C: Could you give some background on how the 2020 Communications Trust was set up and its general aims and objectives?

M: It was set up originally by Wellington City Council, last year, as part of the InfoCity project, and in the development of the project various things got themselves started; things like the wellington.net.nz world wide web web site, the Sun Site negotiations with Sun Microsystems, and assorted other ideas that floated to the surface that weren't really part of the InfoCity agenda. InfoCity was about infrastructure, paradigm shift, and leadership, and acting as a catalyst. Having got some things started, there was no process or mechanism for them to carry on. And because a lot of these ideas had to do with community involvement or education or areas that weren't strictly the business of the council, it was suggested that they should set up a broad-based community trust to take over some of them. I was taken on last year on a short term contract to set up the trust, and having done so, the trustees asked, Would you like to hang on as the co-ordinator? To which I said, Yes, and let's get on with it!

The primary objective of the trust is to raise people's awareness of and access to the benefits of information networks. That covers both Wellington and New Zealand, quite specifically, because the council realised that in the first place this kind of technology leaks like a sieve, and so trying to limit or locate it is not rational. Secondly, because it is likely to develop outwards and take on a whole lot of things that were never envisaged in the first place, it would bring some value back to Wellington City as a leader in those kind of areas. So the council has been quite relaxed about the fact that it would just take on broader perspective than some local - city wide or region wide - activity.

C: What have the main projects been for the Trust so far?

M: The people at InfoCity had already negotiated with Sun Systems for a Sun Site to be delivered to New Zealand. Sun Microsystems has a habit of giving away big networking boxes, almost exclusively to universities, and saying, Look, here's something interesting, have a play with it. I'm not sure many there are now, but when the negotiations started there were about twenty-five, by about late last year there were about fifty world-wide. They decided in New Zealand to do something different, they decided that although they required that it remain within a university, they also suggested that they wanted to have more community input into it, and that they wanted to focus it away from the very deeply techy approach. So they suggested they'd like it to start delivering some value for primary and secondary schools.

What they created was a bit of a hydra, because although their contract is with Waikato University, that responsibility is a technical one. The responsibility for the content and for maintaining the websites on the box, is held at Victoria, and they fund us with a web spinner. Then the Trust is to be the umbrella organisation to deal with the publishing policies and access policies and all that kind of stuff. There's only one contract, and that's with Waikato. The rest is just a request from Sun that we do it. We've had to spend quite a bit of time sorting out the relationships between the three organisations. Two universities and a community trust are going to be complex to start off with. We think we're moving along quite well, and there's still some work to be done. The box is available to the internet and we have half a dozen organisations - three or four schools - publishing their websites there. And the deal is that if you don't have server available to you, and especially if you're a school, you can have a Sun Site website. Similarly, if you have material that is worthwhile for primary and secondary schools - and that covers a pretty broad range: We're not going to call up the curriculum content and demand that every last word is based on it, because things are broader than that anyway. So, there're people like Technology Education, and the Principals Federation, and various others who've got websites up there, too.

Net Day was another project which the City Council didn't feel it was their job to run. So they said to the Trust, We'd like you to take responsibility for setting up a Net Day, whatever that might be in New Zealand. We did some research and decided that the best idea was a kick start for schools to get some networking in place. Because networking in schools ­ especially primary/intermediate schools ­ was being left in the 'too hard' basket, and that is probably the most important part of it. I mean, the software comes and goes, and is replaced on a three or six monthly cycle. The hardware comes and goes. It's going to be out of date in... Well, it's out of date when you take it off the shelf. It's going to be superseded substantially within a couple of years. But the network is unlikely to be. If you've got a Cat5 network in a school, it's going to carry 100MB, which is a huge amount of information, and for a primary or an intermediate school to be generating the equivalent of ten TV channels, that's a fairly long stretch from where we are now. So although some schools have gone to fibre, for a variety of reasons, for those schools who don't have that kind of confidence in their ability to fund it or manage it, or whatever, then a Cat5 network is a pretty good deal, and it's going to last them quite a long time. The advantage is of course that it can also be installed reasonably cheaply. It's mature technology, and people with some basic skills and some supervision can do it up to standard. Net Day has actually been the most important thing which we've done.

C: How's the response been to that?

