Randy Stoecker, Professor of Sociology and Research Associate in Urban Affairs at the University of Toledo, Ohio. http://comm-org.utoledo.edu
The other day, while trying to figure out what to write in this paper, I was looking out at the street in front of my house. Standing loud and proud in a no parking zone was an ancient Volkswagen Microbus. Its paint was faded, but it was surprisingly free of the rust that afflicts most automobiles even a few years old in our winter climate where salt is used to keep roads free of ice. As I watched, a young man who was probably half the age of the Microbus, complete with the hippie look required of those who drive such vehicles, opened the driver's side door, threw his backpack in, released the parking break, and proceeded to push the van down the street. At just the right momentum he jumped in the driver's side door, popped the clutch, the engine roared to life, and he drove away.
I wondered about this young man's approach to the technology of the Volkswagen. These old 1960s Volkswagens were what they translated to be--the "people's car"; cheap, unreliable, prone to breakdowns, and intimately involving of their human occupants (remember Herbie the Love Bug?). The particular Microbus-human interaction I witnessed was classic. Here was a driver who probably had little mechanical training, but had a relationship with his Microbus that allowed him to still use it for transportation long after its battery had become useless.
Contrast this with the way many of us approach information and communication technology. For many of us, that magical mystery box sitting on our desk seems like an alien from another world. Yes, it's unreliable and prone to breakdowns, it's getting cheaper, and it intimately occupies our attention for often hours a day, but we are not one with it. It is not the "people's technology." Of course, we must remember that the people's car was originally the product of a brutal genocidal dictatorship, so perhaps there is still hope for the computer. After pondering this young man and his Microbus, it is that hope, and how to achieve it, that I wish to discuss today.
I remember back to the middle 1990s when I was about to embark on a project attempting to link up community organizations throughout the State of Ohio in the . I spoke with a woman who had tried a similar project in another state just a couple years previously, and had failed. She had one sentence of advice that has stayed with me ever since: "Don't let the technology drive the project." Today too many of us ask "what can we do with this technology?" It is the wrong question. The right question is "what technology do we need to accomplish our goals?" The young Microbus driver was not about to be limited by preconceived notions that a functional battery is required to make a car run. We should not allow ourselves to be limited by what the corporations tell us the technology can and cannot do.
Particularly for those of us working in the community sector, the technology often seems like a distraction. For our work is not about technologically-mediated interactions, but fundamentally about face to face relationships. We worry that all this communication and information technology is getting between us and the people we try to serve. We complain about the growing daily wave of e-mail filling our in-boxes, distracting us from our real work. We swear when the computer crashes yet again, just in the middle of trying to enter information into our client database. We waste countless hours searching, sometimes in vain, for information on the Internet that will supposedly improve our practice. Our real work is rebuilding the social fabric of society, empowering disenfranchised community members, restoring neighborhood and family relationships. It is difficult to see why we should be wasting so much time with the technology.
We feel distracted, however, because we are treating the technology as the driver rather than the engine. We let the technology, and the corporations who sell it to us, tell us what we should do with it. What would a VW Microbus look like if it were made by Microsoft? We need to understand, however, that we are the driver. Just like the driver of that Microbus, there may be entire parts of the machine that we do not need, and ways to use it that have not been considered.
At the same time, the technology offers possibilities that haven't existed before. These aren't just technological possibilities, but cultural possibilities as well. When we take responsibility as the driver of the technology, different possibilities emerge. Rather than a distraction, the technology becomes a toolbox. Yes, we still need to invest time in learning how to use the tools in the toolbox, but now we approach the technology with a need and find or modify tools to fill the need. This is the wonderful, amazing thing about the Linux operating system and the software being developed for it. The Linux operating system, and the vast majority of the software written for it, are created using an "open source" philosophy.[1] In contrast to Microsoft, who develops their software in secret and never shares more than a tiny portion of their "code," open source software is openly shared globally in the hopes that it will be developed by a wide cross-section of people who put need and use before profit. And they are succeeding. When you shop for free Linux-based software, you regularly find that the software author created it because they wanted to do something on their computer and found no existing software to meet the task. There are other examples of technology development that is user-driven rather than corporate engineered, such as the free software being created by the Organizers' Collaborative, which includes a database designed for community organizations and soon an antivirus package.[2]
This approach to software development not only creates good software. It also builds relationships, sometimes global relationships. And it does not happen by accident. The Internet itself is a product of the open source philosophy, and has evolved into a medium that is now defining global culture. The Internet is a medium of choice, diversity, and interactivity. On the Internet you can choose not only what information you want, but when you want it. A broad spectrum of standpoints are represented. And on the Internet information can flow multi-directionally. The user can interact with the medium, being an information provider as well as receiver. These qualities of the Internet challenge, in fundamental ways, the hegemony of corporate and government media, top-down decision-making, and one-way communication everywhere. They even challenge historically entrenched practices of community work that have monopolized power, programs and information in the hands of service providers.
