Summary

Introductions

Attendees introduced themselves as follows.

"I'm Dan Atkins. I had the privilege about six years ago of launching a new professional school at the University of Michigan which we call the School of Information. That was possible in large part because of major support from the Kellogg Foundation. The point of this school is to take a much more holistic perspective on information systems and their use: holistic in the sense that we consider technical social, behavioral, and cultural issues simultaneously and are attempting to produce professionals with that perspective. A lot of the focus of the school is on community-based use of technology. And what evolved from that experience is a new partnership which we call the Alliance for Community Technology with Kellogg and potentially other funders. We're trying to build a set of very unique projects at the intersection of community, academia (particularly schools like ours that ground their work in the real world) and social investors such as the Kellogg Foundation. Paul, Kate and myself are all affiliated with that organization. There's a two-pager here that gives you kind of an abstract view of what we're trying to do. It's very much a work-in-progress and perhaps we can engage it and form some synergy with some of you today.
       "I'm here today to help Phyllis in facilitation of this meeting as is our colleague Roberta Johnson. We are trying to capture the fruits of all this work by note-taking and electronically. I'm going to do a bit of videotaping and if anyone strongly objects let me know. But this is not tape that you're going to see on the web tomorrow. Just think of it as high resolution note-taking that we want to use to make sure we capture all the subtlety of what's said here and we will be assisting in whatever the appropriate capture of what this process is. I think Phyllis said it yesterday but I want to reinforce since I work with her so closely. We're extremely excited and grateful at the people who have collected here today and we think we have the potential here for a very impactful meeting."

"I'm Pat Bransford, founder and president of the National Urban Technology Center. We consider ourselves people who are helping individuals in disadvantaged communities gain opportunity, access to opportunity. And to an extent, the technology in telecommunications is the buzz now. That is what we are focusing on."

"Hi. I'm happy to be here. My name is Karen Buller and I'm with the National Indian Telecommunications Institute. We're located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We work with tribes all over the United States including Alaska and Hawaii. We do work in the areas of education primarily but also language and cultural preservation. And most recently we're doing a lot of work in telecommunications policy in Indian country."

"I'm Holly Carter and I'm executive director of the Community Technology Centers Networks, CTCNet. We're the largest community technology centers in the United States with six in Europe too. So we're thinking globally as we go about our business. Also the founder of a new non-profit organization, Community Technology Development which will provide an umbrella focus for the work of CTC Net and also really focus our work on leadership development and organizational development within the context of CTC's and generally community development and capacity building. It is truly a pleasure to be here. Thanks."

"My name is Trish Millines Dziko. I'm the co-founder and executive director of the Technology Access Foundation. We're in Seattle and we focus on training teens of color in the field of information technology."

"Chuck Ericksen, Northwest Wisconsin. I work with a new group called New Paradigm Partners, a consortium of schools and a region of northwest Wisconsin schools, community organizations, different investors in our region. I work with the Kellogg Foundation for part of the Kellogg International Regional Program for four years. I'm glad to be here."

Tracy Gray, Vice President of Youth Services for the Morino Institute, arrived on a delayed flight after introductions had been made.

"I'm Steve Goodman from the Educational Video Center in New York City. We work primarily with at-risk teenagers in New York City Schools. We provide them with equipment and guidance to create documentaries about community issues. They learn to use video, as a powerful technology, to document conditions and research issues in their neighborhoods. They earn school credit for their time with us. We also work with teachers from grades K-12, helping them to incorporate video and other forms of digital media into their curriculum areas. We also offer video workshops for community organizers, and a program called YO-TV (Youth Organizers TV) for kids who are out of high school. YO-TV is designed to help graduates bridge the gap from high school to college and to find work in the field of media and technology."

"I'm Roberta Johnson. I'm from the University of Michigan. I direct the Michigan Space Grant Consortium which is an institution that couples with other institutions in Michigan to try to encourage math, science and technology learning. I'm also a space scientist at the University and have some interesting internet-based outreach activities that I have worked on for the past five years collaborating with Dan and I'm happy to be here."

"Hi. I'm Larry Kirkman, I'm president of the Benton Foundation. We're an activist operating foundation dedicated to realizing social benefits of communications with three interdependent program areas and I'll be talking about them in a minute. But we focus on public interest policies that shape the emerging communications environment with special commitment to the digital divide and universal service issues. We focused in this program over the last few years on schools and libraries and in particular, around the E-rate. We have a set of programs around capacity-building, particularly in the non-profit sector where we look at tools and practices and assessment strategies and the whole range of resources that can build capacity in non-profit organizations and community based organizations. And third, we have an area that we sometimes call the laboratory but its demonstration projects will reproduce what we think are leading edge projects that can show what the technology is good for. And lately, our focus has been on creating portals to the non-profit sector, called Portal Plus. You'll see some examples of those. I'm very pleased to be here. Thanks."

