“The Rise and Fall of DDS – evaluating the ambitions of Amsterdam’s Digital City“, Reinder Rustema writes that DDS might not have been open enough because of its institutionalisation and the closed design of the interface which did not allow improvement by the users. It intended to become a broadcaster and mass communicator more than becoming a community. This eventually made the users passive paying consumers of a telecommunication service. In spite of efforts to ‘design’ an on-line community, the major achievement of DDS has been more that it contributed computing power, disk space and connectivity to the internet for public use, much like the academic and research institutes have done in the early years of the internet.”
