the village
The campus and its keepers are this entry’s ground. None of the rooms in this story ran themselves: behind every conference stood a founder who imagined it, a programmer who built its software, a sysadmin who kept its machines alive, and hosts — named, accountable people — who greeted newcomers, seeded topics, and kept the talk civil enough to continue. These are the main players, in their public capacities, from the sources this edition consulted. It is a roll of the verified, not the complete: for every name here there were staff and hosts no directory printed, and the unnamed are part of the village too.
Frank L. Burns (1939–2003) — founder of The Meta Network (1983) and president of Metasystems Design Group. A retired Army lieutenant colonel — two Vietnam tours, the Silver Star — who had directed Task Force Delta, the Army’s computer-linked network of researchers and futurists, and who is credited with the Army’s “Be All That You Can Be” slogan. Howard Rheingold remembers him as a man who retired “to become a toolmaker for electronic activists.” TMN is item 8’s home; he heads this roll.
Charles Roth — the author of Caucus, and the foundation under the Caucus rooms of both editions. A Wayne State computer scientist who encountered CONFER in 1980–82 and wrote its portable heir; he bought the rights back in 1994, carried Caucus to the web in 1995—writing CML, the markup language its web pages were built from, in a month—and later served as Screen Porch’s chief technical officer. TMN, ARTS WIRE, and the EFA campus all ran on his software; item 8 was written inside it, while The WELL’s rooms ran on Caucus’s cousin PicoSpan. After Caucus Systems’ bankruptcy returned the rights to him, he kept the software through CaucusCare, rewrote it on MySQL, and open-sourced it. The item/response grammar this work is written in is, in large part, his design.
Scott Burns — Frank Burns’ son, and, in the editor’s recollection, the system administrator of everything at the Arlington offices: the ISP’s and the Caucus conferences’ servers, in the back room, with Scott living on site. The edition’s own record corroborates his place in the story — the editor’s printed thank-yous, from 2000, begin with his name.
Lisa Kimball — a partner in Metasystems Design Group from 1984: a partner, that is, in the company that owned and ran the rooms this work was written in. In 1985 she founded the Electronic Networking Association — the field’s own professional association — in a Greenwich Village loft, and TMN stood in the founding consortium of her association. She edited its award-winning online newsletter, NETWEAVER, chaired its annual meetings, and in 1990 received its award for “Outstanding Contribution to Networking.”
Her doctrine was that networks are biodegradable. When the ENA had outlived its purpose she dismantled it herself, and her reason stands as doctrine: “Setting a ‘sunset’ date at the beginning prevents people from associating disbanding when ‘done’ with failure.” Facilitation was doctrine too, stated in period: the online industry, she told the Wall Street Journal in 1993, should hire “a few less programmers and a lot more guides, teachers and facilitators.” Rheingold’s verdict, in The Virtual Community, was that it is “hard to find any significant CMC system in the world that doesn’t have a contribution from her.” This edition’s own archive holds her in the act of keeping this village: in a post of March 30, 1998, preserved in this edition’s November 1999 campus export, Ginny Little, on the road, hopes to meet her in Washington; in 2004 it was Kimball who interviewed Charles Roth inside Caucus itself — the interview this edition’s Caucus entry stands on; and in 2003 she was marking TMN’s twentieth anniversary, quoted on Joi Ito’s weblog — the network’s memory-keeper as well as its partner. Her sunset doctrine is this village’s own epitaph logic: TMN itself dissolved, the campus closed, and what remains of a biodegradable network is exactly this — an edition, its records, and the people who kept them. If one person walks between every room in this story, it is her.
Tom Mandel — president of Screen Porch, quoted in the Caucus 4.0 announcement of 1998 speaking for the web version of the software: the steward who carried Caucus across to the browser.
Robert Parnes — the grandfather of the form: as a University of Michigan graduate student in 1975 he wrote CONFER, the ancestor of Caucus and PicoSpan alike, and founded Advertel Communication Systems to carry it.
Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant — co-founders of The WELL (1985): Brand, of the Whole Earth Catalog, who set its founding term, “You Own Your Own Words”; Brilliant, the epidemiologist who brought him the idea.
Marcus D. Watts — author of PicoSpan, The WELL’s conferencing software: Caucus’s cousin, from the same CONFER ancestor.
Anne Focke — who conceived ARTS WIRE, proposing it at NYFA’s 1988 Orcas Island gathering, and first led it; and Ted Berger, NYFA’s executive director, who shared the vision and backed it into being.
Anna Couey — ARTS WIRE’s first network coordinator; co-founder, with Judy Malloy, of its Interactive Art Conference, where Scibe was collectively created; co-editor of its first newsletter, Hotwire.
