The Milan Civic Network experience and its roots in the town

The Milan Civic Network (Rete Civica di Milano, RCM for short) is a project of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Milan. The initiative of promoting a Civic Network intends to avail the local community of the skills developed at the department, giving the city a vantage point on the technological communication environment of the twenty-first century. RCM is strongly inspired by Internet values, such as being free and open, and by the principles and goals of community networks. RCM is a BBS based on the SoftArc First Class software, whose server runs on a Apple Macintosh Workgroup Server 95 made available by Apple Computers, while the client software is available both for Mac and Windows platforms. The authors outline the technical details and some special choices we have done and sum up the evolution of the network. They present RCM desktop and its major conferences. Finally, they discuss the features which characterize RCM as a community network rooted in the town