(I,NU) = Inaudible or not understandable

Barb: I'm speaking with Ann Bishop from the School and Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, one of the co-founders of the local low-cost internet service provider Prairienet and Director of the Community Networking Initiative. A project which is designed to reach out to the local community by providing equipment and access to the internet. Could you please tell us a little bit about yourself? How you became interested in community access issues.

Ann: Sure Barb, that's actually a little bit of a hard question. It's not something that I can really put my finger on. All I can say is that it's sort of certainly a fortuitous combination of personal and professional commitment. In my research and teaching and other professional work I'm interested in user-centered design and analysis of information systems. And interested in the analysis and understanding of people's information needs. So oftentimes that tends to focus on people who for one reason or another are kind of unfamiliar or new to the technology. So certainly although in that/often that kind of work tends to be done with professionals with scientist engineers or whatever in the field of Library and Information Science. But there are some people in our field who look at everyday information needs at everyday residence of a town, everyday citizens, and what are the nature of their information needs and so I sort of carry that across to look at what happens when they bump up against more formal information systems and how do they mesh or not mesh with their needs. And what are the particular barriers and problems that confront them in their information seeking and information use and these days that seems to just naturally encompass computers, computer based information systems, the internet, and e-mail and networked information systems as well. So again I think even the fact that I have those research interests is just sort of also coming from a personal interest. But when/in a very specific way when I moved to Champaign-Urbana about/I guess about 7 years ago, I had heard of free nets and community information networks and just to clarify or expand on your definitions a little bit, although most of them do provide internet access for free or for no cost, just as important is the development of information resources per se. So the creation and helping people in town create, if you will, an online data base of information about community organizations, community events, and happenings in town and of course these days with the latest trends in technology, those tend to be web sites. So right now Prairienet has sort of sponsored the care and feeding of over 400 local organizations that have created web pages to try to let other people in the community know what's going on in their organizations. So we're trying to spur some inter-institutional cooperation with that to improve the degree of access to community information. But I just wanted to clarify that it's not just quite the same as just an internet service provider, although certainly communication functions are very important to people. But it does have this community content component to which that's very important as well. So when I moved here I/shortly after moving here I heard about Prairienets and community networks and thought it sounded like kind of a neat idea and saw that there wasn't one here. And it seemed like an ideal situation/it seemed that with the university here, with the graduate school of Library and Information Science, and with the emphasis and interest in technology and other schools like the College of Ed, that it might be a place where somehow with the support and interest of people on campus and perhaps with some of the campus resources that it might be possible to start a community information system. And I think also being at the University it makes that digital divide even clearer, if you will. It makes that gap clearer about how all of us students and faculty are very used to having computers and access to the internet because we get that as a normal course of our affairs through the University. And it's very clear that people in town don't have that, aside from the fact that there is/or should I say on top of that there is very definitely a significant low-income population in the Champaign-Urbana area so there's sort of clear evidence of haves and have-nots (I,NU) the split between the community and the university and then even within the community. There's a very wide socioeconomic spectrum represented. Yeah, ok, great.

Barb: Maybe can you now just describe some of the outreach efforts of the community networking initiative?

