Freenet (Community Networks)

The freenet movement comprised dozens of community-based bulletin board systems (BBSs), often based in a public library and accessible through the Telnet protocol, which made online public information available to local citizens. They usually were accessible through local phone dial-ups, and often were either free or nearly so to users (some asked for $25 annual donations). As the Christian Science Monitor noted in February 1996, freenets were, for many citizens, the first connection they had ever had to the broader Internet.

In the late 1980s, the heyday of the freenet movement, municipalities often built local electronic networks using government funds, supplemented by private donations. The people who posted information to freenets—for example, a boat-repair expert handing out free advice on boat care—were almost never paid, and neither were network administrators or content overseers. The systems invariably relied on volunteers, which resulted in a certain amateurish quality. Nevertheless, for many thousands of pre-Web online users, freenets offered their first access to e-mail, as well as their first encounter with coordinated and organized online information posted by governments, schools, libraries, and specific cultural and interest groups.

The movement remained strong into the late 1990s, until commercial Internet services and the World Wide Web became more popular, more ubiquitous, and more reliable substitutes. However, some freenets, notably the Minneapolis-based Twin Cities Freenet, moved their resources onto the Web and continue to thrive.

The freenet model was created at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Dr. Tom Grundner became interested in creating an online network at Case Western that could be accessed by people in the community seeking health information from public-health experts. In 1984, Grundner launched the “St. Silicon's Hospital and Information Dispensary,” a medical bulletin board that proved so successful that it attracted early funding from AT&T and Bell Ohio.

This encouraged Grundner to devise a wider network. The Cleveland Free-Net, the first of the true freenet systems, opened to the public in 1986. It too proved successful, attracting 7,000 registered users and handling more than 500 phone accesses a day during its first year. In addition to serving as a place to collect information, the BBS allowed people to post messages online and form discussion threads that could be read and responded to by anyone on the network. It was one of the very earliest examples of people who were not part of the computer-industry elite being able to discuss and debate issues of community interest using computer technology.

Over time, the Cleveland Free-Net developed many sections of topical interest where citizens could discuss issues of importance to their communities, while also gathering such information as city-council meeting agendas and county-board meeting minutes. Cleveland Free-Net section titles eventually included areas labeled “The Administration Building,” “The Post Office,” “Public Square,” “The Courthouse and Government Center,” and “The Arts Building,” among numerous others. This labeling format became common among subsequent freenets.

The Cleveland Free-Net allowed people to dial in from cities outside the Cleveland area, but it limited those connecting to the discussion of topics of interest in Cleveland. Inevitably, other cities began picking up on the idea of generating community conversation using computer technologies. As the movement spread, other cities generally based their local freenets at public libraries, largely because most people in the community did not yet have personal computers at home, and public libraries generally made computer terminals accessible to the public. The Heartland FreeNet, launched in Peoria, Illinois, in 1990, was apparently the first such library-based freenet system.

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