M: We've had thirty-six schools which, on the twenty-eighth of June, which installed forty-five networks. And that was the pilot project, and so we had a broad range of schools. We were dealing at any one time with about sixty schools, but the didn't all take part in the day. And that was also part of the pilot, to find out what the barriers to participating in something as fundamentally simple as a NetDay were going to be.

C: What were those barriers?

M: They varied. Some of them were simple: Money. Even at a thousand dollars or less for the network, some schools could not afford it. One of them was purely organisational. We were quite late last year when we got started, and we had about fifteen schools that were interested but had to pull out because they already had scheduled everything that they were going to do in the following year. There was just not enough resources left in the school to add another one. And so they've all said, We'll be back in for 1998, there was no other obstacle. But in some cases it was different parts of their technology plan, they had decided computers were more important than the network. And in some cases the school board of trustees said, No, we're not going to allow this to go ahead, for whatever reason ­and in a couple of cases simply because they don't understand. A lot of this is about educating the people who are running the schools.

C: Are there any kind of directives or policy at a government level?

M: No, there aren't. We have finally heard, in the last ten days that the Ministry of Education is going to "develop a strategy" for the application of IT in schools. But given that the schedule of things, it will be unlikely to make the next budget round, so it won't until 1999, and because the budget comes out in May, schools aren't going to be able to apply it until 2000, even with the best will in the world.

C: Which is too late.

M: Well, it's too slow. The point is that what is required isn't something that's hard and fast and deeply researched, because things are changing so fast that any amount of research isn't going to produce an answer that's current. Some of the people who should really be talked to about networking/information technology in schools are people like Stuart Burns at the Rotorua Energy Charitable Trust, who have put a bit over a million bucks into twenty odd schools in their area. And they are dead serious about this stuff. They're not just putting in the technology, they're not just paying for networks, or hardware, or software, although they are doing that. They've got 10, 20, 60 and in one case 98 thousand dollars per school coming out of the Trust and into the schools, but they're then following that up. They've got one person employed whose job it is to work among the schools to help them identify what the problems are what the best solutions are. That's on a purely practical basis. They are then also paying for some solid external research to be done into the best use of the technology, and what works and what doesn't - they've already identified that things like teacher training are going to be important, so they are already gearing up to provide teacher training for the schools in their area.

So it doesn't take a hell of a lot to figure out what a good strategy might be, but what it does take is the will and the funds to go out and do something about it. The Ministry of Education could do a lot worse that to phone up the Trust and say, What are you doing? Put that in writing, and get on with the job. But I think it's unlikely [to happen]. However, that's really the way this trust is working, as well: To say, This is not all of the answer, it's only part of part of an answer, but it's better than nothing at all, which is all schools will have if they're not able to take it on for themselves.

So this is a way of not just putting hardware in schools, because one of the big outcomes of the pilot project is that you get networks of people volunteering to help. About twenty-five percent of the people who helped out with NetDay had no other contact with the schools they were working in. It was purely a voluntary effort for NetDay for that school that got them in there in the first place, but the school now know some people that they didn't know before who they can call on for some support when they are doing things with their IT and that's the biggest difference, the biggest outcome of NetDay.

We're scaling that up now to an almost nation-wide event for next year. We're hoping that we'll get almost a dozen centres where they will take on NetDay. We were going to do it for Rotorua, but as far as we can see Rotorua is so far ahead of the rest of the country that what we should be doing is all going up there and learning from them! It's inspirational but it's demoralising as well to know that when one city or one region had the asset of its local power board to do something with, instead of frittering it away by giving me ten shares, or selling it off and spending the money, as Wellington City has done. What they did was set up a trust, give it fifty-one percent of their power board shares, which were worth $30 million and are now worth nearly $100 million, and said, Go for it! And that trust is now applying those funds and about half of its money is devoted to education, to young people, and all that stuff. They really are the centre of what's going on.

C: What's the general level of corporate and, outside the Ministry of Education, governmental interest in this kind of thing?

M: Local government has been quite interested. The cities I've mentioned have put some resources behind it and are interested in pushing things along. And Wellington City, although it's using the Trust as its delivery mechanism, is thoroughly behind us. At central government, the Ministry of Education has been really helpful. Maurice Williamson does his best. It's just he hasn't got any budget. And because of the nature of I.T., it keeps cropping on other people's patches - education or delivery of democracy or justice or whatever. So he tries to generate some leadership, but they really don't have the budget or, I suppose, the authority to intervene in they ways in which they would like to. But they're very good and very helpful.

