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With the discovery of oil on Alaska's North Slope, the continued issues regarding the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act, the oil spill of the Exxon Valdez in the Prince William Sound, the controversy over oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the recent announcement by the United States Geological Survey that the Arctic will be the focal point for global change studies, Alaska, once known as “Seward's Follie” and a place that should be given back to Russia, continues to be in the forefront of national and international news.

Available evidence indicates that there is a growing gap between the information rich and information poor. That gap is part of a larger struggle for control of information resources and for the societal power that accompanies such control. New institutional arrangements are needed to spread the benefits of modern information technologies to all segments of the population. Achieving social equity objectives requires governmental leadership and funding. But current legislative proposals for shaping the National Information Infrastructure (NII) lack clear statements as to how the social equity objectives enunciated by the President and Vice President would be accomplished. These proposals seem to make insufficient provision for expanding the development of more than 150 computerized community information systems (CCIS) created by grass‐roots organizations over the past several years. Locally controlled information delivery systems supported by a federally sponsored system of National and Regional Institutes for Information Democracy could help meet the daily information needs of all people, regardless of economic class or community environment. The Institutes would provide sustained support for anc coordination of social equity and empowerment objectives, and could servie as the institutional structures lacking in current legislation