[Date Next]
[Thread Prev]
[Thread Next]
1996 Internet World's Fair, Plain Text Version
- To: carl@radio.com
- Subject: 1996 Internet World's Fair, Plain Text Version
- From: Carl Malamud <carl@radio.com>
- Date: Tue, 31 Jan 1995 15:13:53 -0500 (EST)
A World's Fair for the Information Age
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Carl Malamud, Internet Multicasting Service
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Public Park for the Global Village World's Fairs Ushered in the Industrial Age A World's Fair for the Information Age The Internet Railroad Internet Town Hall The Information Highway Beautification Fund The Global Schoolhouse Pavilion How You Can Open a Pavilion The Industrial Exhibition Getting There
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Public Park for the Global Village
This is a proposal for a 1996 Internet World's Fair, an exposition in the spirit of the great World's Fairs of the turn of the last century that marked the beginning of our modern industrial economies. We propose a World's Fair for the turn of this century, helping to usher in the information economy. This World's Fair will be located on the Internet, with centers of activity in multiple cities. The core cities will be connected together with and will feature applications ranging from an Internet Town Hall to digital libraries to an industrial exposition.
Like its industrial era counterparts, this World's Fair will have three goals:
Introduce people to the Internet and show them how this technology works, much as people learned about railroads, lighting, power, and other technologies in prior World's Fairs. Draw together engineers and industry to build public works projects for the global village. Challenge the state of the art by providing a highly visible place for people to show the results of their efforts. The World's Fair is structured as a core data highway to which commercial and research networks connect. A large number of pavilions can exist within this framework.
People do not move to cities without public parks, schools, libraries and other public facilities. If we want people to move to the global village, if we wish to see the birth of an information economy, we need to provide people with a view of that world. A World's Fair is the kind of broad cooperative activity between government and industry that will show people what this technology can do for them, a forum of international cooperation that can help us to build the kind of Global Information Infrastructure that will drive our world economy forward.
World's Fairs Ushered in the Industrial Age
>From 1848 to 1912, the world saw a series of Universal Expositions and World's
Fairs held in the great cities of the world. From London's Crystal Palace to
the great White City at Chicago's Columbian Exposition, these fairs ushered in
the industrial age, guiding and focusing several generations of engineers and
industrial leaders while drawing in millions of curious consumers to learn what
this new age of railroads and telephones and lights and cars could do for them.
The World's Fairs served as magnets, attracting tourists from all over the world. The Midway in Chicago was the birthplace of a wonderful new wheel designed by George Ferris and also served as the inspiration for amusement centers in other cities such as New York's Coney Island. The Eiffel Tower of Paris and the Crystal Palace of England were two of the permanent monuments left behind by the Universal Expositions.
The World's Fairs served as the focal point for a society learning to cope with machines and industry. In city after city, the mounting of a World's Fair always left a decisive impact, a permanent change in how the parks and roads and lights of that city operated. Whole cities were formed in their wake, such as the birth in New York City of Queens from the remains of the World's Fair in Flushing Meadows.
Lewis Mumford said that "metropolis itself may be described as a World's Fair in continuous operation." The World's Fairs were early models of how to run our cities. Large lighting systems, electrical plants, telephones, mass transit, and most of our transportation and communication systems were nurtured in these environments that focused large groups of people on one large event. A typical World's Fair built a model city, with pavilions for different countries, large expositions of agriculture and industry, and a host of cultural events. These miniature cities became the model for the world around them, influencing radically the development of London, Paris, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and the other cities where the World's Fairs were held.
A World's Fair for the Information Age
Over the last few years, we've seen the dawn of the Internet, a global internetwork of computer networks connecting over 30 million people in 150 countries. The explosive growth of this global Internet leaves no doubt that we are witnessing the birth of an infrastructure as fundamental as lighting, mass transit, power, and the telephone. Gradually, we're seeing every computer in the world connect to every other computer.
This global Internet will become a prototype for the Global Information Infrastructure that will become a fundamental building block for business in the 21st century, just as important as the telephone and telegraph were for business at the dawn of the 20th century. The impact of the Internet will go beyond business however, changing the way of each of will lead our lives.
