[Reader-list] Summary / TOC - The Rise and Fall of DDS

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

http://reinder.rustema.nl/dds/rise_and_fall_dds.html

The Rise and Fall of DDS
evaluating the ambitions of Amsterdam's Digital City

ReindeR Rustema
reinder at rustema.nl

Summary

In this research project the intentions with which Amsterdam's Digital City 
was built are evaluated, based on a historical account. The Digital City has 
been a virtual city in Amsterdam between February 1994 and July 2001. It was 
inspired by the Community Networks movement in the US and Canada and 
functioned as a Free-Net in the Netherlands, but has attracted international 
interest for the design it had chosen: it used the metaphor of a city to 
structure the information and communication in cyberspace and made the users 
into 'inhabitants'.

The history of this virtual city is described in four distinct periods which 
are each put in the perspective of four themes that are important for the 
Community Network movement: social cohesion, third places, freedom of 
information and democracy. 

The experience with DDS suggests that the free and open information and 
communication space can hardly be institutionalised. Compared with the 
success of the internet in this regard we can see that open standards and 
protocols that respect the gift economy in cyberspace are important to 
achieve this. 

DDS might not have been open enough because of its institutionalisation and 
the closed design of the interface which did not allow improvement by the 
users. It intended to become a broadcaster and mass communicator more than 
becoming a community. This eventually made the users passive paying consumers 
of a telecommunication service. In spite of efforts to 'design' an on-line 
community, the major achievement of DDS has been more that it contributed 
computing power, disk space and connectivity to the internet for public use, 
much like the academic and research institutes have done in the early years 
of the internet. 

Table of Contents

 1 Introduction 5
 1.1 Community Networks 7
 1.2 Theme 1: Social cohesion 8
 1.3 Theme 2: 'Third places' 10
 1.4 Theme 3: Freedom of information 13
 1.5 Theme 4: Democracy 14

 2 DDS, a ten week experiment in 1994 16
 2.1 All inclusive 17
 2.2 DDS as a third place 19
 2.3 Government information on-line 20
 2.4 Democracy on-line 21

 3 Institutionalisation of DDS in 1995 23
 3.1 Popularity 24
 3.2 Designing the public domain 25
 3.3 No politics 28
 3.4 No democracy 29

 4 Competition from internet in 1996-2000 31
 4.1 Internet as a public or a commercial domain 32
 4.2 no 'DDS community' 33
 4.3 Information left DDS 35
 4.4 No discussions 37

 5 Commercialisation in 2000 39
 5.1 Sponsored by DDS 40
 5.2 DDS brand-name 41
 5.3 Communities moved out 42
 5.4 Democracy revisited 44

 6 Conclusion 46
 6.1 Community versus 'group' 48
 6.2 Public protocols, commercial interfaces 49
 
 Bibliography 50
 Appendix 1 organisations present in DDS 52
 Appendix 2 USENET newsgroups in DDS 55
 Appendix 3 statutes of the DDS foundation 57
 Appendix 4 list of squares in DDS 60
 Appendix 5 Metro logfile 61
 Appendix 6 Hypertext discussions in DDS 76