Untitled - socium.ge

The US community technology movement 333locally and regionally have caused redundancy and prevented the movementfrom leveraging its collective experience nationally. In 2000, the University ofMichigan released a study of CTCs and their efforts to share lessons learned,aptly titled Surely Someone Knows How To Do This: Organizing InformationFlows of Community Technology Centers (Sandor and Scheuerer, 2000). Theirfindings included the need for more networking opportunities and betteraccess to documentation of others’ practices.Third, the community technology movement currently faces huge challengesof achieving scale and sustainability. How should we address the digitaldivide in the many places that do not benefit from the existence of CTCs?Should we devise a way to create CTCs in these places? Replication of thosemodels that have demonstrated success is one possibility, but has alwaysseemed better in theory than it has worked in practice. Locally based organizationswork because they are rooted in their local context; this makes suchmodels difficult to transfer. Or should we construct mechanisms that enableexisting CBOs and other local organizations to build the capacity necessary toaddress the technology gap? One vision is that of CTCs playing key roles asthe community institutions of the future, functioning as gathering places, traininginstitutions, and family learning centers. Another vision would positionCTCs as stopgap measures, functioning to fill a present void only until existinginstitutions can gain sufficient capacity to address the technology gapthemselves.The most realistic way for CTCs to achieve scale and sustainability isthrough partnerships with existing institutions such as CBOs, schools, andlibraries. Such partnerships will help to institutionalize the goals of thecommunity technology movement and enable it to reach many more people.The community technology movement is also mature enough to have generateda set of intermediary organizations and trade associations. These organizationscan help to create scale by documenting and disseminating bestpractices, educating funders about the problem of the digital divide andcommunity-based solutions, and connecting with other community-basedmovements that have complementary goals.Fourth, the community technology movement has yet to fully align its effortswith the community building movement, an interrelated and parallel movement,which seeks to revitalize distressed communities, that has emerged overthe past half-century. Many community technology practitioners are onlybeginning to situate their work within the context of much broader efforts tocatalyze community change. Analogously, many community building practitionersare only now considering how to incorporate information and communicationstechnology into their community outreach activities. In Bridging theOrganizational Divide: Toward a Comprehensive Approach to the DigitalDivide (Kirschenbaum and Kunamneni, 2001), researchers at PolicyLink