The global village has been growing at an explosive rate, but it is growing in the same wild uncontrolled way that railroads and other building blocks of the industrial age did in the early days. Many people have only vague notions of the exact nature of the revolution sweeping by them. We are building a global village, but are doing so in a haphazard fashion without any sense of community or shared purpose.
A World's Fair will bring together government and industrial leaders with working engineers. The World's Fair will be our opportunity to build a public park for the global village, a place that emphasizes what a community looks like in an information age. These public parks in cyberspace will, like the industrial age fairs they are modeled on, expose large numbers of people to the technology and at the same time leave behind a permanent infrastructure to help drive the information economy forward.
The Internet Railroad
The unifying technical piece of this World's Fair is the Internet Railroad, dedicated bandwidth between the participating cities that connects large servers together. The Internet Railroad connects large servers in each of the cities together with a high-speed, dedicated lines.
The railroad is a dedicated resource for moving large data streams between the different cities. A data stream might be the movement of copies of a large database from one city to another, a process known as "mirroring" the data. A data stream can also be a real-time transmission of audio or video.
Deciding what data goes on the railroad and how to schedule it is an interesting research project. By using a dedicated infrastructure, multicast and other data should be able to move between major transit points reliably and predictably and will be unaffected by traffic patterns in the rest of the Internet.
The goal for the railroad is a T3 system operating at 45 million bits per second. The T3 lines would be located close to major interconnect points in the Internet such as the Global Internet Exchange (GIX) in Washington, D.C., allowing Internet service providers to tap into the data streams for their customer base.
Fanning out from the T3 core of the Internet Railroad are lower- speed lines. These lines can include multicasting from satellites at 64-192 thousand bits per second, metropolitan and regional networks at 10 and 45 million bits per second, and leased T1 lines operating at 1.544 million bits per second.
The railroad is a back-end network, it is not used for transit traffic from one user to another or from one user to a server. Rather, the railroad is used to connect a set of core pavilions together. These pavilions include large servers such as the Internet Multicasting Service "cyberstations" in Washington, D.C. It also connects a few core sites together, such as the National Press Club ballroom used for the Fair's monthly Internet Town Hall.
Being on the railroad is not the only way to participate in the Fair. There will be a large number of individual, club, small business, city, and other pavilions that will be part of the World's Fair.
Internet Town Hall
Once a month during 1996, an Internet Town Hall will be held. The center of the Town Hall will be the ballroom of the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. This ballroom is the same place the National Press Club holds its luncheon addresses. The ballroom has 10 million bit per second connectivity into the Internet and has an extensive support structure in place for large events.
Each Internet Town Hall will have as a goal bringing a sustained focus on a certain issue. Rather than a 1-hour TV special, the Internet Town Hall will last much longer. Each Internet Town Hall starts with an archive of supporting materials to focus discussion. Technology ranging from e-mail discussion groups to live multicast sessions will be used to bring world leaders onto the Internet. At the conclusion of the monthly event, the data produced to support discussion on that issue stays around, as do mailing lists and other collaborative activities.
The Information Highway Beautification Fund
A central pavilion in the World's Fair will be Information Highway Beautification Fund, a fund dedicated specifically to putting large government databases on the Internet. Started as a pilot project in January, 1993, the Fund's aim is to have ready at the beginning of the Fair in January, 1996 all U.S. Patent, Trademark, and SEC documents.
The pavilion will also serve as a focal point for other efforts to put government databases on-line. Governments around the world will be challenged to put their own information on-line, contributing to a global digital library of key documents. Resource discovery mechanisms specifically oriented towards government documents are being developed and will be part of the pavilion.
Patent, trademark, and financial documents are key databases for an information economy. These are the documents that form a legal infrastructure for services, guiding investment decisions, intellectual property development, and other key aspects of our modern economy. These databases are fuel for the information age and putting them on-line helps to stimulate our economy.
Support for the Information Highway Beautification Fund has already been received from MCI, Sun, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NYU, RR Donnelley Financial, Time Inc., and many others and an extensive volunteer corps of some of the Internet's leading researchers has been formed to make this data easier to access, more secure, and more useful.
The Global Schoolhouse Pavilion
The Global Schoolhouse allows children around the world to work together and do real research on a public affairs issue, such as the environment. The children are then able to present their results to each other and to world leaders.
