Children help change the online world ---------------------------------- by Odd de Presno In one year, 2600 children from 31 countries participated in a project which helped extend the city limits of our global city. KIDS-91 was a grassroots movement. It was set up to get children between 10 - 15 years of age involved in a global dialogue. It started with an experiment in May 1990 organised by a Children's Cultural Week in Arendal, Norway. In just 14 days it attracted 260 children throughout Canada, Norway, and the U.S. Shortly afterwards, the surprising energy of the idea was exhibited at the Electronic Networking Association's annual conference in San Fransisco. There, the organisers decided to do it again, but this time to aim at the largest possible number of participating children/countries. Today, the third project is well under way. The name is KIDS-92. The movement also decided on a generic name for all the annual projects i.e. "KIDLINK - Global Networking for Youth 10 - 15" The idea -------- The organisers wanted to use computer conferencing to collect childrens' responses to these four questions: 1) Who am I? 2) What do I want to be when I grow up? 3) How do I want the world to be better when I grow up? 4) What can I do now to make this happen? They also wanted the children to illustrate their future vision, for example in a drawing, a video tape, or something else. These contributions were to be sent by ordinary mail. Here are some examples of responses received: From Kibbutz Ramat Yochanan (Israel): 1. My name is Nachshon Steiff. I am 15 years old and go to the 9th grade at school. I have 2 brothers and one maried sister (I am an uncle as well). I also had a brother who was killed in an accident in the army. All my brothers are older than me. My parrents do not live together - I live with my father, but my mother lives in the kibbutz as well. I also have a little dog, her name is "Kfitz", The hebrew word for a spring that always jumps -just like my dog. I play Water-Polo, I am the goal keeper - and I like it. I also like to listen to music (the Beatles). 2. I am not sure what I want to be when I'll grow up, maybe a writer, maybe not. 3. I want the world to be nicer. I want no air polution, and no more wars. I want peace, and that all people would have food and a place to live in. I want the world to be the best it can be - so we would live without problems and worries. 4. I think that only the people who rule the countries can do something to achieve peace - so I can't do nothing except protest about it. But I can keep the world clean if I won't destroy the nature. And if every body will give a little help it could be very good - but there must be a person who should do the first step. From Vilnius (Lithuania): 1. My name is Arnas Opalnikovas. I am 12 years old. I learn in secondary school #62. My school is in Vilnius. 2. I shall work with dogs, becase i love them. 3. I don't want that people is at war. There is comunist diktation in Lithuania. All Lithuanian don't like it and I don't like it. People in Latvia and in Estonia think so, too. 4. I can't make that Lithuania will be free now. I must good learn. This is my duty. When i grow up i make very good work to Lithuania. From Yerevan (Armenia): 1. My name is Vazgen Sedrakian. I am 14 years old. I am study in school No 114. I go in for wrestling and to music school. I study in drawing school too. I like to read books and to listen to classical music. 2. When I grow up I want to be an architect. I want to design houses that will be very beattiful and will not be destroyed by any kind of earthquake. 3. I want the world to be without wars and borders. I want children to be happy and our planet will be always green. There will be no Red Book and dieig spisios of animals. 4. I must be kind to my friends and animals. I mustn't spoil and dirty the nature. The assumption -------------- was that the responses would be collected through global electronic computer conferencing, and that other means would be used where access to computer conferencing was difficult for technical, economic, or other reasons. The coordinators approached individuals willing to function as liaison officers between "the world" and the 'Mission Control Center'. The team met on SciNet, a Caucus-based conferencing system in Toronto, Canada. The system had a KIDCAFE conference for children, and conferences called KIDS-91 and KIDPLAN for planning and coordination of the global effort. Team members called in from the US, Canada and Norway. The project director, Odd de Presno from Norway, dialled into SciNet through Norwegian Telecom's Datapak service. When Tymnet Outdial Services (marketed in Europe through i-Com in Brussels, Belgium) was announced, changing carrier gave a 40 percent reduction in communication costs. This was achieved even though he called long distance to Sweden or Denmark to connect to i-Com, and dialled out long distance from Buffallo N.Y (USA) to SciNet in Toronto, Canada. Still, it was an expensive method of communication. Getting the children online ------------------------ Most of the coordinators were networking specialists or educators. The idea was to invite interested schools or individuals to use SciNet to participate. Access was free, but participants had to pay their own telecom costs. Invitations to participate were distributed through systems like CompuServe, PARTI on the Source (bought by CompuServe in summer 1990), TWICS in Tokyo, MicroLink in the U.K. (since closed down), and Bergen By Byte in Norway. At that time, however, sending email betwen these systems was difficult, at times outright impossible. For this reason the plan was to port responses over to SciNet, and store them in a central area which could be accessed by anybody. Online to the globe ----------------- After some months, the coordinators concluded that to make people from all over the world dial into a central computer in Canada was futile. The communication costs were too high for many, prohibitive for others. Also, many potential participants did not want to leave their current online environment. KIDS-91 found itself in desperate need of global email. The