Karen Banks
lorenetworking
The GreenNet engineer whose gateway carried mail for sixty partner organisations across three continents, using the wrong technology on purpose.
GnFido ran on store-and-forward - fidonet and uucp - rather than a permanent internet link, because for most of its correspondents no permanent link existed or could be afforded. It was the inferior technology by every measure except the one that mattered, which was that it worked where the better one did not, and for thousands of people it was the only affordable electronic communication available. In 1995 the programme she helped found took forty women to the UN conference in Beijing and gave ten thousand delegates email and web access, some of them for the first time in their lives; the same group then got communications written into the Beijing Platform for Action, the first intergovernmental policy to treat women's access to these technologies as a matter of rights. Her own summary of thirty years is the line to keep: it is one thing to have access to the technologies and the pipes, but it is the people who make the network.
Also known as: banks, gnfido, greennet, apc wnsp
Sources
- Internet Hall of Fame: from 1990 to 1997 Banks maintained an international gateway called GnFido at GreenNet, a non-profit ISP in London and a founding member of the Association for Progressive Communications; working with over 60 partners in Africa, South Asia and Eastern Europe, the gateway used simple store-and-forward technology - fidonet and uucp - providing in many cases the only means of cheap, efficient electronic communications to thousands of individuals, NGOs, academics and government departments
- Internet Hall of Fame: in 1993 Banks and her women colleagues in APC formed the Women's Networking Support Programme, which led a 40-strong all-women team to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, where they provided email and web access to over 10,000 delegates, some of whom had never before sent an email or viewed a web page; she received the inaugural Anita Borg Social Impact Award in 2004
- APC: with other women's rights groups the APC WNSP successfully lobbied for the inclusion of Media and Communications as a new chapter in the Beijing Platform for Action, the first global intergovernmental policy to reference the importance of women's right to access new technologies