Abstract
The Oakland Community Networking Project (OCNP) is a research project jointly sponsored by the Interactive University Project and the Institute of Urban & Regional Development at the University of California, Berkeley. This paper gives a brief overview of the goals of the OCNP and the components of community technology literacy that we are developing in low income urban neighborhoods. Challenges faced and lessons learned are touched upon, as well as the role of participatory design and its impacts on this project.
The Oakland Community Networking Project
The Oakland Community Networking Project (OCNP), supported by a grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, engages the University of California as a technical partner in the work of community development and empowerment in four of the most economically disenfranchised neighborhoods of Oakland, California. OCNP goals are three-fold:
Unlike many "traditional" community networks, which seek to provide access to online networking to large numbers of participants, the OCNP is more narrowly focused on creating in-depth Internet knowledge and experience among working community development professionals. Once this technology literacy based is established, we then explore together the circumstances and methods by which Internet tools can be used by communities diverse in economics, education, and ethnicity.
OCNP staff provide extensive training and technical support to the staff people of community building agencies in order to build among them a foundation of technology literacy. Technology literacy is more than just knowing how to use the computer; it is experiential knowledge from having traveled the Internet and understanding how best to use networked tools to communicate and promote community goals. We pursue three strategies for working with three unique community groups: staff of Oakland Public Library branches, staff of community service agencies, and community residents serving as staff interns at community-based organizations as part of a city sponsored job skills and empowerment program.
Components of community technology literacy development
Training is the first component necessary to establish a baseline of technical literacy among our four library branches and eleven community-based organizations. In some instances, we started from ground zero, working with staff who had never used a computer before. In most cases, people had never before experienced formal computer training. Much of their computer experience was gained via seat-of-the pants methods. Basic computing concepts, functions of hardware components, tricks and short-cuts were missing from their repertoire. These topics were greatly appreciated when introduced through OCNP training sessions. The first year of this project was spent in training - from basic computer skills and relevant office applications to web site design, graphics, and html programming.
The second component, incorporated and integrated into the first, involves experience. Exploring the Internet in order to effectively design a web presence for one’s organization is something that one cannot get by listening to an instructor or reading any number of books. This knowledge must come through direct, hands-on experience. We often call this "practice" or "play," but its importance should be emphasized. This component is often difficult to implement among busy, over-worked community service staff. They, like the rest of us, don't have time for activities that feel exploratory or extraneous at the moment, even when eventual gains are imagined and anticipated. This tension leads to a third, crucially essential, component to the development of technology literacy, relevance.
That relevance plays a key role in the successful adoption and application of both the computer and the network to the tasks and goals of busy working people is not a new finding. Our work confirms the importance of relevance as it relates to both the computer and its programs as tools, and to the information resources available on the Internet. This seemingly obvious observation proved to be a significant culture shock, however, to OCNP staff. Students and staff of a major research university not only take our access to the Internet as a given, we hold very dear the concepts of exploration to achieve knowledge and experimentation as a valid, if not sacred, workplace methodology. We find these attitudes to be not as pervasive in the work lives of non-profit agencies, who are struggling daily to meet the basic needs of their clients.
Given that a major goal of our grant is to experiment with Internet tools such as chat rooms, mailing lists, perhaps even MUDs and MOOs, we have had major perceptual and relevance hurdles to overcome. We met this challenge by first engaging our partners in activities with relevance and immediate gains. For example, we helped them move their client address cards into an Access database and taught them Microsoft Word and Excel to more quickly develop grant proposals. At some point in the world view of each individual and each agency, the computer then became accepted as an important and relevant tool to the work of the agency. This plateau seems to take much of the skepticism and fear away from Internet exploration activities.
Finally, we see sustainability as a significant component for continued use of technology in an organization. The goal of sustainability is achieved when computers and the Internet are fully integrated into the daily work of community agencies. Sustainability implies that both the human and the technology infrastructure continue to grow and be maintained, and the organization makes active plans to do so, with or without outside assistance.
Working with public librarians
The role of Oakland Public Library staff has been viewed as essential to bringing Internet technologies and access to Oakland’s low income populations. Indeed, our HUD grant proposal outlines a unique set of goals for library capacity building that includes: preparing librarians to support Internet services for patrons, enhancing their search techniques and experience with online information resources, making their own community-specific collections more widely available via the Internet, and promoting literacy and enriching after-school youth activities at the libraries.