solution came in the shape of several discussion lists at the computer center of the State University of North Dakota (@vm1.nodak.edu), and extensive use of Internet email. When the KIDS-91 project was concluded on May 12 1991, it owned the following BITNET discussion lists: RESPONSE This list was set up to capture the childrens' responses to the four introductory questions KIDCAFE general discussion forum for kids 10 - 15 years of age only KIDS-ACT discussion forum for kids 10 - 15 years of age. Topic: "What can we do now to make our visions a reality?" KIDS-91 general discussion for coordinators and interested persons about KIDS-91. Sharing of experiences. General information. KIDPLAN detailed planning and coordination of the KIDS-91 project All discussion lists were open to anyone, although KIDCAFE and KIDS-ACT were read-only for persons outside the given age bracket. The users were teachers, social workers, parents, teachers, peace and environmental activists, media people, researchers, and others interested in the issues involved. Most children participated through their classes. Others came in through their parents, through libraries, clubs, and other organisations. Some even came in using their own mailboxes. Expanding the KIDS-91 matrix --------------------------- The geographical expansion of KIDS-91 parallelled the growth of the internetworking matrix. During the autumn of 1990 new countries in Eastern Europe were accessible for Internet mail for the first time. Whenever this happened, KIDS-91 was there. New responses were received from places like Leningrad and Moscow in Russia, Vilnius in Lithuania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Peacenet/Greenet and other special purpose networks were also interesting gateways into difficult-to-reach places, as was DASnet, the service porting messages between non-connected networks. Among those reached through DASnet were users on GeoNet (in Germany, Poland, Switzerland, the USSR), Dialcom, and ComNet AG. Through a mailbox at IASnet in Moscow, KIDS-91 was able to reach Jerevan in Armenia and Sverdlovsk in Russia, USSR. While email to Jerevan took minutes, snail mail packages with creative contributions travelled for two months to reach Norway. Users in Japan came in from NiftySERVE through CompuServe into Internet. Later, when TWICS made the discussion lists available through their Usenet News reader, part of this traffic moved there. Some Japanese subscribers found it most cost efficient to read through TWICS, and send responses through NiftySERVE. Today, the Aegis Network in Kyoto is another alternative. Korean children's responses are manually ported to Internet and sent to the RESPONSE data base. In Norway, the discussion lists were piped into the QNX-based conferencing system Bergen By Byte. In Arlington and San Fransisco (USA) they went into Caucus conferencing systems. In Denmark, they were downloaded to a Portakom conferencing system operated by the Danish School Board. In Ireland, children's responses were ported directly to the SHS BBS in Saltrod, Norway, and were transferred from there by the project director to North Dakota. The discussion lists were received from Internet via the NITEC network, and some participants exchanged email with correspondents in the U.S. and Australia via this route. The FrEdMail BBS in Dublin also provided access for interested participants. Because of the distributed nature of the project, nobody knows for sure how many really participated during KIDS-91. For example, at the last count 25 persons read the KIDS-91 discussion list messages through Bergen By Byte in Norway. Other participants came in through parallel conferencing systems, others through mail exploders of different types, or local area networks. Then we have the teachers. Their classes often had from 20 - 40 students, but only one modem. All kinds of creative tricks were used to keep the students informed about the action in KIDCAFE, sometimes without letting them to the keyboard very often. Some teachers made daily KIDS-91 newspapers. Others filled walls with computer printouts. Some put large maps up on the wall, posted messages to their students by the map, and used colored thread from the messages to the map to show were the senders lived. Expanding globally ----------------- Getting mail to and from mailboxes connected to Internet/BITNET/UUCP etc. is relatively simple. To exchange mail with some other networks, however, proved to be quite a challenge. Dialcom was one of these. This network covers parts of the world which are hard to reach by Internet mail, and which were high on the list of priorities for KIDS-91 (like Africa). There were many attempts to open the Dialcom doors for the KIDS-91 traffic, but without much luck. Perhaps they thought it wise to protect their income base, even though KIDLINK does not have the intention of moving any users to any other network. The goal is to let the children participate in a global dialogue . Campus 2000, a Dialcom-based education service, announced the intention of becoming an official part of KIDS-91. Their students, however, where never able to read and write messages to KIDCAFE. The only direct interaction with Dialcom happened on May 12th. On that date, the last day of the KIDS-91 project, Dialcom users were given a chance to participate in the KIDS-91 celebration through keyboard to keyboard chats. FidoNet is a global email network connecting a large number of free bulletin board systems. Users in Denmark, Poland, Estonia, Singapore, and New Zealand participated in KIDS-91 through a gateway to Internet. Work has started to make the discussion lists available as Fidonet Echos for KIDS-92. KIDS-91 was not broadcast through USENET newsgroups. The organisers looked into it, but were unable to find a suitable solution in time. The organisers encountered several obstacles with USENET. One problem was the need to inform new users up front about the purpose (and restrictions). In KIDCAFE, for example, those who write messages must be between 10 - 15 years of age. On Usenet an adult user may join the discussion without knowing about such restrictions and that