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Recently as we at the Project were developing our new mascot (right) I came up with the tag line "Service for the 21st Century." At the time I simply thought that it "worked" with the robot and some other marketing materials that we were putting together for our June round of recruiting but when I attended the Freedom to Connect Conference, I started thinking more about what it really meant. Freedom to Connect was not a conference about robots or service. It was mostly about the importance building and protecting an open communications infrastructure in this country. There was much talk about policy, innovation, and the need to take action. While the specific topics varied, they all played off of an economic picture presented by Yochai Benkler. Professor Benkler set the stage early-on with his discussion on how increased computing power, an open internet, and collaborative production are combining to radically transforming the economy and society. (I will attempt no further summary of his book, The Wealth of Networks, which you can and should read online at benkler.org.) …read more

by Shannon McCue I think we all can agree that access to information technology is important. As a member of the CTC VISTA Project, I gained a lot of insight into a variety of Community Technology Centers and was able to become broadly familiar with the field of Information Technology Accessibility. As my fellow VISTA’s were working on projects that helped low-income youth, ethnic groups, etc. gain access to technology, I was thinking, hey what about people with disabilities? As a person with a disability I know how it feels to be left out for this reason. Fortunately, when it comes to accessing technology, I don’t have any problems, but there are a lot of people that do. For instance, what if a person who is blind doesn’t have access to a computer and needs to use the Internet? What if a person with mobility impairment does not have the dexterity to use a mouse or keyboard? What will happen to our generation’s access to information technology as we start to get older? These are issues that need to be addressed. Luckily, we are finding answers to these questions, but you have to know where to look. Organizations like the Alliance for Technology Access along with CTCNET have partnered up for initiatives like the Connections for All Project (C4All), and they are addressing some of these very same issues. After I completed my year and a half as a CTC VISTA at the University of Massachusetts/Boston, I received a fellowship at the Institute for Community Inclusion, which is also affiliated with UMass/Boston. I had to come up with a project that had to do with increasing awareness and services to people with disabilities, which I have one year to work on. My project is about Accessible Community Technology Centers (CTC) in Massachusetts, and I’m mostly concentrating on neighborhood centers and computer centers within housing developments. I will be contacting and meeting with these centers to assess whether their facilities, programs, and communications are accessible for people with disabilities. …read more

by Lauren Bratslavsky My focus in college was on media studies and some video production on top of that, so applying to be a CTC VISTA with Media Bridges, to serve as a Youth Media Facilitator, seemed like a perfect fit. Media Bridges is a public access center in Cincinnati. They have a summer youth program and run the occasional outreach program for local schools. I was going to serve the organization by building a solid, year-round youth program. I was only a little hesitant. The job description included teaching, which I had never done, but I was ready to try. …read more

by Jessica Rothschuh I haven’t always been a techie. Maybe I'm not really a techie now, but as a CTC VISTA, I felt I had a responsibility to know technology. …read more

by Ross Musselman So, you want to send an email with an attachment to your teacher? Or perhaps you want to browse the Smithsonian's website in order write a paper for your class. Prior to November, if you were a teenager on the Mesa Grande Reservation, uploading the attachment might have taken you half an hour, and browsing the graphic-laden website of the Smithsonian Museum would have been a nightmare. Before the Community Wireless Network was activated there, telecommunications infrastructure at Mesa Grande was limited to satellite television and wire-line telephone service. Now, each home has wireless broadband service thanks to the efforts of the Southern California Tribal Digital Village and the CUWiN (Champaign-Urbana Wireless Network) Foundation. Since 2000, the CUWiN Foundation has been supporting community-owned networks around the globe. CUWiN currently has networks deployed on the Mesa Grande Reservation in Southern California; in several neighborhoods in Chicago; Urbana, Illinois; Homer, Illinois; Apirede, Ghana; and Mamelodi, South Africa. The organization also organizes the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks (http://wirelesssummit.org/). …read more

by Nichole Payne I was having a conversation with an intellectual recently. He was debating whether or not he should take time off to do community service or go straight to graduate school. He noted dispassionately, “In two hundred years, we’ll all be dead anyway.” His idea seems to be that we are in some kind of rat race to achieve our goals and make something of our lives. This idea only makes sense, though, if those achievements will be completely permanent, and I don’t believe they can be. Even if you produce a great work of literature that continues to be read hundreds of years from now, eventually the solar system will cool or the universe will wind down or collapse and all trace of your efforts will vanish. And in any case, we can’t hope for even a fraction of this sort of immortality. What my friend doesn’t understand is that change is personal, and if there is any point at all to what we do, we have to find it within our own lives. This is the reason I joined up, as did so many others, to serve as an AmeriCorps VISTA. …read more

By Patricia Conrad-Wexler Attendees of the CTCNET Conference in July 2006 arrived by many modes of transport but I and my director at Young Entrepreneurs Society, Tim, drove to Washington D.C. in a Toyota Prius. It was surely an economical way for a VISTA and the director of a nonprofit to show how folks can get by on almost no income! …read more

by Paul Hansen When I think about the CTC VISTA Project, this is the picture that I am playing with in my head. Look at all those nodes! Big nodes, little nodes, nodes nodes nodes. There's no mistaking it— it's a network diagram. It may well be that the cult of web 2.0 has a grip on me (everything is networking and networking is everything) but that does not mean that this is not a useful way to look at the Project and where it is heading. I think it is. …read more

by Brittney Fosbrook As a new member of the CTC VISTA Project, I began my service full of fascination for the seemingly utopian quality of social networks made possible through open source content management systems (CMS). My enthusiasm for social networking software easily translated to my first large task at the Homeless Prenatal Program (HPP), a portal to be used primarily as a resource for case managers. In my initial vision, the portal would allow case managers to both access and alter content regarding best practices, downloadable forms and resource recommendations for clients. This case management portal, I assumed, would allow case managers to engage in a collective, participatory and accessible social network mediated through open source software on the internet. However, as my research and development for the portal commenced, I began to see there were problems with idealizing internet-based social networking. …read more

by Denise Meise   West Tennessee STAR Center The West Tennessee Special Technology Access Resource Center, better known as the STAR Center, is a non-profit organization in Jackson, Tennessee that specializes in assistive technology. In 1988, Chuck and Margaret Doumitt discovered that their two youngest children were losing their eyesight, and doctors eventually determined that they had a rare condition called Batten’s disease. This disease would cause blindness, seizures, loss of motor skills, and ultimately death. Chuck and Margaret began to dream that George and Angela would someday have access to assistive technology. Instead of moving to a larger city that already had an assistive technology center, the Doumitts decided to start one on their own.   …read more