This is La Plaza Telecommunity Learning Center, run by Patrick Finn, a hairdresser, artist, and community organizer. Here even computerless TaoseÒos can indulge freely (and for free) in the 1990s pastime of Net surfing. This is the essence of community networking: giving the uninitiated the knowledge, tools, and resources to share in the information revolution.
The inspiration for building an on-ramp to the information superhighway from rural New Mexico -- the on-ramp that made it possible for Kathie Priebe and others like her to move their lives and businesses to Taos -- came from a small group of residents disturbed by their isolation. Richard Bryant is a balding, mustachioed telecommunications expert with a Ph.D. in neuroscience, who moved to Taos from New York City in the early '90s when he "got tired of stepping over bodies." He teamed up with Paul Cross, a former engineer from Los Angeles, and Patrick Finn. Bryant, Finn, and several others from Taos attended a community networking conference held in Telluride in July 1993. It was there that they conceived not only of bringing technology to Taos but of creating a technological culture that might transform their community.
"We realized we could do much more than have a pipe come into town; we could provide something really good for the community in terms of education, health care, and business and economic development," says Bryant, adding brashly, "We also thought we could make our network better than the other networks we saw."
From a business standpoint there was good reason to do more than just connect Taos to the Internet. For technology-dependent businesses to thrive in remote areas, connecting a computer to the Internet is the easy part; finding employees who have the savvy to use the technology or, as Kathie Priebe says, finding someone to fix your computer can be far more challenging.
La Plaza went on-line in December 1994, offering users 15 hours of free Internet connect time, free Internet training, and even free use of computers at the learning center. La Plaza's home page (http://laplaza.taos.nm.us) is an elegant Web site illuminated by southwestern motifs. It includes numerous forums for exchanging views on subjects ranging from local politics to business, cultural events, and sports. The town government is on-line, and there's a health-care page with information about diabetes, hypertension, and other health problems that are common among the local population.
The basic idea of La Plaza, according to Bryant, was to recreate electronically the sense of community the town had lost. "We wanted to create an electronic plaza, where you could meet people, buy things -- whatever you used to be able to do at the plaza but can't do now."
La Plaza's founders had hoped to get 200 people to sign up for E-mail accounts, Internet training, and access to the World Wide Web. To their amazement, more than 2,500 people signed on in the first year. In an extension of its community services, La Plaza recently went commercial: on February 1 it launched the Trading Post @ La Plaza (http://laplaza.taos.nm.us/tp), a site where local businesses are putting up Web home pages and conducting on-line commerce. Competitor TaosNet (http://www.taosnet .com/menus/sub.home.html), which also launched in early February, is already struggling to keep up with requests to put local businesses on-line. Like its real-world counterpart, Taos's electronic plaza is fast becoming a bustling commercial center for the community.
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Like businesspeople elsewhere, entrepreneurs in Taos have found that the promise of the Internet is uncertain. "The challenge is whether we can sell things on the Internet from our little rural community," says Finn. "We make dynamite stuff here. Can we sell cookies on the Internet? We don't know yet. This is an experiment. Will people see art on the Internet and buy it? We don't know. Will they buy a poster? Maybe."
So far, the most successful Taos Internet business ventures have been travel and tourism.
Taos is perched near two ski areas. Taos Ski Valley (TSV), the largest ski area in New Mexico, put up a home page last fall on TaosWebb. TSV gets 14,000 "hits" -- visits to its Web site (now on TaosNet) -- a month. "Consumer response has actually passed my expectations," says TSV marketing vice-president Chris Stagg. "I see it as an alternative to distributing brochures. If you have a great ad in a magazine, it costs thousands of dollars, and you get 2,000 to 3,000 responses." Stagg calculates that it costs him about 50¢ for each brochure that he mails in response to a traditional inquiry. In contrast, TSV paid $3,500 to put up its Web page and pays $160 a month to maintain it. He notes that the resulting cost per inquiry has dropped to a few cents. "I feel as if I'm getting a bargain, even if I get only half the respondents," he says.
Ski Rio Resort, a combination ski area/realtor about an hour north of Taos, attributes several major real estate deals to its Internet presence. An E-mail inquiry led to the sale of a $40,000 property to an out-of-state buyer. A Dallas builder who saw the Ski Rio home page (now located on the Trading Post @ La Plaza) and exchanged E-mail with the resort has now signed a letter of intent to build a million-dollar housing complex. And a Hawaii investor who first "visited" Ski Rio in cyberspace is poised to close on another property. Says Ski Rio CEO Lawrence Smith, "We've generated ski and real estate leads at probably one-tenth of the cost" of advertising in conventional media like magazines and television.
