Bangor Daily News Editorial

Saturday, 31 March 2007

All Together Now and Wired

By Todd Benoit, Bangor Daily News, Maine

Mar. 31--The threat of school-district reform has provoked Maine into talking about the value of local communities again, but the discussion almost never extends beyond an assertion of town boundaries. That is a loss because it avoids any responsibility to make a community something more than a collection of people who happened to be born there, found jobs nearby or just liked the local tax rate. The town of Hermon is trying something else.

Over more than a decade, this growing community just west of Bangor has constructed a computer network based in its schools and spread throughout nearly all of its 2,000 households. More, Hermon has built this system as a long-running civic project, a boon to business and a shared way to communicate within itself. The widespread use of HermonNet, as it is known, is an intriguing example of what's possible when people, as someone in computerland once said, think different.

The key to this network is its affordability. And the key to that is Jeff Wheeler, the director of information services for HermonNet, who had been operating the schools' enthusiastic computer build-out 10 years ago when he began meeting with Yvon Labbe of the University of Maine's Franco-American Centre and started thinking more about community.

That led to democratized access to the Internet, which in Hermon includes "air boxes" -- gutted computers with cards that allow them to connect to high-speed access through a central computer with lots of storage. Using public-domain software and cast-off computers, Wheeler can assemble a 30-unit cluster of computers for about $3,500. Upgrades go through the central computer, saving money and making access universal. "The notion is that you get off the obsolescence curve," Wheeler explains.

This idea, embodied in a bill by Bangor Sen. Joe Perry, which would encourage other communities to set up low or no-cost networks like Hermon's, is a natural complement to the state school laptop initiative, a good program that regularly founders on its cost. The HermonNet model, which is in the process of offering a low-cost town-wide wireless network now, could integrate all those laptops into a far-reaching system. And while the state laptop program begins in grade six, Hermon offers all students access starting in kindergarten. Students in Hermon take their home pages with them wherever they go, year after year.

The computers are only the delivery system, however, for why HermonNet matters. Wheeler and Tony Brinkley, a UMaine associate professor of English and the interim director of Franco-American Studies, recently drafted a paper about HermonNet. They write, "While the use of technology is original and in many ways remarkably innovative, what is central to the Hermon model is the understanding of community and community development. Without this central understanding, the technology is just technology and imitation of the Hermon model will fail."

The benefit of HermonNet is not just that it's a cheap way for lots of people to get online, but that it is, for instance, a means for the community to make decisions about what it wants to be. In some ways, its technology choices and its approach to building what has become an essential tool of the 21st century help determine that.

More than that, it helps solve the riddle of the creative economy in a rural area. This new economy, based on the ability of groups to make something new and valuable, relies in all previous models on having a critical mass of like-minded people who, intentionally or not, share resources and interests.

Few communities have figured out how to make that work in a rural area, where those of similar talents and pursuits are widely dispersed. HermonNet does it by making connections among people in a community -- it provides virtual mass.

Hermon Town Manager Clinton Deschene, who reports that some business owners have told him they stay in Hermon solely because of HermonNet, says the savings were also apparent at the town office. He said that three staff members at the front desk had each accumulated a computer for office work, one for serving customers and a third for Internet access. "That's nine computers, going back and forth between them," he said. Extending a line from the nearby school solved his problem, the town office became a HermonNet user and the number of more efficient, better networked computers dropped to three.

If HermonNet is such a great deal, why haven't more towns copied it?

"Fear," Wheeler answers. "Outright fear. And old habits. Once you buy into one paradigm -- the laptop program, replacing computers every three or four years -- it's very hard to change."

Some places have expressed interest, including the University of Maine System, the Boston consulates of the Canadian and French governments, and several towns in Maine.

But some encouragement, in the form of the Perry bill, could move the idea of HermonNet from an interesting thought to actual networks across Maine, and communities can take themselves, wherever they choose to go, from there.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.