UCLA community technology conference. 2.15.02. Copyright 2002 Steve Cisler. Okay to post on other lists and non-profit servers
Los Angeles has a great many projects focused on community technology and innovative uses of ICT. One group that is leading the way at the University of California Los Angeles is the Advanced Policy Institute in the School of Public Policy and Social Research. They have a project to collaborate with librarians in Nairobi, Kenya, to help them with the African Virtual Library-Kenya. Based on their successful project called Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles (NKLA) , the AVLK project sent four librarians to spend a week at the institute. During that time, Bill Pitkin and his colleagues organized a one day conference on community technology and invited some interesting people to talk about domestic projects and several outside of the U.S. It was an important visit for me, aside from the conference. Just after my Peace Corps service in Africa, I had been admitted to the African Studies program to research the spread of Islam is Mauritania and Senegal in 1967. However, the U.S. military felt my time should be spent in other tropical climates, and I never attended the university, though I did visit a friend who was also admitted to the program. This was my first visit back to the campus after 34 years... The morning of February 15 we arrived to register and have breakfast. The Institute did not trumpet its own projects very much, but they deserve a close study by readers of this short report. NKLA began in 1995 and continued with the support of grant money from the NTIA in the Department of Commerce (the same program that has been cut from the proposed US budget by the Bush regime). The project provided access to city information on building permits, tax delinquincy, and affordable housing. One of the challenges was the integration of data from disparate sources. The community was involved not just as users but also through hundreds of outreach sessions. Locals were also involved in asset-mapping for local neighborhoods, and a number of new projects grew out of this. Now, they are working on a project for the state of California that will concentrate on urban areas but also include a few smaller towns in the collection, publishing, and mapping process. Michael Gurstein of the New Jersey Institute of Technology gave a short keynote address. He teaches courses in community informatics and the digital firm. He discussed a large pharmaceutical company that is one of the most digitally integrated in the world. It fulfills over 8000 prescriptions in an hour, in contrast to his uncle, the proverbial small town pharmacist in a small town on the Canadian prarie, who might have done that many in a month. One of the points he made was that only certain cross sections of the business sector were reaping the benefits of the integration of this expensive technology. Smaller firms, more conservative firms, non-profits, and whole other countries lack the skills, money, and inclination to match these investments. In some ways the increased integration puts those firms even further away from groups satisfied with just a functioning LAN or new database or active web site, not to mention those groups too poor to have any equipment at all. Gurstein hopes that community informatics will renew the vision to make the Net useful for all. He hopes that Bush's declaration of victory over these disparities won't be echoed in other countries where the situation is even more critical, and victory, if it can be called that, is nowhere in sight. International projects Doe Meyer of the Annenberg Center for Communication talked about the women health and media project in Africa. She emphasized the importance of not concentrating on one medium, so they worked with t-shirts, posters, newsletters, the Net, and video. She showed a video about the National Association of Disabled Women in Zambia and their efforts at AIDS education in rural areas. Net activists should not forget that video can be much more accessible to some people than information on a computer. A video program in the local language can reach many people who may not see any use for the Internet. I spoke about telecenters in Latin America and the different kinds that were emerging in different countries, depending on government policy, the NGO's activities, and consortia like somos@telecentros based in Quito, Ecuador. I mentioned a handbook I had just completed on keeping ICT projects running in developing countries. Lee Thorn of the Jhai Foundation is a real storyteller. To start off with, he admitted he was there to get support for his project in Laos, and he passed around literature (but no collection plate). The Jhai Foundation is built on his idea of reconciliation between the people of Laos (the ones who were bombed) and the U.S. (the ones who did the bombing). Though it was more than 25 years ago, the bombardment of Laos is still affecting people who weren't even born at that time. Unexploded cluster bombs and other ordinance litter the landscape. Thorn is working with Schools Online to set up Internet Learning Centers in different parts of the country. I was impressed with the long and careful planning process that he and the Laotians engaged in before plunging into the technology aspect of the whole endeavor. Many times this began by drinking beer around a table outdoors, and after many conversations and planning sessions, the community would come up with a viable plan, not one concocted only in Silicon Valley or London or Washington. In the afternoon, the panel discussed U.S. projects. I had spoken earlier with Andrea Skorepa who has long directed Casa Familiar in San Ysidro, California, on the Mexican border across from Tijuana. She began as a teacher and also served as a VISTA volunteer in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. She has been running this community service agency which provides all sorts of non-technical and ICT programs in several centers around town. Though most of her members are Latino, she described the influx of non-Latino people (mainly black) when affordable housing became available in this part of San Diego County. She helped lower tensions by getting both groups together over meals shared in common. In her talk she said (and everyone on the panel agreed) how terrible it was to have to spend so much time raising money instead of working on the mission of the organization. Randall Pinkett, having received his Ph.D. from MIT's Media Lab, is now working in a consulting firm called BCT Partners in New Jersey. Building Community Technology Partners uses the experience he had in the Canfield Estates project in Boston as well as telecommunications firms in New Jersey, and he showed a short video of an interview with some of the Canfield Estates technology users and also described the project flow and tools he and his partner used in this project that provided new computers and fast access to many of the residents in a low income housing project that had been torn down, rebuilt, and turned over to the people at very low cost. His project struck me as a strong mix of technology and community process, followed up by some rigorous evaluation. Nadine Watson presented an overview of Plugged In, the famous community technology center, that is in its tenth year, and has benfitted from strong leadership and its proximity to many Silicon Valley firms that want to help East Palo Alto, an underserved area of the county. However, this same area is attracting affluent home owners, and the area is changing its demographics once again. Plugged In is now bulding its own center and has continued a number of content design programs and training programs. After each panel we had a number of questions that almost became discussions around a single topic. What interested me most of all was a question about the diverse number of efforts in any one community to provide access. Why not base it all in a public library? The community-based organizations are somewhat suspicious of institutional programs in libraries and public schools. They see themselves as more flexible and responsive to the needs of the community. However, in talking with librarians and educators, they feel they have more stable programs than chronically underfunded non-profits. Of course, in many towns all these groups are working together or at least aware of the other's efforts. Both sectors share a lot of the same ideals and clientele, but this year the community technology conference is about the same time in June as the American Library Association conference, but one is in Austin and the other in Washington, DC. The Linux Public Broadcasting Network has some RealVideo files of the Feburary 15 meeting. Over my dialup line the quality was marginal. If you have something faster, you may have better response. A list of the main URLs follows. Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles (English and Spanish) http://nkla.ucla.edu/ Advanced Policy Institute http://api.sppsr.ucla.edu/ Mike Gurstein's Community Informatics mailing list (signup and archives) http://www.vcn.bc.ca/lists/communityinformatics/ Linux Public Broadcasting Network http://www.lpbn.org/ Randall Pinkett and BCT Partners: http://www.bctpartners.com/ Casa Familiar: www.casafamiliar.org Plugged In: http://pluggedin.org Steve Cisler 4415 Tilbury Drive San Jose, California 95130 408 379 9076 http://home.inreach.com/cisler "There are some places where the road keeps going." - Bud Parker ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, an NGO that is a GKP member*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