In the corporate sector, not a lot. Maurice keeps beating them up and saying, The I.T. industry has to support schools. And then goes away and leaves them to it. No I.T.company is going to off its own bat and by itself try and solve the I.T. issues of the New Zealand education system. So in coming along with something like NetDay, we've said, Here's a one day project, with some follow up - not a hell of a lot. It's therefore a way for the industry to be involved directly, to do something practical and at a fundamental level, and also to have a limit put on it, to know that it's not just opening its purse and asking people to dive in, because once the network is installed and up and running, that becomes the responsibility of the school.

So people in industry have all to varying degrees said, Yes, we're prepared to put some money into this, and our resources into it. Including forming teams to adopt schools... Because it fits into a mold. Someone's come to them with an idea that works. They re pretty supportive. That said, it still comes out of their charitable involvement. It's at the $5000 level. It's not at the corporate communications and marketing strategy level. It's been a bit of a disappointment, I suppose. We would have liked to have got some bigger players on board, at a higher level. But it looks as though we're going to be working at 5 & 10 & 15 thousand dollar involvement for a nation-wide event. But we are proposing to do up to 600 schools, with a basic Cat5 network, an eight port network, for less money than our friends in Rotorua are putting into their twenty-six schools in one year. So we have to be realistic about the whole process. It is a kick-start, a way of getting things moving, a way of enlisting the community in its educational future by using I.T. And that's good. It will be a grassroots operation whatever happens. It has to be owned locally, there's no way it can be done from a central point of view without substantial amounts of money - which we just don't have. So NetDay's been really important to us.

Another organisation we've got involved with has been the Bangemann Challenge which is the City of Stockholm's initiative. Bangemann who was a commissioner for the European Community was asked to report on their use of I.T., and he came back and was fairly brutal, and said, We're missing out. Frankly, Europe is blowing this opportunity. So the Mayor of Stockholm, said, OK, We'll do something about this, so they developed the Bangemann Challenge, which among European cities is about 400 000, for the application and use of information technology in a whole variety of areas, including small and medium enterprises, democratic delivery, education resources. That wound up in February this year, but it was immediately followed up by an international global challenge.

We're now working on hopefully becoming the New Zealand, and maybe the Oceania representative of Bangemann, because there are a lot of things being done which potentially show some leadership. In NewZealand, there's the system that Ericsson is working on at the moment, the home internet service, which allows people to use internet and their phone line at the same time. That was invented in Napier. People in the Bay of Plenty, I think, are working on rural delivery of health information services using high speed networks. The Kohanga Reo movement is working on putting in a satellite network for all the Kohanga Reo in New Zealand. What's going on in Rotorua is another one. Manukau are looking at something they call a 'super library'. Capital Network Holdings in Wellington is another one.

So there are a whole lot of things that are happening which are worth entering in a global challenge for the use of information technology, because they are cutting edge, they are showing some leadership in the way in which IT is being applied. Partly just to gain profile for New Zealand and partly just to bring those people into contact with other people who are trying to do similar things around the world, because as usual everyone's working more or less in isolation and busily reinventing the same damn wheel. And part of the Bangemann process is to say, Here is, let's say, health information delivery; now here are twenty projects in places all round the world who are all working with the same general set of objectives, but using half a dozen different delivery mechanisms. Those projects, as well as getting some exposure for themselves, will get some exposure to each other, and what the Common Market has said is that they will sponsor a series of Topic Seminars. So that if there is a particularly adventurous project that is going on somewhere, then the Common Market will cover part of the cost of flying people from all over the world who are involved in similar things, to that centre to look at, to talk about it, to share information. So there's all sorts of potential.

The City of Stockholm is pouring multi-million kroner into this project and they're doing it because they want to show some leadership as well. They've put in a high speed ring, a gigabyte ring in the City of Stockholm, which is itself real leadership in community access to internet. They've got fifteen phone companies who lease time on it, but the city said, No, we're not going to have fifteen people digging up our streets, so we will put the network in, and while we're at it, we're not going to muck around with bandwidth.

C: That seems like a good entry into some of the Wellington InfoCity things. Some of the charter documents for that seem very ambitious and focused on leadership in a similar way. Can you talk about some of those initiatives?

