CTCNet Conference, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 1997 Report by Steve Cisler, cisler@pobox.com [Editor's Note: We invite you to also review some images and conversations recorded at the conference. Contact Phil Shapiro (pshapiro@his.com) for access to this material.] In Carlos Casteneda's coming-of-spiritual-age novel The Teachings of Don Juan (sometimes still placed in ethnographic research), the Yaqui Indian helps the author find his 'power spot' as part of the rituals that lead to understanding and self-fulfillment. In June 1997, I visited a 'power spot'—the CTCNet conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an annual event for the loose confederation of 200 community technology and learning centers. Several hundred representatives from these centers came together for training, the sharing of ideas, problems, and techniques, and to debate issues relating to equity of access at the state, local, and national level. CTCNet has a strong concentration of members from New York and Boston, but it has spread to many other parts of the U.S. with about 20% of the sites located west of the Mississippi. Most are in urban areas and target children, the poor, and other groups that have been underserved. Only a handful of sites are in small towns, so the rural areas, which have a higher level of poverty than the urban areas, are missing out or are served by groups that have not yet joined the network. That seems to be the premise: that people who don't have the skills to deal with the networked society will be left out, and the various centers provide everything from help with resumes to PPP access to help with high school equivalency exams and basic literacy training on up to web page design classes. The opening session was a panel of Pittsburgh citizens involved in a variety of city and county network and training initiatives such as Common Knowledge, Information Renaissance, the library's Electronic Information Network, the ominous sounding Department of Justice program "Weed and Seed" and Hill House Community Access Network. One member of the group said she felt as though she were married to the others because they met so often before different city fora to explain the networking activities going on. While they spoke about technology projects, about economic development, the real difference seemed to be that these people from the city and school district were working together on a continual basis. There was some indication that smaller groups in town were reluctant to cede all their own power to receive funds and agree to work under the mantle of the city or the school bureaucracy. The speakers were obviously looking outward to make the connections with other organizations in the community, to convince them that alliances were in their best interest. During the Q&A period some of the questioners voiced their skepticism about the motivation of the corporate sector in becoming involved in supporting the community networking initiatives. Mario Zinga cited all the unfilled technology jobs as a reason that business was supportive: they needed a larger labor pool. But are these going to the desirable 'knowledge worker' positions or just low level data entry clerk and digital burger flippers? Marcia Snowden reminded the audience that they were trying to make the whole town attractive to employers, not just have a better-trained work force. The nature of the Net is such that the increased bandwidth in more and more places allows companies to keep a core managerial staff in one place, perhaps Pittsburgh, and have the other activities distributed in offshore data havens, low cost manufacturing countries in Asia and machiladoras along our border with Mexico, and outsourced to other American firms in low wage areas away from Pittsburgh. After the plenary we went to different panels and discussions on topics such as public access cable, working with libraries, finding money to keep community centers running, citizenship development, and working with cities. My session on community networks had about 50 minutes. Half of that time was spent learning more about the Hill House Community Access Network which is selling PPP accounts for $25 per year as part of the center's access program. That fee covers use of the center as well as the account, and for $10/hour members can receive computer training. Chrishelle Thomas-Eugene conveyed a lot of excitement and drive that has helped make this center a model for other ones in the city. However, they have high expenses ($24,000 a year for a T1 line) so the reality of making a business out of a community services would seem to be her main challenge, considering how few paying accounts she had. There were other sessions on asset mapping (see John McKnight and John Kretzmann's Building Communities From The Inside Out the Center for Urban Affairs at Northwestern University, 708 491-3518) on GIS mapping for communities (HUD has software called Community 2020 which has a relatively simple interface but lots of arcane icons). Bart Decrem, director of Plugged In in East Palo Alto called a special morning session that was very different. He raised the issue of being ineffective (or being blamed) for being an outsider when working in his community. In his case he's a white Belgian working in a black area, and the audience broke up to share their own experiences and some suggestions. It was very complex and not at all predictable: how to deal with recent Asian immigrants arriving with anti-Black prejudices, with parents who leave their kids with older neighbors in Washington, DC and just never return, with locals suspicious of do-gooders coming in for a quick help-and-run session (NetDay being one example). Not that we solved many of these tough problems, but many had never been voiced before in a mixed audience. There were several sessions on policy and advocacy. Peter Miller of CTCNet said it was not clear what direction policy work should take, but they had an intern, Rainikka Corprew, working on this for the summer. Barry Forbes of Alliance for Community Media gave a couple of plugs for Sage Publications' Public Radio and Television in America and how the vision of large amounts of public space was whittled away or muted. Lauren-Glenn Davitian urged people to collect stories to tell others, and I said story-tellers were needed to simplify complex issues like the Telecomms Act of 1996. One of the pamphlets being distributed was "Internet Jones" a comic book that talked about access. It was reminiscent of Cerfnet's "Captain Internet" comic book in the early 1990's. One site, www.lap.org, was working on developing "Communityware", but I have not investigated this collaborative software project. A session on community-based research projects included a center in a poor Appalachian neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio where there was 27% unemployment, and they were studying the effects of having free access and email. A plenary on setting the direction for CTCNet (which could not depend on NSF money forever) was quite tense. A steering committee had worked for a year on some guidelines and recommendations. These were available by email, but many of the people in the audience were not familiar with the issues and were being asked to make decisions that afternoon. Many of them did not realize how much work the steering committee had done, and some wanted to send it back to the committee to re-do. However, it was clear that the committee would not be willing to work on it another year, and they held a vote, reminding the audience that it was not cast in stone, and that setting up a framework could be changed later. By a slim margin, the CTCNet members approved the plan. There was a lot of discussion about regional groups, proportional representation, racial makeup, etc. The group dynamics of virtual organizations are difficult. Some people are members just for the services; others because they want to be involved in projects with others, and another group because they enjoy (or see the value in) organizational politics. CTCNet decided to add some special interest groups: rural, disabled, youth, intergenerational, and so on--but no SIG for community networks. I'm not sure if that is an indication of the lack of awareness or the feeling that they are not that pivotal in the success of community technology centers. From the rapid growth of CTCNet and the statements by others who planned on starting literally hundreds of sites just for HUD housing projects does indicate that there could be thousands of community technology centers in a few years. These seem to be a phenomenon that will spread, quite apart from school-related computer training. About 15% of the current members are public libraries, and I hope that more libraries join. They need to rub elbows with other public service agencies and community centers that are providing similar services to overlapping clientele. I also hope that more rural centers will join because they stand to benefit even more than the urban centers whose personnel have an easier time of meeting colleagues than do the more isolated sites in the countryside. Following this conference I decided to visit some rural community sites in the Appalachian part of West Virginia and Ohio as well as a few people that were very cautious about the use of technology... [This report may not be archived, mirrored, stored, or republished on any commercial server or service without the permission of the author] Community Technology Center Review, January 1998 Table of Contents