spring07

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 Matt Isaacs I recently started on a new project to improve the ease of use of the CUWiN network system. The project is a web application (PHP based) to allow communities and other collaborative entities to create and manage custom firmware images for their wireless nodes. The first portion is finished but not live. …read more

by Kevin Bulger I feel it is important to have a deep, full understanding of a problem before you go about finding solutions to it. Since I will be focusing on issues surrounding the Digital Divide and suggesting solutions for those issues, I need to know precisely what the Digital Divide refers to before I do anything. …read more

by James Carlson Located at the East End of Houston, TX is a place people call Pecan Park. If you look above the cars and notice the trees canopying most streets, you will understand why. The local high school is among the oldest in this coastal city. In the south end of Pecan Park, an apartment complex supports over 8,000 area residents, who are the poor of this already poor metro neighborhood. The per capita income of all residents in this community was last taken at $10,326. On the Westside is a local community college, and to the East a Community Technology Center, known as Technology for All (TFA). It is here, that I have made my home this past year. …read more

by Sascha Meinrath The United States is facing a worsening broadband crisis -- over the past half-decade, the US has fallen behind a growing list of industrialized nations in delivery speeds, price per megabit, broadband penetration rates, and other facets of broadband service provision. Rural and poor communities are being doubly discriminated against -- often receiving little or no broadband access and being forced to pay higher service rates when they do have access. …read more

by Reebee Garofalo For the last 30 or so years, I have been a popular music activist and educator. I have been asked to comment on the relevance of copyright law to community media. This fits with my own agenda for a couple of reasons: first, that music tends to get underrepresented in discussions of communication policy and media transformation (except when we want to censor it), and second, most of the copyright battles that will eventually plague all media have already happened in the music industry. We can learn a lot about the future by looking at the history of these struggles. …read more