The Global Schoolhouse started in 1993 with a videoconference on the environment between children in London, Virginia, Tennessee, and California and U.S. and British government officials. Work on the Global Schoolhouse has since decentralized, being carried by groups such as the Internet Multicasting Service in Washington, D.C., CNIDR in North Carolina, and the Global Schoolnet Foundation in California.
The Global Schoolhouse Pavilion will feature activities that help kids learn (and like) the Internet. Links to schools on-line, a special directory service, and information on Global Schoolhouse activities around the world will all be featured. A series of competitions will be held
The Internet Multicasting Service will continue work with the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to put Performance Plus programs on the Internet. Ranging from a special multicast of Handel's Messiah to Bill Taylor's "Jazz at the Kennedy Center," these programs will put on-line a series of programs on the arts.
A feature of the Global Schoolhouse Pavilion will be a "wire our schools" day in the middle of the year. Engineers, electricians, and other volunteers will be solicited from labor unions, corporations, universities, and other organizations and asked to help wire their local schools.
How You Can Open a Pavilion
A pavilion can be formed by individuals, clubs, cities, corporations, universities, and even countries. A pavilion can be in a dedicated facility where people come visit, such as an Internet Town Hall or a Cyberspace Planetarium. A pavilion can be simply an on-line presence, such as an individual's World Wide Web pages.
Pavilions in the Internet World's Fair, strive for two goals:
Bring the real world into cyberspace. Bring cyberspace into the real world.
Bringing the real world into cyberspace means putting some kind of information or event on-line. This could be a government database, or an audio archive, or a local events calendar, or any information that exists in the real world, but not in cyberspace.
The second goal is the reverse of the first: introducing the Internet to people who have not seen it. Training classes, a public access terminal in your local cafe, an on-line school are all examples of how we can use the Internet World's Fair to promote the Internet.
The main principle of the 1996 Internet World's Fair is that we are building a public park for the global village. A pavilion in the 1996 Internet World's Fair must give something back to the community. Commercial activity is encouraged, but to be a pavilion, you must make some kind of public contribution.
In addition to the pavilions described in this document, a variety of others are planned. A Small Business Pavilion will contain a directory of small business on the Internet and examples of how to use the Internet creatively in a small business. The Future of Radio Pavilion will contain large audio archives and will maintain a variety of 24 hr/day multicast streams of music, news, information, and entertainment. A Town Square Pavilion will focus on individual use of the Internet and will include special "white pages" resource discovery mechanisms to find people.
The Industrial Exhibition
Chicago's Columbian Exposition had the Great White Way, the prototype of our modern amusement park and birthplace of the Ferris Wheel. It had great pavilions dedicated to countries or themes and buildings that formed a lasting part of the city. But, like every other fair before it, one of the highlights was the industrial exhibition.
The World's Fair will feature a series of industrial exhibitions that will bring together the corporations and engineers that build the Internet infrastructure. Each of the 1996 Interop expositions will be dedicated to the theme of the World's Fair. A special World's Fair track will be included in each Interop conference around the world, featuring intensive use of the Internet technology in a series of sessions dedicated exploring the issues surround the Internet and its development.
An on-line directory will be developed as part of this effort, forming a lasting source of information on different products and services that make up the Internet. Links to company home pages, background information, and other information will be included in the on-line pavilion.
Getting There
The 1996 Internet World's Fair will be announced March 29 at the Interop conference in Las Vegas. Additional talks about the fairs will be scheduled around the world at forums such as INET, IETF, and other industry and non-industry events.
Throughout 1995, the core infrastructure and full schedule of events will be put in place with a Grand Opening of the fair in early 1996. By opening day, we hope to have the railroad operating from Japan to Europe and to have 1 terrabyte of disk spinning dedicated to the fair and its pavilions.
The initial organizing committee consists of Dr. Vint Cerf of MCI, Dr. Eric Schmidt of Sun Microsystems, Mike Millikin of Interop, Carl Malamud of the Internet Multicasting Service, and Marshall T. Rose of First Virtual. A series of local organizing committees have already been formed in Boston, Washington, D.C., San Francisco Bay Area, Tokyo, and Amsterdam. Additional organizing committees and further details will be released at the announcement on March 29.
[Date Prev]
[Date Next]
[Thread Prev]
[Thread Next]