Digital Village

John D. MacCuish, Susan M. Mniszewski, Gregory E. Shannon, and Bonnie C. Yantis he Digital Village Initiative is a telecommunity is a society that exists dependent of geography—global, inde- telecommunity-outreach project and functions through electronic com- pendent telecommunities exist for Tof the Laboratory’s Computer munication. There are two types of everything from auto repair to environ- Research and Applications Group. A telecommunities. The first is quite in- mental activism to molecular biology. 150 Los Alamos Science Number 22 1994 The Digital Village Initiative The graphic at left and those scattered throughout this article are reproduced from a user-interface prototype for telecommunities that was developed at the Laboratory. The second has its roots in a specific tional telecommunities. The outreach geographical location and is predicated initiative operates through collabora- on the notion that people who live in a tions between Laboratory personnel and particular town, or county, or region members of proposed or emerging naturally share many interests. Estab- telecommunities. That approach en- lished communities already have orga- sures that the technical choices associ- nized social and political structures, ated with telecommunity development such as local government, civic groups, meet the specific needs of each commu- and business alliances, but the introduc- nity within the context of its culture. tion of an electronic-telecommunity The collaborative work was motivated structure can facilitate and broaden priate-use policy, and the NSF network, by contact with a number of emerging many aspects of their interactions. or the Internet as we know it today, be- New Mexico telecommunities including Several technological, economic, and came an international research- and ed- those of San Ildefonso Pueblo, Taos, social factors were influential in bring- ucation-oriented network of over a Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Farmington, and ing about the emergence of telecommu- thousand government, academic and Los Alamos. In addition, the project is nities. Over the last thirty years com- commercial entities. a response to the current administra- puter hardware has become increasingly Once the strict usage policies were tion’s initiatives to develop and imple- more powerful and less expensive, and lifted, distinct cultures began appearing ment the technology for the National the personal computer is now ubiqui- on the Internet to address a vast array Information Infrastructure (NII), and it tous. Technologies and standards for of interactive human-communication complements the strategic shift of both connecting computer networks have be- needs (see Figure 1). Electronic mail— the Department of Energy (DOE) and come more efficient and robust. The now almost as essential as the telephone the Laboratory toward greater emphasis Internet, the computer network used by for electronic communication—is the on the nation’s economic security. most telecommunities, has its roots in spontaneous outgrowth of technology Rapid advances in hardware and the U.S. military’s desire for an elec- originally developed for transmitting software present emerging telecommu- tronic-communication infrastructure that nities with options that are often be- would survive a nuclear attack—the yond their resources to evaluate or im- system as a whole had to remain opera- plement. The Laboratory’s strong tional even if portions of it were de- capabilities as a premier computing, in- stroyed. In 1968, the Advanced Re- formation, and communications research Projects Agency (ARPA) search center are a valuable resource initiated a prototype system, ARPAnet, for evaluating available technology and with that design requirement in mind. recommending equipment and systems ARPAnet evolved as a research and to meet the needs of a variety of development tool used by military and telecommunities. Our abilities to test academic research centers around the equipment in various configurations, to country. In the mid-1980s the National model customer applications, to evalu- Science Foundation (NSF) assumed ate human-computer interactions, and to much of the responsibility for adminis- analyze the performance of prototype tration of ARPAnet. The NSF then systems will be a significant force in started its own network, NSFnet, for determining the overall scope and char- academic and commercial concerns, scientific data. People routinely use acter of the NII. and also linked together other networks e-mail for all types of communication Among the many applications being to form the NSFnet “backbone.” The from coordinating community calendars explored and modeled as part of the result was a matrix of powerful com- to writing their congressional represen- Digital Village Initiative are: puters with high-speed connections tatives. linking the various networks together. The Digital Village Initiative was * telemedicine, through which The NSF eliminated many of the re- launched to design and test infrastruc- doctors can consult with one an- strictions set forth by ARPAnet's appro- ture technologies for both local and na- other more effectively by sending Number 22 1994 Los Alamos Science 151 The Digital Village Initiative digital 1.adb 7/26/94 2.5 40 35 2.0 30 25 1.5 20 DOE Digital superLab. The goal of the superLab project is to facilitate col- 1.0 15 laboration among three National De- fense Laboratories (Livermore National 10 Laboratory, Los Alamos National Labo- 0.5 Number of data packets (billion) ratory, and Sandia National Laborato- Number of "host" computers (million) 5 ries) through the use of advanced com- putational and information-management 0 0 O N D JFMAMJJAS O 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 technology. Much of the software 1992 1993 being developed for superLab is object- Figure 1. Growth of the Internet oriented; that is, it makes use of a set The graph on the left shows, for a twelve-month period beginning October 1992, the of modules, or building blocks, that can number of computers (in millions) acting as “gateways” to the Internet, a system of be assembled in various configurations networks once shared by only a few thousand users. The graph on the right shows appropriate for specific applications. the dramatic increase in network traffic over the last five calendar years. Plotted in the Thus it can be reconfigured to meet the graph are the number of data packets (each equivalent to 200 typewritten characters) specific needs of a particular telecom- transmitted each month over the backbone of the Internet. munity. medical records or x-ray images, tained by the people who “live” in Security and privacy. Security and for example, over the Internet; them. The members of the telecommu- privacy issues are fundamental to the nities must decide themselves how they successful implementation of telecom- * electronic commerce through will provide access, whether they will munities. Security is critical for elec- which almost any type of business guarantee universal access, how they tronic commerce and digital cash ex- can be conducted over a network will define appropriate use and content, changes. Furthermore, if medical such as CommerceNet; and how they will fund their “mile on records or other sensitive information the information highway.” will be accessible, privacy must be * digital libraries, which will make guaranteed. For example, a financial or local, national, and international medical system must guarantee that its libraries available to all members Technical Issues infrastructure and content will not be of the telecommunity; damaged, that no information is di- The Digital Village Initiative em- vulged during transmission, and that the * telecommuting, through which ploys a wide spectrum of dual-use tech- integrity of the information can be veri- more and more people will be able nologies originally developed through fied. Wireless telecommunication tech- to work from their homes; the Laboratory’s defense and nonprolif- nologies amplify security and privacy eration efforts—specifically, research in concerns because such transmissions * electronic classrooms, which will the areas of computer security and pri- are accessible to virtually anyone who free students and teachers from the vacy, high-performance computing, cares to “listen.” constraints of time and location; human-computer interaction, informa- The Laboratory has a long history of tion mining, and network navigation. contributions to computer-security tech- * and electronic government ser- Our collaborations with emerging nology. Our ability to evaluate and im- vices, which will provide informa- telecommunities are yielding many op- plement state-of-the-art encryption tion and facilitate many different portunities to assess interactions among codes and intrusion-detection methods types of transactions on a local, technologies, applications, and policies is being applied to the problem of safe- state, and federal level. as well as occasions to evaluate Labo- guarding information transmitted across ratory research within new contexts. the network. We are currently working The collaborative nature of the Digi- Technology transfer of software and with the Internal Revenue Service and tal Village Initiative is in harmony with hardware, for example, is central to the the Social Security Administration to the underlying philosophy that telecom- Initiative. A good prospect for transfer explore a variety of access-control and munities should be created and main- is software being developed by the user-identification techniques.

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