CCN Essay

CCN did not start out as a bunch of hackers. It started as two things: first, a bunch of librarians who saw that unless they acted, this new thing, the Internet, would make advantaged people more advantaged, and disadvantaged people moreso, AND one brilliant Unix sysadmin who singlehandedly built an integrated, secure environment of CCN in a couple of weeks to support the librarians' dream.

We can predict three CCN metrics:

• First, the ratio of "doing good in the world" to "volunteer effort" will uniformly decrease - the number of users will go down, the amount of work will increase.
• Second, the level of frustration among the volunteers (and staff) will go up and up, uniformly, and
• Third, the number of volunteers will go down. At some point there will not be enough volunteers to run the service and there will be huge long outages and times of degraded service. Some might say that this happened... about... five or ten years ago.

So to me it seems like there is a thing that we could focus on, and a path forward.

The thing we could focus on is: getting Internet service to poor people. Maybe charge for it, the same way that affordable housing is charged: as a (tiny) fraction of your monthly income. There is/are at least one other organization in HRM that's doing it that we could join forces with and the money in our coffers would be leveraged, not just spent. The organization I’m thinking of is GEO Nova Scotia.

To me this is *clearly* doing good in the world in the way CCN was originally intended - and remember, I’m one of the CCN history team members - yes, there’s a history project on the go.

The path forward is: instead of waiting for the email and Information Provider services to (possibly literally) crash due to a lack of staff, to gracefully and professionally exit out of them over the period of a year.

Dialup: sigh. Maybe figure out a way that Dialup could be implemented in a low-maintenance and cheap way AND think of some revenue stream for unused dialup lines.

To me it seems like we have a few main goals:

• to keep the emails of the form @chebucto.ca , @chebucto.ns.ca alive
• to keep the IP content up and not freeze parts that people want to maintain;
• and, dialup. I'm pretty sure that

I'm also pretty sure that there are some people who will refuse to switch from dialup to a cel data hotspot due to 5G mind control rays. There are going to be a few people that we can not make happy.

In the interest of John Howard Oxley's primary motivation) keeping email alive for the existing people who still want it.

I have a whole bunch of technical solutions in my head around this but I don't want to get into the weeds; what I want is to open discussion on the possibility of winding down this society over the course of a year or two in the interest of continuing to do the same kind of good in the world.

Technical solutions

• Maybe we could run one dialup line for the 5G mind control people.
• Depending on what people think of the idea I might engage David Trueman, who originally built the CCN software and now is back in Halifax, to envision a new version for Linux.
• What we'd want is to re-integrate the user management / email account management / IP management thing into a super low maintenance monolithic system that we can run on e.g. $50 / month kimsufi servers.