Project DIANE, an acronym for Diversified Information and Assistance NEtwork, was a very early videoconferencing based community service network created in the United States. DIANE was a grassroots driven regional videoconferencing consortium which promoted and supported cooperative electronic alliances in education, community service, and economic development.
Created in 1992 in Nashville, Tennessee, Project DIANE was in active operation as a centrally managed public service network until 2006. Portions of the network still remain in service, however, though no longer under the Project DIANE moniker.
Peak network membership consisted of more than 200 participating organizations and more than 350 program and technical coordinators, supporting live interactive video programming over a service region consisting of twelve U.S. states and five countries.
History
Project DIANE was first proposed by Dr. Stephen P. Shao, Jr. in 1992 as a regional diversity development project collaboration between the U.S. Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and a small consortium of public and private universities located within TVA's six state service region. At the time, Dr. Shao was employed as a business research center director at Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee. After a year of deliberations and two successful community based field pilots, Project DIANE was given startup funding by the TVA.
The two field pilots, named the Nashville Pilot and the City Share Pilot were instrumental in demonstrating that videoconferencing technology was a viable and highly flexible mechanism through which to deliver a broad array of educational, economic development and public service resources to the general public. Both pilots were carried out with the participation of several dozen community service organizations, governmental agencies and corporations.
Primary sponsors and underwriters of the two pilots included TVA, BellSouth, IBM led by Steven Wilkinson, and PictureTel (later purchased by Polycom). The Nashville Pilot was an intracity test of desktop videoconferencing technology with application test sites in Nashville, Tennessee constructed at Tennessee State University, Cumberland Science Museum (later renamed the Adventure Science Center) and the Looby Public Library.
One month after conclusion of the Nashville Pilot, the City Share Pilot testbed was created by connecting the three Nashville video test locations to additional video sites constructed in Huntsville, Alabama. A large portfolio of community oriented and educational test applications between Nashville and Huntsville were launched with a 40-minute discussion of intercity cooperation between the mayors of the cities. It is believed that the City Share pilot was the first ever intercity videoconference link ever constructed for non-commercial purposes.
In the years following the project's pilot startup, many public and private organizations participated in the network's public service programming and donated both in-kind and financial resources. Network participants and supporters were also successful in securing a wide bevy of public and private grants to pay for different types of community applications which utilized the project.
Overview
Project objectives
Project DIANE's primary objectives were to: develop a successful electronic community service network that could be expanded and/or replicated by all interested members of the community, bring education institutions, business development agencies, and community service organizations closer together for cooperative sharing of scarce public and private resources and provide needy individuals and groups with free, or low cost, digital access to useful information, assistance and professional expertise.
There were two notable aspects about the network. First, the project was designed as a broad-based, rather than niche-focused, community telecollaboration. DIANE membership reflected a wide spectrum of community organizations which came together online to jointly plan and carry out public programs and services.
The project was represented by most segments of the community, both in an organizational context (e.g., schools, community centers, libraries, business agencies, etc.) and individually (child through senior adult, families, disabled, urban and rural, etc.) DIANE was inherently a "project of projects" with teleconferencing applications in the three target areas of education, community service and economic development.