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Summary The following 20 points, across the seven areas listed below, were among the most salient that arose during the discussions. A scan of these points will provide the quickest overview of the meeting. If you prefer, you can listen to these points as they were made at the meeting.
The meaning of community What youth are doing Strategies for philanthropy Schools and the E-rate Dynamics of the IT workforce Lets make haste 1. At the Greenwich Day School which is probably one of
the richest schools in the United States. I was meeting with the
headmaster and I asked how they're dealing with technology. His
comment was, Very slowly. I thought that was very refreshing. He
said, I'm doing it so my faculty can absorb it as I go along. Something
you don't hear often. Two, he said, Our ratio for expenditures is
70% on staff development training and 30% on physical systems. That
was a profound comment. And thats properly the ratio. Mario Morino
2. Q: Do you see the possibility that organizations
of all kinds will substitute IT for making artistic development
opportunities available? A: Well, I don't think they're separate
subjects anymore. Some of the greatest music compositions these
days are cranked through the IT. Some of the greatest music composition
today is occurring through IT. Some of the greatest photography
work is occurring thorough digital technology. Sunday night I heard
a concert with Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock and you know what?
They both used technology an awful lot. The lines are graying. A
person who specializes in wood construction, in pottery, can use
the IT area to do that better. And we shouldn't draw the lines is
all I'm saying. Some people have put it as bits versus atoms and
it really shouldn't be thought of that way, it's bits and atoms
together. Mario Morino 3. I start the digital divide from a different place. In
fact, it really is just a redefinition of what's existed for the
last 50 years in this country. The same folk who are divided digitally
have been divided economically, have been divided in terms of social
process, have been disenfranchised and so on and so forth. So for
me the fundamental question is, what's so big and bad about technology
that's going to do things that the War on Poverty, for example,
didn't do 40 years ago, to the extent that we still see the same
foundations of poverty in 1999 that we saw in 1966 and 1965 when
that was the major focus. When that was on everyones tongues and
that's where the resource was going and so on and so forth. Holly
Carter 4. Sustainability. Mechanisms for sustainability in terms
of growth and development are fairly straightforward. Does technology
really provide what we haven't been able to find in the last four
decades? Does it enable people to say, I don't have to live from
hand to mouth as an individual; from paycheck to paycheck as a family;
from program to program as a community-based organization; from
hustle to hustle out on the street. I can really start thinking
about some sustainable abilities to move forward in a structured
way. That's what sustainability allows you to do that subsistence
existence doesn't. Can technology really move us from subsistence
to sustainability? Holly Carter 5. What can happen if you give kids the tools to work
online and the time to be creative? Seven year olds can know their
communities, study them, communicate about them, share that knowledge
and act on it. Larry Kirkman 6. Youth are learning new technology differently and they're
gaining new skills that we're not even sure we understand. We need
to study this further. And we need to realize that the projects,
the things that get them involved in technology are not necessarily
called "learning about technology." They are doing projects that
are valuable to them and have relevance to them and then are an
entrée into using technology. Breakout Group B, Roberta Johnson
7. The best programs are ones that we're helping kids
find a sense of efficacy and leadership, acting as producers, which
was one of the other themes this morning; and enables kids to connect
with others, both adults and peers, to take on challenging content
in new ways. Breakout Group C, Alan Melchior 8. Digital technology in general is driving the merger
of all sorts of technologies. The computer has had a big place in
it, but we're entering an era of whole new devices. All kinds of
things will be coming out. The computer itself may become obsolete.
We consider all technology if it's helping to reach young people,
to empower communities, and to make things better in that larger
structural sense of giving people equity, access. Gail McClure
9. Through all of our programming that we do, irrespective
of the area, health, education, food systems and rural development,
and volunteerism and philanthropy, we think that technology and
information systems technology is on the cutting edge of everything
that is going to happen and will be a natural part of our lives
in the future. And so the foundation is looking for ways to figure
out how do we best make sure that the work that we do in communities
are supported with the right tools and that we make the best investment.