a discussion is part of a larger structure. The organisers are still searching for a solution to this situation. The May 12, 1991 Celebration --------------------------- On the last day of the one year project, several attempts were made to bring the participants closer in contact with each other. One of the methods was chats, or interactive keyboard-to-keyboard discussions. Several systems/methods were used. Here are some of them: - Internet Relay Chat (IRC) with participants from New Zealand, Australia, Norway, Hawaii, California, and other places. - BITNET Relay Chats with participants from Czechoslovakia, Ireland, Denmark, England, Norway, and the US. - Cleveland Free-Net (USA) with participants from all over the globe - TWICS in Tokyo. Eight girls in a Biloxi, Mississippi (USA) slumber party were among the participants. - Tymnet (Dialcom), with participants from USA, England, Australia, Canada, Japan, and Norway. - CompuServe Education Forum Videophones connected seven sites in the US, Canada and Norway using Phone Vus and Panasonic Visual Telecommunication Systems. Beautiful black-and-white pictures of everything from smiling faces to boats in 200x242.5 dpi resolution were sent over a several hour videophone bridge sponsored by MetroMedia (USA). A four-hour multi-point videoconference took place between children in Toronto (Canada), Washington DC (USA), Helsinki (Finland), London (England), Glasgow (Scotland), and Arendal (Norway) sponsored by telecommunication authorities/companies in these countries. The children used it to discuss what they could do to make this world a better place to live in. In Washington DC's Children's Museum, the videoconference signal was beamed up to a microwave satellite and broadcast to private satellite antenna receivers all over North America. The Celebration team also tried to use what is termed 'asynchronous chats' or semi-synch. The assumption was that the email traffic load on a Sunday (Mother's Day in North America) would be so low that turn-around of email messages would make it look like some type of slow chat. It is in fact possible to achieve a turn-around of 3-6 minutes on traffic to and from Ireland and North Dakota. This segment was a disappointment. Some messages did not arrive at their destination until two days later. The reason is that KIDCAFE and KIDS-ACT are not on one individual datacentre. It's a process between loosely coupled networks for electronic mail and conferences. The traffic was higher than expected, and things were just too slow. Using Amateur Packet Radio was another disapointment. Nothing much came out of it for several reasons, weather conditions being one of them. The use of fax machines, however, was a great success with many kids, and especially those still frightened by the keyboard. Messages and drawings were sent between the sites. What did they get out of it? ------------------------- KIDS-91 had participants from Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, England, Estonia, Finland, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Puerto Rico, Poland, Rumania, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sverige, Switzerland and the U.S.A. There are many reports from participating children, in which they say that the global dialogue has shaped their lives. This is especially true for those who were 'involved' in the war in the Middle East as seen through the eyes of young Nachson from Israel. Nachson was actually at the keyboard on one occasion when patriot missiles were "taking out" scud rockets directly overhead, and the whole house shook with the impact. Teachers used KIDS-91 in their classrooms, and allowed children to use the keyboard to find keypals and extend their horizons. Many kids grabbed their dictionaries eagerly for the first time to understand the meaning of strange messages in Spanish, Italian, French, English or German. "I have never seen Janis in bed with an English dictionary before !", said Erika Osa, the mother of a young Latvian participant. KIDS-91 was also about giving the kids a voice. This was achieved through articles in the Washington Post (USA), Globe and Mail (Canada), and newspapers in Argentina, Brasil, Norway, Israel, the U.S.S.R, Denmark, Latvia, and other places. There were also many radio and TV interviews. Several KIDS-91 exhibitions are now touring the world for the children to see and enjoy. KIDS-92 ------- started on May 13 1991, and will continue until May 19, 1992. The basic theme is the same. New participants are joining the 'movement' at an accelerated pace. This year, the coordinators want to reach out to even more children around the globe. Countries in Africa, Asia, Central and South America are of the highest priority, even though the communication infrastructure in these areas is poorly developed. A new list has been added (KIDS-92@vm1.nodak.edu) to keep people informed about the current project. Hectic detailed planning and coordination on a day-to-day basis takes place in KIDPLAN. If you're interested in joining, don't hesitate to do so. This is the "Mission Control" of the grassroots movement. Depending on where you send your mail from, send children's responses to one of the following addresses: Internet: RESPONSE@VM1.NODAK.EDU BITNET: RESPONSE@NDSUVM1 UUCP: vm1.nodak.edu!response CompuServe: >INTERNET:response@vm1.nodak.edu MCI Mail: At TO, type RESPONSE and the word EMS in parantheses. At EMS: type INTERNET. At MBX: write RESPONSE@VM1.NODAK.EDU AppleLink: RESPONSE@VM1.NODAK.EDU@INTERNET# SprintMail: ("RFC-822": , SITE:INTERNET) FidoNet: Send to user UUCP at 1:105/42. The first line of text in the body of the message would be To: response@vm1.nodak.edu The next line should be blank. AT&T Mail: internet!ndsuvm1.bitnet!response X.400: (C:US,A:Telemail,P:Internet,"RFC-822":) Send mail to opresno@ulrik.uio.no through Internet for more information, or signon to the desired discussion lists. We assure you that it will be lots of fun. We believe that you understand the importance of the project. Further information is also available in the bimonthly newsletters, which are available online from the participating networks. --- end ---