Judy Malloy — ARTS WIRE staff from 1993; editor of its newsletter, Arts Wire Current, from 1996 to 2004; founder of The WELL’s Arts conference; publisher, on The WELL in 1986–87, of the first online hyperfiction — and the orchestrator of My Name is Scibe, the sister work to this one.
Joe Matuzak — Michigan poet; director of ARTS WIRE from 1995.
Ginny Little — the EFA teacher whose TMN classroom conferences neighboured the artist conference; her students found their way in from January 1998 and became the river’s second flood of writers.
the classroom next door
EFA — Education for the Arts, the Kalamazoo magnet program — kept TMN conferences of its own, next door to artist: Classroom A and Classroom B, a Homeroom, a Café, a Publishing Area, an Authors Forum. Its accredited online creative-writing course was co-taught by Ginny Little — first with the editor, then with Dirk Flinthart after the editor stopped; the conference home pages in the scrape name her, in Caucus’s own term, Organizer — of Classroom A, Classroom B, and the Authors Forum alike. The editor, on his own confirmation, was also the course’s technology architect, building and managing its dial-up-era infrastructure; the classroom record backs the shape of it — students with technical trouble are sent to him (“email chris and he can help you… or Frank@tmn.com can help you too”), and chris@tmn.com stands in the record as a course contact. By the editor’s testimony, he taught his end of the course from Washington, DC: from 1996, by dial-up, from his apartment at 1101 East Capitol Street, on Capitol Hill, overlooking Lincoln Park. The geography is the whole picture — the teacher at a modem on Capitol Hill, the students hundreds of miles away in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and the classroom a conference neither of them could see. The program put the tools in the students’ hands: laptops and dial-up accounts, supplied — the November 1999 export of the classroom conferences — the surviving capture, taken through the session of Phillip J. Rhoades, an EFA student, whose login its pages render under, and preserved in the editor’s archive — is full of them in the students’ own words: a laptop “from KRESA,” laptops called “a gift of the program,” a new modem waiting at EFA — and the course also met face to face, periodically: the record opens with a three-to-four-hour computer orientation, where students remember meeting each other, and Frank of TMN, in person. Item 8 was not that class, and this edition never prints it as one: it was a public item in a public conference. What happened was adjacency — some of Ginny’s students found their way in from the classroom conferences from January 1998, the way you wander out of a classroom and into the café next door, and stay for the conversation.
Chris Abraham — the editor of this edition: a writer in Scibe on ARTS WIRE and The WELL in 1994, from a desk at PNI (Picture Network International) in the same Arlington building as TMN’s company — adjacent offices and a shared smoking patio, no other connection. On September 2, 1997 he opened item 8 in the artist conference, meaning to recreate Scibe there, and gave the item and its method their name, coelaboration; he wrote 60 of the 212 responses that survive, the largest single share, and the other 152 came from the other eighteen writers. On TMN he also co-taught EFA’s online creative-writing course with Ginny Little, and was — his word, confirmed — its technology architect. In 1999 he joined Caucus Systems — by then the conferencing software’s own company — as a Linux systems administrator, the employment his period biography on Howard Rheingold’s site records.
and the hosts themselves
Above all, the hosts as a class: TMN’s conference hosts, chosen by its moderators, and its conference organizers, the unpaid core with the wider powers; The WELL’s conference hosts; M-Net’s fairwitnesses; ARTS WIRE’s conference coordinators. The record prints few of their names and all of their work: every room in this layer was kept by somebody. The village is mostly them.
consulted sources
Charles Roth, interviewed by Lisa Kimball (2004), caucuscare.com
Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community — his verdict on Kimball’s contribution to CMC
Joi Ito’s weblog (2003) — Kimball marking TMN’s twentieth anniversary
Wikipedia, “CONFER (software)” — Parnes, and the descendants
Wikipedia, “The WELL” — Brand, Brilliant, Watts, and the hosts
The sister edition’s wiki: ARTS WIRE — Focke, Berger, Couey, Malloy, Matuzak
This edition’s what page — the editor’s printed thank-yous, Scott Burns first
The November 1999 export of TMN’s classroom conferences — taken through Phillip J. Rhoades’ session, whose login it renders under; preserved in the editor’s archive — the laptops, the modems, the course contacts, in the participants’ own posts
The editor’s confirmation (October 26, 2026) — his role as the course’s technology architect; the supplied laptops and dial-up accounts; the face-to-face sessions
The editor’s testimony (October 26, 2026) — teaching the course from 1996 by dial-up, from his apartment at 1101 East Capitol Street, Washington, DC, overlooking Lincoln Park
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