In practice, we find our work with public librarians to be continually challenged by institutional inertia and a unique mix of professional cultural attitudes and fears. Many communities are today putting great expectations on local library systems as agents of Internet access and skills development. Are these expectations well placed, valid, or realistic? The roles of public libraries and librarians in bringing new technologies to the masses is fertile ground for a rich and complex set of research questions.
Communication or content ?
Every OCNP partner buys in to the idea of a web presence for agency promotion. They also see their web sites as a means to reach out and expand their circle of contributors. Most subscribe to the idea that web authoring is a great delivery vehicle for enhanced literacy and youth empowerment. We are now at the stage of exploring our use of Internet tools to communicate and to collaborate. Much of our current conversation, though, focuses on questions of content:
Those of us involved in the OCNP partnership have engaged in discussions of the evolution of an Oakland Community Information Infrastructure (OCII). In this vision of the future, Oakland’s diverse community will access online information resources and possess the skills and knowledge to deploy and employ advanced technologies. All Oaklanders will create and use advanced tools to communicate with one another about their businesses, communities, schools, curricula, art, environmental issues, and collaborations.
Evolution of OCNP’s Internet tools "experiments"
In June of 1998 representatives from all OCNP partners gathered at the UC Berkeley campus for a Community Building Partners Conference. On a live network connection, each partner showed off their newly-developed web site and shared web development stories and tips. We also broke up into small groups to brainstorm how we could use the Internet to communicate and collaborate about specific community issues. These issues had been consistently repeated to us during every needs assessment meeting or design conference we attended. The issues galvanizing all four neighborhoods and all OCNP partners are:
Challenges
The biggest challenges we face fall into two categories. The first category involves multiple cultures. The proverbial blind men describing an elephant adequately evokes the challenges facing a partnership of several University departments, the City of Oakland, the US Department of HUD, a public library system, multiple community agencies, students, executive directors, faculty, and staff. The cultural "mix" includes the university culture, technology, community, city, library, student, community activist, and the more deep-seated cultures of language, age, gender, ethnicity, and income. In such an environment, everyone’s assumptions must be questioned, and ongoing dialog is an absolute necessity. I would like to see a cultural anthropologist join our team to study the process as we explore the use of technology-based tools and paradigms to bridge some of these cultural chasms.
Constant seismic activity is my phrase for the second category of challenges in community networking. Community seismic activity shares traits with geologic seismic activity. It happens without warning, usually when least expected. It can uproot long-standing entities. It is pretty much constant. You can never predict the magnitude of the activity. You can never adequately plan or prepare for the after effects. It is not advisable to be caught flat-footed.
Two of our collaborating agencies and several agency programs have gone out of business. Most agencies undergo constant staff and leadership changes, funds run out, organizations restructure, and key individuals come and go. As a relatively stable partner attempting to work with many agencies, this is where I have found the active and iterative processes of participatory design to be crucially helpful tools. Detailed project plans change from week to week. Flexibility and comfort with ambiguity are essential elements of progress.
Lessons learned so far . . .
We have learned how to moderate the increasingly ubiquitous hype about the Internet. We have been very careful to not promote computers or the worldwide web as a panacea to community problems. We have frequently been forced to an extremely critical assessment of our own assumptions about the uses of technology, as we try to counter the unrealistic messages conveyed by TV and other media.
The effort to plant, nurture, and grow staff computer literacy and development is time well spent.
There is no one best content or structural model for all situations. The best we can achieve is a process model that enhances our abilities to respond to constant changes.
No one individual has all the expertise, knowledge, or experience to implement a successful community program. This has been a particularly poignant lesson for Berkeley students, who have been groomed and trained to achieve every goal on their individual merits.
The participatory design model works in community networking projects. It gives us a built-in collaborative process. PD enhances the ability to think laterally, and to act locally. The iterative process inherent in PD accommodates changing circumstances and ensures error detection and course correction.
About the author
Tamara Sturak is the Project Manager for the Oakland Community Networking Project. She has a degree in English literature from the University of California and twenty years of professional computing experience. Tamara has focused her work on enhancing the usability of computers and computing systems for novices and exploring ways people from diverse field, communities and perspectives can collaborate on mutually relevant goals and activities.