As we reflect on our beginnings, and how far we have come, it's worth sharing some stories and the names of so many volunteers and employees that have contributed to KiN's current success.

Here are some members' memories for your enjoyment:

Eric Moon’s History of KiN

In 1996, Joan Baer found a $30 000 Industry Canada grant for building internet infrastructure in communities. I think she had in mind a job for her twin sons. As part of the grant, there were to be partnerships between community organizations so she asked Milt Stanley (the school) and me (Eric Moon, Selkirk College) if we wanted to partner up. Sure. Milt was the husband of the then public library librarian, Shirley Stanley. It seemed natural that the Kaslo and District Public Library should be part of this partnership.

At the inaugural meeting of KiN, I was instructed not to go as one of the Selkirk College bosses wanted to be the college representative. Milt refused to start the meeting without me.

Milt bought a little 5-port router that acted as our dial-up pool. Everything was 33.6 kilobyte modems, all connecting to one 33.6 connection to Nelson through the school system. We also bought a couple of Apple computers to act as web, email and ftp servers. We registered the domains and had students set up the servers and start building web pages.

Every summer we’d write a grant and hire some students to do more development work for KiN building web sites that involved them, going to community entities like the golf course, community services and the public library and give them a web presence. They also had to look after the dial-up accounts and the network, including getting the public library online and giving their clients public access to the internet, often for the first time.

KiN offered to buy, setup and connect a computer for the Argenta public library and they took us up on the offer. A couple months later we had to take the computer back, as the library volunteers were rebelling.

The list of KiN alumni is very long but include Tyler Hamilton, JJ Legg, Tom Satterly, Kevin Sawzuck(sp?) and Nichole Zilkie. Mary-Allana Holmes and Chanden Bhatt, were both from the Selkirk Co-op Program. Many went on to have careers in technology.

KiN also advocated for better networking for our communities. Dial-up was working but everybody wanted higher-speed networks and Telus was dragging its feet with DSL in rural communities. We wrote letters to Telus, provincial and national governments. A lot of problems stemmed from the province’s promise of an exclusive deal with Telus in exchange for giving phone services to rural BC. It seemed to take forever.

The Columbia Basin Trust came up and said they were going to spend $100 000 to study the situation and maybe that threat helped to motivate Telus.

It was Milt’s vision that KiN buy a backhoe and start building fibre for every home. He showed us pictures of communities in Europe that were doing this. We all raised our eyebrows with scepticism but…. He talked to the new board and his vision came true.

In the early 2000s KiN started moving away from pure training and started heading towards becoming more of an internet service provider. Also Telus had laid fibre from Nelson up to Meadow Creek. There was hope. Mountain Top Wireless, a commercial Kaslo ISP run by 4 people, built a tower on Mt. Kaslo had proved that wireless could work. Those of us who could get service got spoiled by 40kb service (instead of 5kb dial-up). I still see a few of those antennas up here and there.

When Mountain Top Wireless failed (basically didn’t have a good billing system), KiN bought the tower and started their wifi service. If I recall correctly, Rob McLellan headed up that project. I and a few others helped Rob get the Meadow Creek and Mt Lavina tower up and service running. It was at this point that I bowed out of Kaslo infoNet.

I learned a lot at KiN, job interviews, selection committees, grant writing and team work and leading, besides all the technical stuff. When we didn’t have any crew, it was up to Milt and I to keep things running. Hung modems, spammed e-mail servers and the ftp server wouldn’t stay up for more than a day at a time. When we did development at the college, I set up a zip drive as a web server and I’d walk the zip disk up the hill to load it on the real server.

I’m proud of what KiN became and the service and jobs that it provides to our community.