Around the world in a city bus – How Tampere leads its citizens into the information age

Apr 22 2003

“Welcome onboard NettiNysse”, Helena Kortelainen says as she welcomes the visitors entering a yellow bus, parked somewhere on a street in Tampere N 61°49.83 E 23°76.28. What’s so special about this bus, that there is a welcome committee at the rear door? The bus, and the personnel on board are part of a project of the city library of Tampere, to bring the information society closer to the citizens. “Democratisation of internet technology”, social scientists would call it. The people of Tampere just call it NettiNysse, a slang expression for “the internet bus”.

Image caption: 18 meters of high-tech: If NettiNysse wouldn’t be yellow, it would look like a normal city bus.

Just a normal city bus?

From outside, the internet bus looks like one of those standard articulated busses of the city transport, except for its bright yellow colour covered with sponsor’s names. It’s no surprise that the people of Tampere somehow feel familiar with this bus: the city library bought it from the city transportation department where the former bus number 316 had been carrying citizens around Tampere for 18 years. The bus has driven over one million kilometres altogether, more than 25 times around the earth.

Five persons are employed in the NettiNysseproject. Four of them, like Helena Kortelainen, are mainly working on board the bus, but the project manager Elina Harju is nowadays spending most of her time doing the managing work at the main library building. While the internet bus is currently run as a three years’ project, she has reliable information that it already is considered a permanent institution in Tampere. “We might eventually need another bus later”, as she points out how successful the internet bus is. At the moment, the bus is entirely booked for the next three months. But the success doesn’t mean that there is no need for improvements: “We want to try things”, the project manager describes her attitude to experimenting with new teaching strategies and concepts.

“Originally, I would have liked to have a double-decker bus”

When stepping into NettiNysse, visitors feel fascinated by entering such an everyday vehicle, only to find an amazingly well equipped computer pool on wheels. The former interior has been removed and replaced by modern office furniture. In the rear part of the 18 meters long bus there is a “classroom” for ten people, equipped with an internet PC and a screen projector, while in the front part there are ten swivel chairs with small tables, onto which the computers and their flat screens have been fixed. Nothing remains to remind one of the long history of this vehicle, except maybe the driver’s seat which indeed looks very much like 1982.

Image caption: An unusual combination: internet computers inside a bus.

Elina Harju got the idea of such an internet bus together with some colleagues from Denmark and the Netherlands while working in teacher and adult education. While the Danish and Dutch projects were never realized, the city library of Tampere bought this bus in summer 2000. Teachers and students of two vocational schools in Tampere worked on the conversion and ten months later, it was presented to the public. With the reduced number of seats, the 15,000 kg vehicle is under European law regarded as a “mini bus”, so that nearly the whole crew can drive it without a real bus licence. “It’s made for men, so we can drive it”, Elina Harju answers, when she is asked whether it is difficult to drive such a huge car.

Antennas are the only limit

“The antennas have to see each other”, says Jouko Hildén, another member of the staff, describing the only technical limitation of the internet bus. It can work as entirely wireless, but it is still necessary that no buildings block the high speed WLAN data connection between the antenna of the bus and the base station. Presently, there are seven base stations in the Tampere area, so the bus can already be used in many areas of the city and its suburbs. The huge batteries of the bus allow it to run all the equipment for 10 hours “unplugged”. After that, an integrated diesel generator produces the required electricity. Of course a power cable can also be used if available.

“This is not like a mobile library bus”

There are no limits in terms of computer technology. The computers are powered by 1GHz processors, equipped with state-of-the-art flat screens, and the central server computer even allows for a printer and a flatbed scanner. It is stored in a wooden sideboard where one year ago passengers were disembarking from the former middle door.

Image caption: The classroom for teaching ten “newbies” to the use of computers and internet.

The speed of the internet connection is so high that an office worker from the city of Tampere who just comes by to have a look at NettiNysse, wonders why this bus has a faster internet connection than his office PC. But even though this sounds like a workspace for very advanced needs, the goals of this project are different.

The target group are people who have not been in contact with computers and the internet before. “So far, we can’t find any other bus like this in the world”, Jouko Hildén explains with pride in his voice. He obviously loves his work, and this bus. They found some similar projects around the world, he tells, but they were more like a public internet café or a virtual mobile library, while others were specifically targeted to a special age group. Since in Finland internet access to the public is generally provided on a high level by libraries and other institutions, the internet bus in Tampere has purely educational goals. The idea is to teach basic skills in the use of computer technology, specifically of the internet, to sections of the population who don’t have access to these technologies at home or at work.

Image caption: The rear part of the bus can be used for presentations on the white screen same as for transporting 10 passengers on the bus.

“People respect that we come near”

“We try to go near those people who don’t have access”, says Elina Harju, pointing out the philosophy of providing this kind of internet education to citizens. Considering all those people who don’t have any basic skills in computers, there had to be someone responsible for teaching them, says Elina Harju. “To go to a computer course, people need to be highly motivated, so you have to encourage them to get started”. Of course, there are some stationary public institutions offering basic education in computer skills in Tampere, but the internet bus has a different atmosphere. On one hand, the citizens are used to mobile libraries, but on the other hand the NettiNysseis something new and exciting.

“We are not teachers, we are trainers”

The participants of the courses on NettiNysse are not taught any advanced skills in computer technology, rather they learn such basics as how to use a mouse or how to find some information from the web without talking too much about technical details. “We describe the capacity of a CD-ROM by showing the people a car outside the bus. Then we tell them, if that car is a floppy disc, then a CD-ROM would be like seven of these busses!”, Jouko Hildén illustrates. And the way he does it, doesn’t leave any doubt that it really is like that.

Image caption: Joukko Hildén has been working as a bus driver for several years before he started teaching computer skills.

Customer orientation and the ability to interest newcomers in the technology seem to be much more important than specialist knowledge of computer terminology, which in any case none of the course participants would understand. For that reason, the staff on NettiNyssedoes not consist of computer specialists or educational professionals, but people like former bank employees and others. Jouko Hildén, who worked for six years as a city bus driver before joining this project, points out: “We don’t know too much about computers, we just talk the same language”.

“This is not a school, it’s a group”

Taking away people’s fear of this unknown object, “the computer”, seems to be the magic key that makes the services of NettiNysseso popular. In any case, people can’t just drop by to attend a course. Reservations always have to be made for groups of eight to ten people such as neighbours from a suburb, a circle of friends, or a group from an old people’s home or a youth centre. As Jouko Hildén tells, the NettiNyssestaff tries to encourage people to sign up together with their friends, because “they aren’t scared to ask anything if they are here with their friends”. And then, he and his colleagues can use their ice breaking methods by leading them to websites about their hobbies or their favourite singer, so that after a while they forget about having a computer mouse in their hand. “We try to go through content”, Elina Harju points out. And in the end, the participants are so much into the content that the fear of using a computer is blown away. It’s all that easy.