron terminals, CU-line kiosks and Boulder Valley School District computers and dial-up lines. The prototype is available at http://bcn.boulder.co.us or telnet bcn.boulder.co.us 2001 (ie, port 2001).

The funding for BCN comes initially from CU, a Corporation for Public Broadcasting grant, and an Apple Library of Tomorrow grant. Long term funding may come from an NTIA grant, contributions from local agencies, Universal Access funding sources, individual contributors and possibly commercial funding.

BCN is providing a greater sense of community through the synergy of participating organizations at planning and advisory meetings, training sessions for the less advantaged segments of society, and building awareness of other community groups and activities.

Finally, BCN is always seeking the help of volunteers. To help out, please contact Madeline Gonzalez at 303-492-8176 or madeline@spot.colorado.edu

We had about 110 people in attendance at the meeting. Alek Komarnitsky MC'ed the meeting. Alek thanked Bryan Buus and XOR Network Engineering for all of their help on maintaining the RMIUG Internet services and Internet One of Boulder for sponsoring refreshments at the RMIUG meetings. Also thanks to Chris Fedde of US West who set up and ran the June RMIUG meeting and NCAR for letting us use their auditorium for meetings.

The next meeting will be held on Aug. 9th at NCAR and will feature Dr. Michael Schwartz (schwatz@cs.colorado.edu) who will talk about Internet Resource Discovery (how to find things on the Net). A crypto-fest meeting on Privacy, Encryption, PGP, Clipper Chip, etc. is in the works for September (13th), hopefully. Suggestions were also taken for future meeting topics.

Robert Skrobe announced the formation of the RMIUG Internet Job Search Subgroup. This is a group of active job seekers who will learn about using the Internet as a job search tool. Contact Robert either by email (skrobero@student.msu.edu) or phone (303) 440-7598.

Lloyd Brodsky announced the formation of the Colorado Internet Chamber of Commerce. This will be a working group of people who derive all or part of their income from Internet-related work. Some ideas for the group include publishing a directory, sharing leads, hosting a trade show, etc. The first meeting will be a lunch meeting on Wed, Aug. 3 at 11:30 am in the restaurant at Ramada Inn, Rt. 36 and Sheridan. For more information or to reserve a spot, contact Lloyd at lbrodsky@rocksolid.com or 303-758-7030.

For more information on the Rocky Mountain Internet Users Group, send an email to rmiug@rmiug.org or call 303-447-3475.