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Community Technology Flourishes in Seattle

by Peter Miller

CPSR News Volume 15, Number 3: Summer 1997

While enthusiasts in community networking converged in Seattle from all across the country and beyond at the beginning of March, it would be a mistake to think they were bringing new wares to the city. That's because so much community networking already exists.

Seattle is a major national presence in the area of community technology, in some ways ahead of Silicon Valley, Boston's 128 belt, the North Carolina triangle, the Austin area, or anywhere else in the country. Seattle is the home of not one but two community networking projects: PAN, the Public Access Network, tied into the City's technology infrastructure at its most official level, and the independent Seattle Community Network, SCN, which also enjoys status as an official FreeNet and as one of 12 Community Wide Education and Information Service (CWEIS) projects supported by the national Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The conference was coordinated by Doug Schuler, former CPSR chair, active in the CPSR Seattle chapter, and author of a major defining work, New Community Networks: Wired for Change.

As its title suggests, the conference was a gathering for and about community networks, which inevitably involves community space and institutions, in which Seattle is also rich. I arrived a day early and had an opportunity to visit some of them.

A City Vibrant with Citizen Involvement in Technology
The technology program at the Seattle Urban League, CTCNet's first official affiliate in the area, is the joint purview of Willair St. Vil, the Vice President of Programs and Administration, and Bill Moore, the Technology Coordinator. Willair came recently from NYC/United Way. He and Bill have a great rapport with one another. We got talking about the recent HUD Neighborhood Networks meeting that took place in the Seattle and the potential for a collaborative technology program with the HUD-supported development two blocks east and another five blocks west. The Seattle Urban League is well-positioned to help, having been the 1995 recipient of a $180K+ grant from the Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

Our chat lead to a tour of the lab upstairs, where one of the teachers was working on a project web page, to get it ready for central office approval. Passing it by their webmaster, David Wong. These teachers work with high school students, targeting sophomores for skills training with a job mentoring component. It's quite likely that they will take a leadership role in the development of the Urban League's new national technology initiative. CTCNet plays a major role with regard to the initiative, thanks to a grant from NYNEX, which also just awarded substantial support for Urban League technology centers in Boston and Birmingham, New York. Urban League affiliates in Akron and Columbus, Ohio, are part of the Ohio Community Computing Center Network, and Akron received one of last year's lab equipment awards from the CTCNet/Apple partnership. This year's announcement has brought new Urban League affiliates from New York City, Sacramento, Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee. The Urban League experiment ought to grow.

We made a side trip to the Microsoft campus on the east side of the water in Bellevue before returning to the nearby Ranier Community Center, which houses Project Compute. Microsoft has provided support to numerous CTCNet affiliates across the country in a pick-and-choose, targeted fashion: 100 educational CD's via the Children's Defense Fund in Washington, DC; a grant to the Roxbury Boys and Girls Club; and also in metropolitan Boston, support for a number of CTCs that are officially part of the City of Boston. Libraries are the major arena in which Microsoft provides community technology support. The Brooklyn public library is a CTCNet affiliate enjoying major Microsoft support, and there are currently promising negotiations going on with the Martin Luther King library in Washington, DC. Microsoft supports some school-community partnerships, as well as library technology programs, in Seattle that I did not have the opportunity to visit, but we are now exploring a major software partnership through the Microsoft Community Affairs Program by way of their special techology leadership grants with Gifts in Kind/United Way. Chris Hedrick, Senior Program Manager for Community Affairs, offered to do a workshop on how CTCNet affiliates can become Microsoft certified training centers at the annual conference in Pittsburgh in June

The brand new Ranier Community Center facility, one of twenty-some that are funded/supported through the City of Seattle, is the home of Project Compute, an impressive pilot and leadership technology access center.