Phyllis Meadows 10. How do we help local organizations, national organizations,
tap in to intelligence, to resources, to best practices? Lessons
learned at the local level have to be shared. The power of a distributed
clearinghouse is very important and it is what we can do on the
Internet, learning from each other and creating a very powerful,
horizontal network. Larry Kirkman 11. We had some discussions about the premise that the
current IT models, the kind of Microsoft model, was not actually
sustainable within many organizations. And that we needed to look
for fresh ideas, one of those fresh but not so fresh ideas actually
reversion to pool resources, hosting or what's now going under the
name of Application Service Providers, which is kind of back to
time share. Mario mentioned that idea could be generalized to something
called integrated services. So there's this recurring theme of pooling
of resources of all sorts; human resources, knowledge of what works
and what doesn't work, IT infrastructure, use of circuit riders,
ASP models and so forth and so on. And the questions of whether
a foundation could do some experimentation in hybrid models of providing
incentives so that for-profit ASPs would create non-profit sub-units
which would then serve the non-profit world. It's but again a warning
that they need to be tightly tied to community partners. Breakout
Group A, Dan Atkins 12. One of the things that we talked a lot about in concrete
terms was bringing together the business community. In particular
there is a lot of expertise in the business community now around
organizational development and facilitating dialogue between and
creating common visions among different groups. But inter-sector
exchange tends not to happen. And that's one place the philanthropic
community can act as conveners, to create some structures where
that happens, both at the national and regional levels. To create
structures for how do we improve organizational development or running
youth for technology, but also in communities at the local level.
Breakout Group C, Alan Melchior 13. One of the unanswerable questions about strategic investments
is, Do you invest in creating a new and kind of separate sub-field,
that enables the youth and technology folks to be getting together
and sharing and doing common professional development and resource
sharing; or do you try and build it as a thread within the existing
youth serving organizations? And I think ultimately the sense was
we may have to do both. Because you've got to go where the youth-serving
folks are, but you also need an opportunity for people who are investing
in this area to come together and build their own expertise. Breakout
Group C, Alan Melchior 14. How do we leverage our E-rate investment? Four billion
dollars by next year will have been invested in over 80,000 schools
nationwide, wiring more than 1.2 million classrooms. This is an
enormous commitment. What does it mean for the school now to have
the ability to connect to the community? Are community technology
centers, youth centers, a leverage point for that $4 billion investment?
Larry Kirkman 15. The complexity of technology is now becoming a retardant
to progress, not even an incremental benefit. In certain schools
where we have fundamental problems that are social, human problems,
we've diverted the attention from those problems and taken the money
and time to put computer systems in. Our fundamental problems in
the schools are going unaddressed. Mario Morino 16. Moving towards taking an advocacy role, we also had
some discussion of a sense that you almost had to take some legal
action. Some of the problems are so severe between the in-school
and out-of-school settings to get access to this technology that
a legal approach might be needed. Breakout Group B, Roberta Johnson
17. To talk about what I call macro issues that I think
are fundamental to how you approach solutions, let's start with
the most important: the talent pool. There is an inherent shortage
of people with qualifications to deal with technology, period, anywhere.
And it is profound in the case of the non-profit sector, to the
point it could be a fundamental impedimental prohibitive to progress
as we know it today. Mario Morino 18. There was a very interesting discussion about why
IT and the opportunities and economic potentials that it provides
is different from other technological movements in the past. Assertions
were made was that it was more open and that success in the IT industry
right now is based more on what you can do rather on what degrees
you have. And there is this very viable job category where you can
make $35,000-50,000 a year based on fairly specific knowledge of
NT servers and so forth and that's kind of a new opportunities phase.
Breakout Group A, Dan Atkins 19. So this world is changing and man, this bus was out
of the gate a long time ago. And so you want to be involved with
that, you don't have a choice. And my fear is that the commercial
space just so outdistances us, because it is morphing almost by
the week. So we've got to be aggressive. Mario Morino 20. We had quite a bit of discussion about the sense of
almost urgency here, that time is of the essence, that decisions
are being made and if we don't move forward with making some progress,
the decisions will be made and we will be left out in the cold and
those communities were serving will be left out in the cold. We
need to move forward. Breakout Group B, Roberta Johnson |
