The village

It took a village. The works in this edition were not published by platforms in the modern sense; they were hosted—by named people who founded the systems, wrote the software, tended the conferences, and kept the machines running. This roll names the principal ones, each with the role the public record supports. Where a role rests on this edition’s editor’s own recollection rather than a document, the entry says so.

Frank L. Burns (1939–2003) stands at this roll’s head for TMN’s sake: a retired Army lieutenant colonel who had directed Task Force Delta, he founded The Meta Network in 1983 and became president of Metasystems Design Group—the network was his “information age version of the think tank”.

Scott Burns, Frank Burns’s son, kept the machines. The Caucus 2.7 manual’s worked example lists him beside his father—“the notsoelder”—at the network’s own telephone number, and Caucus 4.1’s Bonanza macros were partly based on customizations he originally implemented. The rest is the editor’s recollection, printed as such: Scott was the system administrator of everything at TMN, and lived on site, by the server room at the back of the ground-floor offices.

Robert Parnes built CONFER at the University of Michigan in 1975, the ancestor system from which both Caucus and the WELL’s PicoSpan descend; TMN itself opened on his CONFER II. Charles Roth wrote Caucus—the foundation under the Caucus rooms of both works: he saw CONFER at Wayne State, built its portable heir through Camber-Roth, sold the first copy in 1986, carried it onto the web in 1995, writing CML, the markup language every web Caucus page was built from, inside that same month, and—after Caucus Systems’ bankruptcy returned the rights to him—open-sourced it under CaucusCare, where he remains its keeper. The WELL’s sibling rooms ran on the cousin program, PicoSpan; the rooms of ARTS WIRE, TMN, and the EFA campus ran on Roth’s. Tom Mandel led Screen Porch, Caucus’s web-era company, as its president in the Caucus 4.0 release of 1998 and as its chief executive in the company backgrounder; Metasystems Design Group’s principals were on Screen Porch’s founding team.

Lisa Kimball made her living, in Lipnack and Stamps’s phrase, “catalyzing, coordinating, and cajoling networks”. She became a partner in Metasystems Design Group in 1984, and in 1985 she founded the Electronic Networking Association—the field’s own professional association—in a Greenwich Village loft: she edited its online newsletter, NETWEAVER, chaired its annual meetings, received its 1990 award for “Outstanding Contribution to Networking”, and, when it had outlived its purpose, dismantled it herself, holding that a network, unlike a bureaucracy, should dissolve when its work is done. Facilitation was her doctrine, stated in period: the online industry, she told the Wall Street Journal in 1993, should “hire a few less programmers and a lot more guides, teachers and facilitators to bridge the gap between the complex resources and people who currently find them arcane”. Rheingold’s verdict on her, in The Virtual Community, was that it is “hard to find any significant CMC system in the world that doesn’t have a contribution from her”. She stands in this edition’s own record, too—in a post of March 30, 1998, preserved in the editor’s scrape of TMN’s classroom conferences, Ginny Little, on the road, hopes to meet her in Washington—and it was Kimball who, in 2004, interviewed Roth inside his own software about how it began (see Caucus).

Marcus D. Watts wrote PicoSpan, the conferencing software of The WELL, for NETI; its design—that a host’s censored response is labeled, not vanished—shaped the WELL’s culture directly. Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant founded the WELL itself in February 1985, Brand setting its founding terms: “You Own Your Own Words.”

For ARTS WIRE: Anne Focke, Seattle artist and arts administrator, proposed it at NYFA’s 1988 Orcas Island gathering and first led it; Ted Berger, NYFA’s executive director, shared the vision and housed it. Joe Matuzak, a Michigan poet, directed ARTS WIRE from 1995. Anna Couey, its first network coordinator, brought Judy Malloy onto the staff in 1993 and co-founded the Interactive Art Conference with her; she had earlier co-edited, with Penny Boyer, the newsletter that became Arts Wire Current under David Green, and then under Malloy, from 1996 to 2004.

Judy Malloy has her own entry: ARTS WIRE staff from 1993, founder of the WELL’s Arts conference, and the writer who asked both rooms for windows on the world. In 1986 Carl Loeffler and Fred Truck set up Art Com Electronic Network inside the WELL, the electronic exhibition space where Malloy published Uncle Roger. On ARTS WIRE, composers Pauline Oliveros, David Mahler, and Douglas Cohen—one of Scibe’s eight writers—coordinated NewMusNet from the summer of 1992, and Tim Collins and Reiko Goto served as virtual artists-in-residence in the Interactive Art Conference, the room where the work’s ARTS WIRE half was written.

Under all of them stood the hosts themselves—the WELL’s conference hosts, TMN’s conference organizers, ARTS WIRE’s staff meeting as a virtual office across five cities—named people tending named rooms, present in the talk they tended. That, more than any software, is the village: the works were written in rooms somebody kept.

Sources and further reading