Two large rooms, spanking clean save for two friendly notices, hold wall-to-wall state-of-the-art equipment. Project Compute was actually established at the old Ranier center, and it's unique not only for its longevity, but also for its status as a model volunteer program and its liveliness. Unlike most programs without paid staff, which are often thrown together and hanging on by a thread, Project Compute is rich in resources, technological, human, and otherwise, and the volunteer orientation goes hand in hand with the leadership and enthusiasm that Anthony Williams brings to it. It's an integrated part of the life of the center, for anyone from seniors to kids, along with other activities rooms where art, dance, martial arts, and other programs take place, two multi-basket gyms, and a well-furnished equipment room. Anthony and other volunteers provide support for the staff to use the computer center and then run open access and structured programs themselves in math, science, art, Internet tools, programming, Family Night on Friday, and a much in-demand late night skills training, 9:30-11:00 pm, on Friday and Saturday.

The final site of note is the Speakeasy Cafe. The night before the conference, I just missed a film showing by Trent Harris. But I did get to meet him and a number of Salt Lake City ex- patriots living in Seattle, catch a bit of the jazz being played in the corner, choose from a menu of coffee, beer, and good noshes, and get help from friendly staff in checking out the various workstations and platforms. The antithesis of yuppie consumerism, the Seattle Speakeasy has taken the aesthetic of modern technological society in its most wired, liberating, and satisfying dimensions and brought it right into a new kind of community center. In doing so, the Speakeasy is a genuinely new phenomenon. It's reported that anywhere from 50-70 percent of its full Internet access subscribers (at $10/month or $50 for six months) do not have computers and modems of their own. The Speakeasy houses projects such as the Alliance for Education, the American Women's Roundtable, the Seattle Area Teen Community Service Homepage, the Northwest Environment Watch, Seattle Peace Concerts, and the Washington Free Press. It was a major presence at the conference and on Saturday night hosted a benefit for CPSR (for $25 admission) as the evening's event.

Lots of community networking took place in the keynote and plenary sessions on the first day, starting with the opening address by Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community, editor of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, and founder and Chief Aha! Officer of Electric Minds. The first plenary on "Building a Civic Web" continued the networking theme, which went on into the second day of workshops with offerings such as "Accessible Web Design," "Avoiding Information Overload," and "Civil Liberties in Cyberspace." At Saturday's "Culture and Diversity in Community Space and Cyberspace" session in the auditorium, Madeline Gonzalez gave a report on the development of the Association for Community Networking (AFCN), established at the Taos conference the previous year.

From a CTCNet vantage point, it was quite striking how, given an emphasis and focus on cyberspace, so many center-based access points keep coming into the picture. This was the substance of my panel presentation, which closed the first day, on the connection between cyberspace and community space. On Sunday, I got to introduce a workshop on practical guidelines to building these connections. The workshop was led by Sue Beckwith from the Austin FreeNet and Bruce McComb from the Reca Foundation and TriCities FreeNet in Southern Washington State, both of which have multiple access center sites, and by Anthony Williams. But even outside this workshop, the center-based access connection to cyberspace cropped up everywhere.

A session led by Tina Podlowski, formerly with Microsoft and currently a Seattle City Councillor, on "Creating Technology Literate Neighborhoods," asked, "What does it means for a neighborhood to be technology literate? Where are appropriate 'access points' within a neighborhood?"

A session on "City Government Programs Online" with the City of Seattle's Public Access Network looked at "lessons learned in working directly with nontechnical neighborhood organizations/ individuals and organizing coalitions around technology... Garfield and Rainier Community Centers, Central Area Motivational Project Family & Youth Services Center, and the Department of Neighborhoods neighborhood services centers."

An "Equity in Access" workshop featured Mike Apgar, owner and founder of the Speakeasy, and reps from two of the projects it houses, Madeline Lewis from the Homeless Women's Network, and Anitra Freeman and Dr. Wes Browning from Real Change, the area's homeless newspaper (founded by Tim Harris, who has started similar projects in Boston and New York).

Chuck Leo and Diana Goodwin Shavey presented HUD Neighborhood Networks as established centers at the junction of cyberspace and welfare reform.

Bart Decrem and four young people from East Palo Alto's Plugged In highlighted a youth and education plenary.