by Felicia M. Sullivan When talking about free software, a long-time colleague of mine always says, “You know, free as in speech not free as in beer.” That is to say that free software is about liberty not price. And when speaking about open source software, he refers to transparency and accessibility of the code that allows anyone to create and be involved. He marvels that both free and open source software (F/OSS) share the common dependency upon communities of developers and users to thrive - the ultimate “gift culture” in his estimation. These concepts of freedom, transparency, accessibility, creativity, and inclusion should sound familiar to those of us working in communities. They are the foundations of much of the work involved in social change. Therefore, we owe it to ourselves and to our communities to explore and be open to free and open source software. These applications may benefit our organizations and our citizens not because they cost so little, but because they provide us ultimate autonomy over our own futures in the realm of communications. They ensure that the workings of the system remain knowable and accountable. They prevent us from being dependent on outside forces and put us in the driver seat. Controlling the code is the contemporary equivalent of controlling the core processes of democratic participation. So what sorts of F/OSS applications should the well-equipped community media and/or technology center have in its toolbox? Community technology centers should be at least conversant about these tools in order to make informed decisions about their next round of communication infrastructure building. The Core First and foremost are the set of “core” applications known as LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). For those of you unfamiliar with Linux, it is an operating system like Windows VISTA or Mac OS X. It comes in a number of “flavors” such as Red Hat (http://www.redhat.com), Debian (http://www.debian.com) and Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com). Like any operating system, it sets the environment in which all hardware and software operate. It is the user’s primary control system. Apache (http://www.apache.com) is a web server application. Currently over 62% of all web-hosting applications are running from an Apache server system. System administrators who favor Apache often comment on the reliability and security of the software for the critical running of the Internet. Additionally, as an open source application, it ensures that the workings of a powerful communication system are accessible and transparent to us all. Add to the web environment a powerful database like MySQL (http://www.mysql.com), and dynamic content becomes possible. Everything from blogs to shopping carts to search engines depends upon data stored in a database such as MySQL. When coupled with a scripting language such as PHP (http://www.php.net), web content can now shift and change according to variable inputs. Basically, PHP allows the developer to write simple scripts that pull information out of a database or other locations and display within a basic web page. This allows content to be flexible and have multiple purposes. If you aren’t up to installing and configuring your own LAMP system, there are free and low-cost providers that use this core in their operations. I personally use Dreamhost (http://www.dreamhost.com). It comes with a very useable control panel and lots of nice one-click installs and easy to setup MySQL databases. Grassroots.org (http://www.grassroots.org), The Community Software Lab (http://www.thecsl.org) and Riseup (http://www.riseup.net) are all nonprofits that provide hosting in a F/OSS world for nonprofits and other community-based organizations. Why not check out your web hosting service and see if they support a F/OSS solution. It is a simple step to transforming control over your communications infrastructure. Desktop Must Haves While there are an increasing number of community-led organizations that have moved core web and operating system solutions to F/OSS, it can be a hard and somewhat scary proposition to make this shift as the first step towards conversion. Luckily there are an increasing number of very user-friendly and useful free and / or open source applications available for the center that wants to explore simple ways to get involved. Just like many of us don’t go out and build a windmill for sustainable energy, it is feasible for us to replace incandescent light bulbs with more energy efficient compact fluorescents. Here are some useful desktop applications that are easy to download and install. They are just as good, and in some cases better, than their proprietary cousins: Web Browser: Firefox (www.firefox.com), Flock (www.flock.com)Office Application Suite: Open Office (www.openoffice.org)Contact Relationship Management: Organizers’ Database (www.organizersdb.org) Moving to the Web I remember the first time I used a porta-pak to create a video presentation for a high school project. This was an empowering experience. However, it didn’t compare to the first time I saw a show of mine on cable television. Suddenly my voice was amplified. The same is true when content makes its way to the web. Over the last three to four years, the web has been evolving from a consumer-based model of content distribution to a user-generated one. This is a significant shift from a web that is about pushing a message out there to one that engages and invites others in. For those involved in community-building, this is a powerful moment. Tools for this new web environment (often referred to as Web 2.0) are entering the social sphere every day. Here are some web-based applications worth some exploration: Contact Relationship Management: CiviCRM (civicrm.org)Content Management System: Wordpress (www.wordpress.org), Drupal (www.drupal.org), Civicspace (civicspacelabs.org), Joomla (www.joomla.org)Wiki: PBWiki (www.pbwiki.org), Media Wiki (www.mediawiki.org)Email List: Mailman (www.list.org), PHPlists (www.phplist.com)Bulletin Board/Forum: PhpBB (www.phpbb.com) It’s a matter of liberty, not price. There are countless other F/OSS applications that can be tested and used. Applications that can meet almost any need such as drawing (Inkscape - http://www.inkscape.org), photo manipulation (GIMP - http://www.gimp.org), and audio / video editing (NGO-in-a-Box - http://ngoinabox.org). Some are easy to install and use, and others are not so easy. Some cost little to nothing, and some require the investment of time and financial resources. Some are completely useless. The thing about choosing F/OSS for your information and communication needs is that it is like making the choice to recycle, buy fair-trade coffee, locally-grown produce, or be a member of your local food co-op. It is a choice not just about the bottom line, but a choice that says we care about who controls important resources. It is not a fluke that so many of the resources detailed in this article have .org in their URLs. F/OSS is a stance about what kind of communication culture we want to create. Isn’t this what the mission of grassroots and community-based organizations should be all about? (NOTE: a version of this article originally appeared in the April 2007 issue of the Community Media Review) …read more

by Meredith Aalto Few will argue that one of today’s greatest assets is the ability to access the Internet. We get so much information from it, but not everyone is able to own a computer. What are a person’s options if s/he doesn’t have a computer? How can a person get access to the Internet or even basic software programs? …read more

by Cheryl Jerozal Last week I had the opportunity to participate in my first "sprint". In a sprint, a group of people gets together and works on an open source project for a few days. In my two days (and one night) of sprinting, I learned a lot, met some awesome people, and contributed to the start of a project. I highly recommend sprinting to anyone who gets a chance to do it. …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