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Welcome
to Tallahassee Freenet (TFN), Florida's first community network.
TFN is a volunteer organization by and for the members of
our community.
Mission
- TFN will maintain a web site that contains a comprehensive
index to community information for Tallahassee, Leon county,
and the surrounding area.
TFN will help individuals, informal groups, and non-profit
organizations use Internet technologies by supplying them
with reliable communication tools and services (for example:
web page space, email, forums, and email lists); provide user
assistance through email and telephone support; and provide
training on the use and benefits of Internet technologies.
TFN will help individuals and groups that are not effectively
using Internet technologies by working with community groups
and other organizations to provide education and access to
Internet technologies. TFN will work with the goal of all
area residents regardless of age, income, race, ethnicity,
disability, or gender having access to Internet tools and
having the skills necessary to succeed in the neweconomy.
TFN is a 501(c)3 non-profit
organization in partnership with the LeRoy Collins Leon County
Public Library. While TFN offers free services, it is not
cost free to operate. It depends upon community contributions
in the form of both dollars and time in order to operate.
There are many volunteer opportunities as well as many ways
to contribute financially including sponsorships, donations,
etc. All financial contributions to TFN are tax-deductible.
TFN today
- TFN currently has many registered users with mailboxes,
and is visited by millions of non-registered users yearly.
TFN has ties to county government, state government, the universities,
the newspaper, the hospitals and hundreds of community organizations.
TFN provides a broad range of information services and Internet
e-mail accounts free of charge to thousands of people in the
states of Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. It offers free ppp
accounts as well as free text-based accounts.
16,000 people per year are
helped in person at the Library's Freenet HelpDesk, 10,000
people per year are helped via telephone, and 1,200 people
per year attend general Freenet classes. Additionally, Freenet
programs are presented to over 500 people per year outside
of the Library by Library staff and volunteers.
TFN history - Tallahassee
Free-Net, Inc. (TFN) was founded in 1992 by two Florida State
University (FSU) professors, Dr. Hilbert Levitz, Department
of Computer Science, and Dr. Dennis Duke, Director of the
FSU Supercomputer Computations Research Institute (SCRI).
Both Levitz and Duke had long been fascinated by the potential
for change inherent in computer networking. They both had
been extensively involved with the development and deployment
of the university's local and global networking facilities.
This experience set the background for the decision to open
some of these facilities, free of charge, to the public with
a view to fostering civic engagement, social connectedness,
distance education, and economic development.
Early on, The LeRoy Collins Leon County Public Library, under
the direction of Helen Moeller, joined FSU's SCRI as an operating
partner, with SCRI providing technical support and the library
providing a central location in the community and experience
in organizing community volunteer efforts. Michael Rouse was
hired as the Library Freenet Director. Two SCRI employees
were assigned to the project. Diane Wood, TFN Acting Executive
Director and Randolph Langley, TFN Technical Director who
developed the SCRI-Net Command Interpretor software for text-based
logins that is still used by TFN as well as by many other
systems worldwide. With the phase out of SCRI's support in
1995, TFN employed Emily Ratliff as System Administrator.
Emily was succeeded by Noel Davis, TFN's volunteer System
Administrator. In 1996, TFN retained David McMurtrey half-time
as TFN's Executive Director.
At the time of its formal opening on May 5, 1993, the only
people in Tallahassee/Leon County who had Internet connectivity
and e-mail accounts were faculty and students at FSU. Very
few local residents even knew what the Internet was. Using
equipment donated by IBM, followed later by donations from
Sun, and DEC, TFN quickly developed into one of the largest
civic networks in the world - relative to the size of the
community, it was possibly the largest with 38,000 registerd
users in 1996.
TFN was the first such community information system in the
Southeast and the sixth nationwide. More than an operator
of an information system, TFN was an important agent guiding
Tallahassee/Leon County into the Information Age. The TFN
organization was the prime catalyst in the development of
Tallahassee's computer communications infrastructure. As a
consequence, Tallahassee/Leon County has an unusually high
level of Internet awareness and connectivity. As Figure 1.
illustrates, TFN's presence gave the community a significant
lead over other communities. Early in 1994 when the rest of
the country was just becoming aware of the web, TFN users
were enjoying free ppp accounts and were developing their
own web pages.
TFN assisted county and
state government agencies, schools, and other institutions
in planning for their roles in the emerging National Information
Infrastructure. It conducted workshops for information suppliers,
general users, teacher groups, and state and county government personnel. As a partner in the IRIS project with SCRI, Sprint/Centel,
and the Leon County School System, TFN was instrumental in
getting every public school in Leon County connected to the
Internet, making the County one of the first school systems
in the nation to be able to make that claim. Until the schools
had their own mail and web servers, TFN provided free accounts
to all teachers and students in the County.
With the phase-out of SCRI's support in 1996, Hayes Computer
Systems generously donated space and network connections for
TFN's servers. In November of 1999, TFN's servers were moved
to the LeRoy Collins Public Library. TFN's Internet connections
are provided by the Florida Information Resource Network (FIRN).
original mission - "The mission of Tallahassee
Free-Net (TFN) is to provide a broad range of information
services free of charge to the general public locally, regionally,
nationally, and internationally. The information is provided
via access to the TFN computer systems, which contain significant
amounts of useful information locally, but more generally
provide access via the Internet to a broad range of information
residing at sites all over the world.
TFN is more than an operator of an information system. It
is the agent guiding Tallahassee and to some extent Florida,
into the Information Age. Therefore, it is further the mission
of TFN to precipitate community cooperation that is the basis
for having community-wide electronic communication."
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