M: The best of them all, I think, is Capital Network Holdings. BURL is in the middle of doing a report on business clusters and so forth, the future of economic development in Wellington. They told the economic development committee of the council a few months a go that the most important thing they had done was set up CNHL. That was a piece of brilliance - Richard Naylor, the guy who came up with the idea about how it could be done, is really a genius. For a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and by bringing together seventeen business partners, who each threw in ten thousand dollars a piece, they are putting through the CBD of Wellington a network of 144-core fibre optic cable, and they're doing it on a model which says: if you want to be a customer, you pay for your connection, and that is the cost of laying the cable from the previous connection.

So there's about half-a-dozen loops of fibre being laid around the CBD according to on who the customers are. And as each loop gets close enough to the other loops to link up, it becomes connected. As these link together, you've got a network which has absolutely astronomical bandwidth running through the city. But it's being done for peanuts. Paolo Alto in California, sets itself up as a leader in the world for doing this, and it cost them a hundred million dollars! And the same with Stockholm - they put the money into it. The model we're using here is that we'll put some money into it - and using this model the quality of the network is every bit as good as the overseas examples, and better than many.

The InfoCity unit is being closed down. And that's unfortunate because you can't generate leadership and paradigm shift without people being actively involved in it. Even though it's going to move into commissioning, so the InfoCity process can still continue, it's going to be difficult to generate that leadership when it's just a part of somebody's job. You've got to remember that it was originally driven by Fran Wilde, who, while she was mayor, made sure that it was a viable process.

C: So what's the culture in the City Council at the moment, and what's its perception of what InfoCity's done?

M: Good question. I think they appreciate what InfoCity has done, but I think the culture has moved to that idea that it's not the business of government to do anything, and that you commission, and you do as little as possible and let the market provide. And that's fine in things you can define, in things that are reasonably mature, in for example any parks and reserves activity - well, OK, you can contract that out because there are a number of people who have those skills. You can contract out roading. This technology is changing so fast - and nobody really understands it - there's no question about that; those who tell you they understand it are probably angling for a job, and probably lying, because it's changing too fast for that. But because of that, maybe it is only a city or a government that can take this on. And that's the model that's been used everywhere else. And so while CNHL was a brilliant idea, it was still the city that was leading it. It's still the city that brought those partners into the room, and they were competitors, you know: "Check your knifes and other weapons at the door, come in, and let's sit down and do something constructive for the common good."

C: The recent agreements between Telecom and Clear over number portability are a pretty good example of that kind of leadership.

M: That's right. Jim Bolger eventually bangs some heads together and they get their agreement. There is a whole range of these things, in this kind of area, that you just can't do much with until it becomes mature. You just have to take this kind of risk, and the point is that the risk isn't actually all that expensive. It's just that Wellington or New Zealand isn't the centre of anything.

You know, Bill Gates gives eleven million dollars to his local library, and the reason he does it is because it is his local library. He's based in Seattle. He's not going to give anything to the Wellington Public Library for IT, because it's a customer. And it's the same with even the companies we've been involved with in NetDay. They want to be good corporate citizens within the New Zealand context, but they are not owned in New Zealand. This is not head office. It's the same with the banks. So why would they want to treat Wellington or New Zealand as anything other than a very good customer? Now, nobody doubts for one moment that we're all going to become customers in this stuff, but there's no competitive advantage in being a customer, and that's what the Info City project was originally designed to do, to gain for Wellington a competitive advantage. Because Wellington itself certainly does have some potential.

We are a major information centre. And it's converting it from a centre of information to a hub of information that the InfoCity project was partly commissioned to do. Because the other issue which has come up with BURL's report is that it says Wellington has no other future than information. Now, that information can be Peter Jackson and his film developments, or animation studios, or whatever it may be; it can be distance learning - both the Correspondence School and the Open Polytechnic are based here; it can be government information, historical information, the National Archive, the Museum of New Zealand -they're both here; and the thing is converting that into useful information for other people holds great potential for Wellington. But, of course, the central government is not going to do it. Because people from elsewhere are going to scream: Hang on, why is Wellington getting the benefit out of this? So that's why InfoCity was, again, set up, because we have this potential. And for all its other geographical drawbacks Wellington has this one main advantage, in that it's compact. We're not stretched out like Christchurch or Auckland, we're piled into the valleys. That puts everyone together and that's excellent as far as networking is concerned.