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Computing and the Community: CPSR's 1994 Annual Meeting

by Phil Agre
CPSR/San Diego

CPSR News Volume 12, Number 3: Summer 1994

Although the Clinton administration has been inconsistent about upholding the public interest in its telecommunications policy proposals, its rhetoric of ''information highways" and "information haves and have-nots" has helped to crystallize an emerging social movement around computing and networking. In communities across the country, people are debating the nature of community and the role of information access in a democracy. Literally thousands of local groups are exploring how computer networks can help to nurture social networks, and their experiences are revealing the complex and many-faceted nature of "access." Perhaps this exciting development is an opportunity for CPSR to grow deeper roots in society by connecting socially responsible computer people into a broader movement.

That, anyway. is the central premise of our planning for the Annual Meeting. We are organizing a working meeting, in which as many of the sessions as possible are connected to the work that people in one community, namely San Diego, are doing to realize the vision of democratic technology use. This process starts with outreach. We are beginning to talk to people throughout the San Diego community about the genuinely exciting activity that is taking place in libraries, schools, non-profit organizations, labor unions, political action groups, local government, and so on. We are thinking about ways to involve these folks in planning the meeting, and in the structure of the meeting itself. One idea, would be to "pair up" each invited speaker with someone from the San Diego community who is working on issues pertaining to that speaker's topic. Another idea would be to spend all of Sunday afternoon and evening on workshops that use the situation in San Diego as a "case study" of practical issues such as political action, community networking, organizing information for public access, and so forth. Our thinking is still evolving, and we encourage you to write us with ideas.

Beyond the details of the Annual Meeting, it's worth thinking about CPSR's own future. CPSR has defined itself as "a national public-interest alliance of information technology professionals and other people." Those "other people" are a fascinating group. In the past, CPSR activists have put together remarkably diverse coalitions on issues such as privacy, and CPSR meetings have brought in a remarkable range of people from business to journalism to community activism. At the same time, computing is a specialized activity and CPSR will probably never be an organization for the "masses." My own sense is that CPSR has natural allies in a number of professions with strong public interest traditions whose organization and working methods are likely to change with the changes in information technology. For this Annual Meeting, for example, we are making a special effort to reach out to library people, and people from the UCSD Libraries in tact constitute a majority of those helping to organize the meeting so far.

In general, we will be targeting much of our publicity to people in public-interest professions: library people, educators, public health people, as government workers, as well as people such as BBS operators who are already bringing accessible computing to large numbers of people. Another relevant group, less formally constituted as a profession than the others, consists of disability activists who have a particularly deep understanding of the nature of "access." These professional groups form important bridges between socially responsible computer people and the broader community, and we hope that our meeting can help to strengthen those bridges and deepen CPSR's roots in society.

Phil Agre
Department of Communication University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, CA 92093-0503
(619)534-6328
pagre@ucsd.edu

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