@tb @darius @jym

superficial comments:

Randy Bush was(is) a deeply committed deployer of early grassroots network via various NGOs, mostly on african continent, 1980s, by the time he stumbled on FidoNet in 1984 or 1985 (and volunteered to write proper protocol docs).

https://archive.psg.com/bio-sketch.html

Tim Pozar headed up a project to gateway FidoNet to UseNet (UFGATE); at that time FidoNet had EchoMail which was a decentralized conferencing system. This ended the mono-net in a limited way. Randy deployed this also.
https://lns.com/

(I remember Liberty Bell Net. The creeps were there at the start.)

Yeah, the AUP(s) were vague and very... interesting. They were fairly easily worked around; HP was on the net and Stanford could discuss matters of direct educational issues with gear and such, and that was fairly broadly accepted. Early Little Garden operated directly under external AUPs and discussed it openly. We were essentially kicked off Alternet because our generous reading of AUP pissed off Rick Adams.

To the question, why so much emphasis on NGOs and public interest. Those people were already working internationally and saw FidoNet etc as inexpensive means to an end. And for many of the FidoNet-hosted/originated projects, like K12Net, no other entities could/would accommodate them.

Is there a transcript of this talk?

Here's my copy:

https://www.sr-ix.com/Archive/Peter-Willetts/index.html

Dunno why the file got so fat (113mb) but sounds OK. Mic drops and bumps hand clipped out, heavily compressed, some of the hum removed.