There were lots of library activists. Jamie McClelland from Libraries of the Future read the mission statements from four or five groups, all substantially in agreement, and went on to talk about the importance of coalitions. This talk got cited frequently during the conference.

Community public, education, and governmental (PEG) cable access centers sent representatives from all over the country, including Michael Seitz from Multnomah Community TV outside Portland, who cofounded the ACM-CTCNET discussion list and SIG at the Alliance for Community Media (ACM) conference in Washington, DC last July; Don Senzig from Milwaukee, which is hosting the ACM national conference this July; Richard Turner from Honolulu; and ACM Executive Director Barry Forbes, from the national office in Washington, DC.

Lodis Rhodes called for a new radical common sense--and centers are clearly part of it. They provide a place for those otherwise without access, and the training and support to make use of the opportunity. Centers provide a quite realistic approach to the visionary ideal of universal access--and they help establish those very community institutions that are the mark of and vehicle for empowerment.

Rhodes emphasized the importance of the community-center by quoting from Secretary of Commerce Mickey Kantor's Lessons Learned from the Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program (TIIAP) noting that "TIIAP plays a vital role in the development of the information superhighway by providing grants to schools, libraries, police departments, hospitals, universities, and community-based organizations." Seven of the ten best-practices cases have center-based access as a key component, including several CTCNet-affiliated projects. According to Karen Michaelson, the Inland Northwest Community Access Network (TINCAN), established in rural, isolated eastern Washington State, is very interested in establishing some such joint projects.

Rhodes noted that for every TIIAP granted awarded (210), 13 others applied for funds, and another 65 requested application materials. He stated that the report, Lessons Learned from TIIAP is "aimed at these latter groups" - the 13650 "schools, hospitals, clinics, police departments, libraries, and community colleges, state, tribal and local governments, and community-based organizations" that seek to bring the information superhighway to their communities.

As the conference wound down with the final set of workshops, there were only three of us at the session "Technology and Welfare: A Tragic Love Story" given by Ken Zeff, Americorps*VISTA Coordinator at Seattle's MLKing HUD Neighborhood Network center. The discussion turned into a general session about all the potential resources MLKing has at the tips of its fingers because it is in Seattle, both because of all its resources for community technology and because it is the local model program for the HUD Neighborhood Networks effort, whose national leadership is Seattle-based. One of the other two workshop attendees, the one who was most active in providing impressive advice, was Tim Chuang. We chatted afterwards, and he gave me two cards, one as Consultant in Consulting & Education Services with Versant, the Database for Objects, in Chicago; the other as Deputy Secretary General, Taiwanese Association of America, in Havre De Grace, Maryland. Using a Prarienet email address, Tim is working out of Kansas City for the immediate future, wants to volunteer with some helpful community technology program, and will be checking out opportunities there. He's a good example of the kind of exciting acquaintance one makes at these sorts of community networking gatherings.

There's a great deal of community networking interest in getting better organized, a sentiment which actually culminated in an earlier workshop by Barry Forbes, the outrageous though very informative "Building A National GrassRoots Organization" session. "Oxymoron, isn't it?" Barry began to the roomful of those who had responded to his invitation, including many of the steering committee members of the Association for Community Networking (AFCN).

This report hardly touches the surface of what went on. Much of "Community Space and Cyberspace, the Conference," is still around, including the Proceedings and the following online resources.

DIAC '97: http://www.scn.org/tech/diac-97
New Community Networks: Wired for Change, by Doug Schuler, published by Addison-Wesley, http://www.aw.com/cseng/
Urban League: http://www.blarg.net/~urbleag/ul.html , email urbleag@blarg.net
Madeline Gonzalez at the Association for Community Networking (AFCN), madeline@rmii.com
acm-ctcnet discussion list: acm-ctcnet@igc.org
Tim Chuang, Versant and Taiwanese Association of America: tchuang@prairienet.org

Peter Miller is Community Technology Program Director at CTCNet in Somerville, MA.

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