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Over the years, “community networking” has evolved and contributed toward what has become known as “social media,” with many exciting and novel ways we can all be interconnected. The author relates how she followed a vision for community networking and how, as the Internet was becoming a public medium, she felt a calling to do all that she could so that everyone – regardless of their educational background, income level, employment status, ethnicity, gender or any other “classification” – could have the same opportunity to learn about and shape and benefit from this emerging technology. The paper details how she worked with people from communities across Colorado (e.g., Telluride, Boulder, Southern Ute Tribe) to develop innovative community applications of the then-nascent Internet technology, how participants shared what they learned with people from other communities, and how she eventually co-led the creation of an international Association for Community Networking.

Community Networking -- The Native American Telecommunications Continuum Computer mediated communications -- has evolved exponentially each decade since the mid-1980’s. Pre-Internet exploration in the era of FidoNet and supported by dial-up modem equipment running over x.25 exchange switching does not seem possible to have existed at all. With three decades of change to reflect upon, questions remain today about whether the impact of technology and telecommunications has advanced tribal nationhood.

The InfoZone, a project of the Telluride Institute in southwest Colorado, was an early example-setting community networking initiative, cited for being the first rural Internet PoP in 1992-93, and the first spread-spectrum wireless community-wide network in 1995. The InfoZone began as a First Class BBS network in the late 1980s, before connecting to the Internet, via Colorado Supernet in 1992, with support from the Colorado Advanced Technology Institute. Added early partnership support came from Apple's Library of Tomorrow program, IBM and the NTIA. In summer 1993, Telluride Institute hosted its annual Ideas Festival on “Tele-Community”, bringing together leading thinkers and doers to discuss issues of ‘community’ in the emergent Internetworked society. Before shutting down in the late 1990s, the InfoZone had 1200 subscribers (Telluride population: 1800), hosting online government, healthcare, library services, schools, arts, research, religion, business and tourism information and discussions, and was widely studied.

The trAce Online Writing Centre was founded in 1995 by Sue Thomas at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Over the next decade trAce expanded along with the web, evolving organically and somewhat haphazardly into a vast interlinked network created by many different artists, authors and researchers, during a period of rapid technological change. What emerged was one of the web’s earliest and most influential international creative communities. This chapter outlines the historical context, complex media ecology, diverse membership, wide-ranging influences, and vast and varied output of trAce, much of which has been collected together in a unique archive which can be explored online here: <http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/>

Since meeting in 1975, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz focused their collaborative art work on developing new and alternative structures for video as an interactive communication form and on interactive new media and community-centered social media. With participation by media art and politics theorist Gene Youngblood, this historic conversation follows the work of Galloway and Rabinowitz, beginning with their meeting in Paris and including Satellite Arts Project (1977), Hole-In-Space (1980), and the birth of the Electronic Café during the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.