Ann: Sure, the community networking initiative or CNI and I'll probably refer to it that way from now on, is a partnership of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Prairienet, and the Urban League of Champaign County. And it's a project that's funded for two years by the Department of Commerce's TIIAP (Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program) program. And it's also funded in part by the Kellogg Foundation and it's quite a complex program or it has a fair number of facets. I can give you the URL for the web site for the project so people can look at it afterward. Um that's a good idea. But if you bear with me for a minute well I'll try to go through and explain very briefly/give a quick overview of the various components of it. And first I'll say that the straw is on another very important component of community networking in general, and Prairienet in specific, and that is the user support, the training, and outreach. So that's also I think something that makes a typical community network different from an internet service provider. Is that it does very much have an outreach, a user training, and a user support function. So it grows very naturally out of the kinds of things that Prairienet has been interested in trying to lessen the divide between haves and haves-nots in our community. But provides us with a/through getting the grant, the resources to do this in a bigger way than Prairienet had the resources to do on its own. And also felt it was very important to have a partnership with community organizations, in other words not just have it be something coming from the university, or coming from Prairienet. So we worked with the Urban League to develop the proposal and the/let's see, excuse me, the various components are/first off there's a research and evaluation component that I'm chiefly responsible for and as part of that I'm doing just sort of overall program evaluation of the whole project. And then there are several different stages of research. The first is to get a baseline picture and understanding of information needs and problems of individuals in low-income neighborhoods. The second is to understand information needs of flows and barriers to use of technology for community organizations. So not for the individuals, but to small organizations such as Center for Women in Transition, Family Services, Parish Nurses Association/I'm not exactly sure of that name. Or whatever. So to understand their information needs of lows and understand barriers that they face in using technology. And a third component will be to sort of bring what we learn from those two stages together to improve the content of Prairienet, to add/to bring more organizations into the fold, and get them to put their resources/their information online. And also then to revamp Prairienet's interface so that perhaps it is more useful by people who are interested in the kinds of problems that people in low income neighborhoods face. So just the way that stuff is organized on Prairienet right now it's kind of hard to find things by some specific sort of need or problem such as homelessness or affordable housing. So we'll try to add content and then also sort of restructure the way that information is organized or classified or catalogued or presented on the system to make it easier to find. And as part of that reorganization effort we're working on something called "acid mapping". We're coming more and more to believe that we shouldn't just view individuals and organizations serving them as bodies with needs and problems, but to also recognize that everyone has something to contribute. A skill or some volunteer time, or even just information about their culture, something that they can report about their culture. So we're also, as a specific part of this information reorganization and content addition, trying to look at ways of developing this approach in an online environment. It has been explored by Krutzman and McKnight and others as something to do with communities to map resources but I haven't seen anything where people have tried to do that with the aid of online resources and computers. So it seemed like kind of a natural fit. So for the research component again just to summarize, there's the research into information needs, barriers, using the technology, and new ways of organizing information in a more problem-centered citizen-centered way. So that's the research on evaluation component. Then there is a/what people in town seem to often consider a computer give-away component. We are soliciting donations of computer equipment and one way or another refurbishing that equipment and then distributing that to individuals and organizations in the community. And a third component is training to go along with that. We felt strongly that just sort of throwing technology at people was not going to do much. So there is a strong training and user-support component. So in order to receive a free computer, people complete some kind of training program. That has been split into a teen training and an adult training component. The teen training is more intensive, small classes of teens say 10-20 teens in a class, and we've changed it a little bit from semester to semester. So we did that first in the spring of 98. We just completed the fall of 98 and we're revamping it again for spring of 99. But basically teenagers receive 10 weeks of training in computer and network basics and for adult community members we've had one training program this past summer and that consisted of two day-long training workshops. So more intense, but shorter training period for adults. And we trained about 120 adult community members. So all of those people, the two teen cohorts and the adults, have received computers through the program. And we've also been working as part of that to help jump-start and facilitate the creation of public access computing sites, either sort of lab situations training centers like at the Ridgeway Center which is run by a couple of African Americans and they use it for various community functions. So we set up a lab there. There has been a lab set up at the Douglass Annex, and various other places. And along with computer labs, we're also working towards setting up more individual- or organization-specific public access sites say at the Urban League or at an individual church or an individual community organization. So for people/or in some of the housing projects and neighborhood centers. And/so let's see what else? I guess those are really the major components. There's the computer distribution, the training and support, the setting up of public access sites, the training programs, and then the research and evaluation component. Barb: I see, ok. Ann: And they all inter-relate/in a way there's some guiding principles of the whole program. I think one of the most important one is we are trying to understand how the information technology and resources that form a community network can really take root in low-income neighborhoods. How do we make use of existing social networks? How do we introduce training/I don't even like the way that makes it sound like kind of technology push or sort of an us-them push training. The whole idea is how do we sort of open this up and make it welcoming and inviting in a way that will attract all segments of the community to want to participate in it. And to help us understand how to make the technology, not just affordable but accessible in a very broad sense by making it/doing a better job of making it fit with a wider socioeconomic context and milieu I guess. Barb: So in your opinion what would/what do you think would be the most significant or problematic access issue relating to your work in this community networking initiative? If you could say one or ... Ann: Yeah I guess I'd say understanding that it is that access is a multi-faceted complex socioeconomic/I'm sorry, socio-technical phenomenon. I think that is one issue in and of itself. Like I said it's not/it's not just throwing computers at people, it's not just training/I mean often access stops at the throwing computers so I think that understanding that training and support has to go along with that. One thing that we found in this first year that we're trying to do a much better job of in the remainder of the program is to complement, reinforce, extend the training by more everyday mundane support and refresher type courses. So we've learned that even formal training you know sort of no matter how intensive or how long it is, it's still just kind of a one-shot thing. And it's definitely not enough. I mean it wouldn't be enough for me for someone to give me a computer, give me to one-day workshops and say ok so for it, be happy, use your computer. So we've been doing individual user-support/people could phone in with problem, we have a computer warehouse where people could come and bring their stuff or come in and ask for assistance. But we're trying to do things in a much more modularized fashion and institute more/in a way more accessible training even, have just regular open lab sessions or refresher courses scattered around town and to have the available as frequently as possible for people to come in at their convenience. And get some follow-up support or refresher type (I,NU). So the/in a way the technology seems to be the easiest part of access, the training, the support, and then as I said the probably the hardest to get a handle on, the most diffused, the hardest to talk about combats/I don't know what is just the more/the issue of making it welcome. ...and attractive. Making it attractive, making it really fit with the complex assemblage of any one individual's work practices, norms, personal preferences, culture attitudes. So you can look at that on an individual level of scale, you can look at it on a community level of scale, so which is what we started out doing with this whole project and with Prairienet of looking at/I mentioned that there were over 400/what are called information providers, organizations that put information up on Prairienet. So on a community level we look at that and say/you could say ok how many of those 400 represent say the business sector? How many of those represent educational services, social services? How many of those really represent organizations that have something to do with needs and capacities of low-income people and more diverse cultures? How many of the individual registered users of Prairienet represent people from different cultures, different languages, people from lower economic brackets? And in looking at that again I think it's the biggest problem is trying to make the training, the services, the technology fit within a broad array of social context. And trying to make the technology be a socioeconomic/a socio-technical phenomenon that will fit and suit the context, the culture, the needs of a wide variety of people.