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Potlatch reflection 1: Community
Date: Tue, 1 July 1997
To: oiiall@gsn.org
From: ferdi@tigger.jvnc.net (Ferdi Serim)
Subject: Potlatch reflection 1: Community
Hi folks,
What a whirlwind of activities, ideas and people! I heard last night that 8,000 is a more accurate tally for attendance here, and watching the equivalent of the total population of an entire small town
course through this labyrinth building makes visible a fact of life on the Internet: no matter how many people you come to know, no matter how many introductions fly by on this listserv, there are still a vast number of
"strangers" that can swallow up all your acquaintances at the mere turn of a corner.
It makes activities such as riding an escalator, so easy and graceful during the two preconference days, potentially catastrophic, as the river of riders backs up in the space between floors and both those being
deposited into too little space and those still relentlessly approaching from above realize there is nowhere to go. Now I know how a packet feels when the 'net is slow!
It also reinforces a stereotype. One could believe
that for all intents and purposes the Internet is populated by white people (I once heard it said that the Internet allows you to communicate with well to do whites all over the world). While it is obvious in small group
conversations that there is incredible diversity represented here (as in people from all nations, of all races, religions, etc), just as the land looks different from the air, the contours of our population take on a disturbing
uniformity as we flow by in groups of small thousands.
Lest there be misunderstanding from my sharing of these observations, I'm merely reporting an effect, rather than speculating or judging the cause. This is
important, because as individuals I'd be willing to wager that the proportion of tolerant, accepting beings would be higher inside the convention center than it is back in our respective homes.
If anything, it is more about socio-economic status than race, religion, gender or any other descriptor. It's costly to attend wonderful workshops like NECC. Some of us have already accepted in our lives the ongoing
necessity of buying a new computer every several years from here on out. We've come to terms with mentally budgeting $500 to $700 per year, so that every 3 to 4 years we can catch up with the requirements that give us ongoing
access to emerging technological potentials. To decide to add a similar figure for traveling to national, regional or international conferences is a difficult choice for many people who don't find sponsorship from their
employer or other bartered sources.
But our lack of diversity is also about "otherness". Seattle is a city many people approach with positive curiosity. We may have heard that it's ranked
among the top places to live, that it rains everyday (almost true some times of year), that the people here are enthusiastic about their choice to live here and protecting the environment that attracts them, that it is the
caffein capital of the universe, that it leads the per capita sales of sunglasses (no one can remember where they put the last pair they bought!). What is also unusual is the presence of homeless people, and the city's handling
of this fact. Unlike New York, which has successfully hidden its problem from entire areas of the city frequented by tourists, Seattle seems to have an acceptance that is disconcerting to first time visitors.
Not wanting
to invoke "Andy's hook", I'll reel this conversation back to Internet implications just a little further on...the visceral reaction of discomfort I've experienced and observed in my companions as we've walked to
various locations away from the conference center, when confronted with the human results of what ever forces have led people to the lives we see (we are, after all, walking through their living room), they force us to confront
our feelings about poverty, race, disability and a host of other
issues we are far more comfortable relegating to our imaginings of Calcutta or other previously "remote" locations and cultures.
These folks
simply aren't visible on the Internet. Even though we can't see our email correspondents, perhaps they are "more like us" than we'd be willing to admit, country of origin notwithstanding. Are we really ready for an
Internet that reflects the world we live in? Even if we are, it won't happen without careful, deliberate, sustained effort. It's nice to care about equity, but it's better to act to make it a reality.
As I explained in
my previous posting, one of my three wishes for thi conference is to develop new understandings that can help me increase equity in the way technology is used in my community. I carefully chose these words, because of one
workshop I experienced yesterday. Bernajean Porter conducted a transformational session entitled "Community-Based Planning: Leading Out Change With Technology and Learning", which Art Wolinsky and Janet Murray of the
OII family also attended. (OII has been traveling as a family, first to LA for the Milken Family Foundation conference, where we conducted workshops last week, and now onto NECC...it sure beats Disneyland!)
As a closing,
we were asked to share our most important learning of the day. What I learned from Bernajean's workshop is that unless you design benefits for *everyone* from the very beginning, your plan for improving learning through
technology or any other intervention is destined not to be sustained. That's only the top of a long list of new ideas I got from this workshop. Luckily, her notes are on the conference proceedings CD, so my hasty scrawl won't
be my only backup. In her work moving communities
forward, Ms. Porter has become adept at designing and conducting large scale community meetings which build shared vision, and align people for action. This is among the most
difficult, most important and least understood work that is required if we truly believe that technology is just a tool, that the wires and boxes are useful only in so far as they help real people in real life. Our work is
about people.
All of us have experienced the traditional means of planning: top down, bottom up, representative groups or pilot projects. None of these techniques have worked, if we are honest about it. Bernajean
understands why, and shared with us her learnings about how groups/communities function, and how to assist them into moving ahead to craft a shared vision, build the high level of willingness to work to bring the vision to
reality. As she puts it, "when you finish planning, you should be on GO, not on SELL".
I'm rethinking my approach to what goes on in my classroom as a result. From my intro posting, you may remember I came here
with only three agenda items. The desire to discover effective collaborative tools on the WWW rings hollow if I can't attract participation of those currently "outside", if the entire game isn't designed from the
beginning to provide benefits to students, parents, people without children, teachers, administrators, health workers, local businesspeople...yes, the entire village.
To summarize, Bernajean shared three essential points for designing strategies to build local leadership:
1. Involve large groups of people. Look at the influence web, and plan events to touch different parts of the
system in different ways.
2. Benefits are planned for everyone (see above)
3. Plan for the amount of commitment that will need to be generated, to unleash the energy and responsibility.
The scary news is
that it will take from 4 to 7 years for this process to complete a cycle. There is always the complete assurance that things will stay the same (or get worse) by doing nothing. But there is also the complete faith that by
starting down this road, possibilities will be opened that have remained sealed for two centuries or more in my town. And this work is shared work, so the road will become increasingly more collegial and supportive once it is
begun.
Make no mistake. The seemingly esoteric knowledge Bernajean Porter reported to our community is not a mass consumption item at this point. Just as each of the past dozen years was proclaimed "the year of the
network" until the Internet rolled over such pronouncements like a tsunami, the idea that community building is the foundation to technology implementation is years
ahead of common consciousness. Yet 15 or more years of
learning in this field have already prepared a rich environment of experiences from which we can draw.
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