CTCNet conference, Washington, D.C. July 26-29.
Day One
The network that formed to bring together community technology centers is celebrating its 15th anniversary this week at their annual conference. It's the fourth one I have attended since 1997, and while the mood is optimistic, conditions have continued to change and this is reflected in the programming which provides the attendee with almost too many choices for paid workshops, discussions, traditional panels, and a few keynote aimed at all the attendees, the majority of whom seem to be attending for the first time. They are working in centers or providing support to centers in many different realms: youth, workforce developments, housing, community media, recycling and reuse, immigration, and church CTCs.
The founder of idealist.org, Action without Borders, Ami Dar, gave a short opening pep talk sprinkled with anecdotes about his childhood in rural Mexico, his service on lonely border duty with the Israeli Defence Forces at the border of Lebanon in the 80's, and his belief that the net can help isolated people link up with others who want to act in some beneficial cause. He was asked about the taboo of discussing the rivalries among non-profits all chasing the same shrinking sources of money, and Dar said that while the "funding officers" compete, the webmasters can work together on common causes.
The first breakout session I attended was old-timers reminiscing about the early years, how the present is different, and what might lie ahead. This included the new head of Microsoft community affairs, Andrea Taylor whose interest was rooted in the U.S. civil rights movement. In discussing MS she used phrases such as "your potential, our passion" and the links between literacy and technology. She showed from her few comments about international issues the very different Internet penetration rates and circumstances of U.S. CTCs compared to those in developing countries.
Bob Sims of The Colors of Collaboration in North Carolina talked about his early days with AT&T and then his work in non-profits. I asked him how his own mood had shifted over the years given the highs and lows in support for technology programs. He said he surrounded himself with positive people and reminded the audience that attitude was an important component of providing these services. A lot of the discussion was around the changing role of CTCs given the spread of other points of access as well as far greater ownership of computers or other devices that provided some of the functionality.
CTCNet conferences always seem to use the time to reflect on this topic: where they are going and what the challenges are. This was brought out during an afternoon break where a facilitator interrupted the conversations to point out the long strip of tape that divided the room. He raised several different issues and after each one those present would position themselves along the line to indicate strong agreement to strong disagreement. He used this to elicit comments about positions taken on issues such as "CTCs will be more relevant to communities in the future" and "CTCs must be completely self-sustaining." Using a wireless mike he walked the line and peoples voiced their reasons, and after each one the rest would stay put or perhaps shift their own views on the strength of the previous statement. I thought it was perhaps the best way to have a very general discussion when you had a specialized audience focusing on issues important to their own professional lives and personal experiences.
I was interviewed by Partha Pratim Sarker who founded Bytes for All and works for IDRC in Ottawa, Canada. We discussed some of my adventures offline in 2004 and the dynamics of telecenters and how the operators can network more effectively. I was late to the municipal wireless session which included reps. from Earthlink which is basing its own growth on large municipal wifi networks, Dianah Neff who is CIO for Philadelphia, the city which is setting up its own muni network. I had met her 12 years ago at a community networking conference we held at Apple. At that time she was working in Palo Alto, California (a much smaller town). Neff was excited about the ideas for innovative applications that were coming from people in her metro area, and like the other speakers she assumed we'd have a good network in a few years, but the unknown factor would be the new uses it would be used for. Richard MacKinnon, head of Austin (Texas) Wireless announced they now had 100,000 registered users with over 100 hotspots in Austin plus 48 others in other cities and counties that have joined the network. All the speakers were quite confident about the scalability of this technology and provided some good critique when I asked them about the failures of two well-funded wireless projects in Silicon Valley (Ricochet and Sprint Broadband).
The conference organizers provided well-spaced breaks for personal networking and had ways of helping attendees meet new people and the exhibitors. I have enjoyed these conferences partly because the attendees are so diverse in age and background, and in this way it differs from almost all other technology conferences. I met a former Apple colleague now running the non-profit program for Adobe (discounts of 20% to 80% for all non-profits in the U.S. and Canada) and she introduced me to an interesting guy originally from Brazil.
Marco Figueiredo directs the Center for Community Informatics at Loyola College in Maryland. He was born in the northeast of Brazil, left when he was 24, and returned some years later to live in a very poor rural village where he introduced the Internet to the existing tech. center which was set up with equipment from a German foundation. He is working with students in computer science who have been introduced to topics such as microfinance, rural communication challenges, and community media. Student projects at present include
-online community survey integration with Google Maps
-courseinfo, a telecenter training course management system
-virtual cash register, a web-based telecenter financial reporting system
-low-cost o.s. community video production and streaming
-open source community digital telephone services
I suggest readers contact him at marco@cci.cs.loyola.edu or regiter on the project web site: Http://cci.cs.loyola.edu to help in the evolution of these projects.
Tomorrow we have our panel on international issues...
I like your post, it inspired me to write about the CTCNet conference at telecentre.org!
http://www.telecentre.org/en-tc/node/19054
Posted by: Adam | July 31, 2006 at 01:51 PM