Having a low cost/no cost FirstClass/Macintosh based network similar to the InterNet but far easier to set up and hook into, would be an incredible boon to computer users everywhere. The experience of using FirstClass and a Macintosh, we predict, could well be the catalyst needed to jump start the on-line revolution past it’s current stage of attracting early adopters and the technological elite.
A. Education
There are approximately 32,000 school districts in the United States of America alone. If each school district were to sponsor a single server that supported the students and teachers of that district, and used the OneNet Member network to connect with the other school districts across the country and around the world, the exchange of knowledge could go a long way toward reinvigorating the deteriorating primary and secondary education system.
Having electronic meeting places (in the form of a multi-line OneNet Member server) on each campus, and then hooking together the campuses, would create a similar explosion of communication and knowledge sharing.
Most great achievements in the world are built on knowledge that has gone before us and that we, as a species, have laboriously built on. Creating a simple to use, easy to hook into, microbased, electronic, global nervous system for the world’s schools is not something that’s simply a good idea, it’s something absolutely essential and it’s a nervous system whose time has come. One of the best place for this to happen is in the worlds various school systems at virtually all grade & achievement levels.
B. Medicine
In a conversation with one of the people planning the concept for the OneNet Member system a celebrated author related an experience where he became good friends with a child who was terminally ill with cancer. He watched this boy bravely fight for life but, in the end, lose. He resolved to work so other children shouldn’t suffer like this, and for those who must, their lives should be made as positive and enriched as possible.
Every day these stricken children lie in bed suffering through injections, inspections and constant monitoring. Studies have shown that children in such condition but who maintain their active mental acuity (as opposed, for instance, to passively watching television) require up to 40% less pain killers. This evidence, alone, is reason enough to begin building a system that can help relieve suffering in hospitals and hospices.
One way to help these children and other patients would be to set up OneNet Member network servers in hospitals and give the children access to Macintosh computers. They could then communicate with each other, discuss common interests in conferences, have real time chats, and while in their hospital beds work with teachers who would log in and teach them. Doctors and nurses could use the system to communicate, saving large amounts of time by sharing information more quickly. Every hour saved from the drudgery of paperwork, phone calls and searching for the right information, in the day of a modern medicine man, is that much additional time to spend working on saving the life of another human being.
Once wired up, as with the schools, hospitals could then connect with each other. Patients could communicate with other patients, doctors and nurses with their colleagues in other hospitals—all of them sharing access to knowledge, tools and community. And all of it through this low/no cost distributed system of the OneNet Member network servers throughout the world.
C. Government
City governments could sponsor a community server that had information on the various government oriented activities. Conferences could allow people to discuss topics relevant to the community or region, as well as provide feedback to the leaders of the government. Databases of relevant information for community members could be used to answer questions and could provide access to the government’s base of information. Such an electronic system could lower the support load on the government employees and possibly lower the cost of government as well.
Members of the government could also use the system to communicate more effectively because sending messages between departments would be simple. Different groups within the government would find it much easier to get work done if the communication lines were open.
Once on-line, the governments could hook into the OneNet Member network and set up their connections with systems running in other cities throughout the country and the world. They could share information on how to solve common problems and, potentially, share or pool resources to become more effective than doing it individually.
D. Libraries
If every library in every town in the world were to take the computer (often a Macintosh already) and hook two phone lines into it, the basic infrastructure for the OneNet Member network would be in place overnight.
Libraries already are a meeting place for accessing and exchanging information. By providing an electronic equivalent, and connecting with the other libraries of the world, the basic network needed to give a large percentage of people in the world with computers access to the OneNet Member network (and each other) would be a fairly straightforward affair.
E. Business
All societies have the need to produce and distribute their products. Commerce is the driving force behind many of our day to day activities from our jobs to the quality of our schools (a rich society, generally, has a better chance at higher quality education than a poor society).
Companies can (and already are) beginning to expand into the electronic ether of The OneNet Member network. If a regular OneNet Member system has approx. 100-1000 users on-line, and there are, say, 1500 OneNet Member systems, the potential market for business is between 150,000 and 1.5 million people all over the world.
Businesses can also become full fledged OneNet Member networks by providing your own systems for people to access. Businesses can provide themselves with an outstanding competitive advantage, for example, by providing customers with access to a system that contains technical and customer support information on their products or services, as well as additional marketing and sales information. They could provide better service, support and sales and do it at a cost that is orders of magnitude less than doing it with today’s methods.
1. A MarketPlace on the OneNet
By providing access to information about products, prices and ordering to customers throughout the OneNet Member network, and by providing this access free of restriction (within the marketplace area on each OneNet Member system), business can provide the lifeblood of commerce: communications and access to markets by business and access to products by consumers.
Businesses could publish their catalogs electronically. For their customers, they could create support oriented databases full of information which would answer commonly asked questions, and conferences where customers could ask questions and where the company (and often other helpful customers of the companies products) could respond.
As a checks/balances measure, the OneNet Member network would sponsor a consumer advocacy forum within the marketplace where consumers could voice their complaints (or their praise) about a particular business. This process would keep the people involved with the marketplace from all sides honest and satisfied, and it would be a market driven unregulated activity.
Businesses that didn’t address customer concerns would simply not be frequented by the OneNet Member network user community and would eventually drop from the network. Also, businesses that didn’t get enough return for the time invested would drop off the network. A very real marketplace environment with capitalistic forces driving it would form and grow.
2. Communications Systems within companies/tied to The OneNet
The lack of ability to quickly communicate changes in day to day business slows down (and often causes the failure) of so many companies today. The ability of the field to quickly inform support of customer problems, to provide feedback to development groups, and to provide information to customers and information about customers to their own company is something that happens in a very haphazard fashion in most companies today.
By giving workers a communications system that includes electronic mail, conferencing, access to files, forms and necessary databases, all in a low cost, easy to use Macintosh server, the OneNet Menber provides these basic business necessities at a fraction of the cost of doing it the way it’s done in most companies today. The hard revenue savings is easy to quantify, and the soft benefits (not as easy to quickly express in ROI terms) are immense; they provide large competitive advantages for companies using systems like this over companies that don’t.
Companies, once they have set up systems like the OneNet Member network can hook into their supplies, their customers, their divisions in other locations and their employees on the road, working at home and abroad. The costs would be much lower than attempting to setup a proprietary company owned and operated (with all the associated costs) system.