"I'm Janet Lathan, I'm director of education for ByteBack. I was very interested to read the Brandeis paper because you're the question that we're the answer for. We're the technology training, in that we partner with groups serving the unemployed and underemployed and at-risk youth and we provide the computer training. We help them set up a lab, we help them run their lab, our interns maintain their labs. We're DC-based. We have seven sites, soon to be ten. But we do consider ourselves a prototype of the future so you may be hearing about us more later on."

"Hi. My name is Zoraya Lee-Hamlin. I'm the executive vice-president for the Urban League of Essex County, which is one of 115 affiliates of the National Urban League. What's unique about our affiliate is that we recently built a family technology center and the center provides access for all of the children and adults that do training in the center. We have an adult training program, job skills training. We have a teen program and the school-to-work program, an after work school-to-work program. We also have a pre-school. So we have children as young as fifteen months on the computers up through older workers. We also have an older workers program."

"I'm Aaron Levine with the Ford Foundation in New York. I direct a new program that examines the penetration of technology in the non-profit sector. I've been spending a lot of time with our grantees looking at their funding needs for technology-related projects, their internal technology issues, and the relationship between internal and external uses of technology. I have also spent a great deal of time working with the Council on Foundations, and I'm pleased to report that there will be a technology track at this spring's Council on Foundations Annual Conference in Los Angeles. There will be five technology-related program, management, and theme sessions on the main program and a variety of other activities. One particularly exciting activity will be the Technology Innovations Forum. This is a series of thirteen 1-hour sessions that will showcase emerging no-cost and low cost technologies for small and medium-sized foundations. I hope you can all attend."

"I'm Ceasar McDowell and I'm head of the Center for Reflective Community Practice at MIT and we try to do a lot. Quickly, though, a couple things we're really interested in is with how information technology, changes of information technology can support community building and doing fellowships with whole communities. We have an institute that also looks at the back end of the issue of about how do give community sensibility into the research and development technology. The other parts are to think up ways to work on the mayor's project of his development. And yes,I'ma leadership fellow."

Gail D. McClure, Vice President for Programs at the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, had introduced herself earlier.

Phyllis Meadows, Program Director, Youth and Education, with the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, had introduced herself earlier.

"I'm Alan Melchior.I'm from the Center for Human Resources at Brandeis University. I think most of you have been forced to read a paper we did with the Dewitt Wallace Fund a couple of years ago. Our center is a research and program development center working around issues of youth and community development."

"Good morning,I'm Ed Mishrell with Boys and Girls Clubs of America. And one of the projects I have spent a lot of time on the last few years is Project Connect. That is to try to enable clubs to have technology be available for kids. I have two big challenges we're trying to meet with that. One is to try to create a tech center that we can install in the club that is basically turnkey so that making the technology work isn't the issue. We've spent a lot of energy on that and I think we're at a pretty good place with that. The second part is what do you do with it once you turn it on and how you engage kids with that. Basically the philosophy is that the technology center is not there just for technology, it's a resource that could be used for all of our program areas. So that everything that is going on in the club, what we're trying to do is get our staff to think about how they can use technology there so that all of the kids who are coming in to the club are getting access to that."

Mario Morino, Chairman of the Morino Institute, arrived on a delayed flight after introductions had been made.

"Good morning, my name is Kay Randolph-Back and I work at the Kellogg Foundation. I'm on the health team."

"I'm Paul Resnick from the University of Michigan School of Information and with Kellogg money in a program for teenagers in Ann Arbor and Flint where they learn about computer information technology but they're job is to figure out some project where they can use those skills as tools, some kind of community information organized projects. So they're all going to be CIO's."

"I'm Michael Saunders,I'm with HandsNet. We are a national network of human services organizations providing policy and practice information online out of San Jose, California. We also have a training and resource center in Washington, DC that does internet-based training."

"My name is Mike Tenbusch and I'm the director of Think Detroit, a new non-profit in Detroit with athletic leagues that gives them access to computers as well as training to build a community not only through the league but online as well."

"I'm Ellen Wahl from the Center for Children and Technology at the Educational Development Center. CCT has been working since 1981, since the beginning of personal computers, to figure out how technology can be used in support of young people and the learning process. The work that I've been doing for years, (I used to be at Growth, Incorporated) has been around involving young people in math, science and technology and promoting everybody with access to technology."

"My name is Kate Williams and I'm a doctoral student with the Alliance for Community Technology and the University of Michigan School of Information. I'm also involved in community technology in Toledo, Ohio, particularly the Murchison Community Center."

"I'm Robin Willig. I'm with the National Academy Foundation. We are a career education program that works with public high schools in 350 schools across the country. We are launching an Academy of Information Technology to prepare young people of lower socioeconomic backgrounds for careers in information technologies."

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