The development of a communication and information technology infrastructure that so much emphasizes choice, diversity, and interactivity can, if taken seriously, do much more than provide usable software. But it's not being taken seriously enough. If we look at the community networking movement, or the community technology center model, we are seeing only part of the potential of a user-centered approach.
A community network offers its users the means of electronic communication including chat space, on-line forums, and e-mail. Sometimes they even offer Internet access, though not as often today as when these networks first formed.[3] But the network members are flung far and wide, and we would be hard pressed to call any of them a "community." I manage a community network called COMM-ORG, with 850+ members devoted to advancing the practices of community organizing and development.[4] It is a wonderful resource, and people do indeed build face to face relationships through the network. But to call the network itself a "community" would be a gross overstatement.
A community technology center offers a different kind of potential. Because it is place-based in a physical rather than virtual community, where people interact with each other face to face, share resources, and physically manifest their common identity, the potential for such centers to create face to face relationships should be greatly enhanced. Yet many of these centers operate as little more than high-tech social service centers. The staff runs the programs, conducts the trainings, and creates the rules. The model is just traditional social service with computers added on.[5] There are exceptions, of course, such as the Duke Street Community House in Sunshine, where community technology has become an internationally recognized model of linking community technology and community development.[6] But such programs still stand out because they are exceptions.
We are often caught, then, between letting the technology drive the project or isolating it from the project. Neither is empowering of the communities we work with. What would community information technology look like if it worked like the Internet, emphasizing choice, diversity, and interactivity?
I argue that the Internet is creating and reinforcing a more populist, diversely informed, and participatory public culture. Each of us can now be our own information providers rather than just information receivers. We get access to not just the mainstream media, but all flavors of reporting, from the crazed to the insightful. We may spend more time interacting with other people in chat rooms, on forums, and through e-mail, than we ever spent even face to face before. This makes us less and less patient with social institutions that do not also reflect those cultural attributes. I watch my daughter, who has been raised with the Internet, the VCR, and hands-on museums. She is not content to just watch, and she is not content to not touch. My students today, in great contrast to those a decade ago who would listen with rapt attention and studiously take notes while I lectured for hour upon hour, demand to be engaged with participatory workshops and hands-on experiences.
The undermining of hierarchy being reflected and propelled by Internet culture is also impacting the way us academics approach communities. In marked contrast to the pre-net era, where academics voyeuristically entered communities to tell their tales without any accountability to the people, today we are being guided by the rise of community-based participatory research.
Community-based participatory research goes by a wide variety of other labels such as collaborative research, participatory research, participatory action research, community-based research, and, in Australia, action research. The emphasis is on a relationship-based collaboration between a community organization and university or college faculty and students. It serves community-defined interests rather than academic-defined interests. And it focuses on linking research and action, so that the research is more useful and the action is better informed.
In our early attempts to link up community work, community-based participatory research, and the Internet in the late 1990s, we organized a consortium of university folks and community organizations in the seven largest cities in Ohio - a state that is relatively unique in having seven large cities. Keeping in mind the rule of not letting the technology drive the project, we collaboratively designed a survey asking community organizations what their information needs were and how much access they had to computers and the Internet. What we found was a substantial amount and wide range of information needs, much of which the Internet could even back then provide, but little access to the needed technology. So we set to work trying to close the gap, and in a number of those cites community technology projects sprang up to help poor community members and community organizations gain the needed skills and technology. In the city where I work we created CATNeT, the Coalition to Access Technology and Networking in Toledo. We continued to employ a community-based participatory research approach to the development of CATNeT, doing needs assessments, participatory evaluations, and strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analyses.[7]
Community-Based Participatory Research provides a model for making sure the community drives the technology, rather than the other way around. The process of this model brings people together face to face, builds relationships, and creates programs that can make use of technology on the community's terms. These models are already being promoted by such groups as Compute Professionals for Social Responsibility, particularly through the Participatory Design conferences[8], and the ArsPortalis[9] project.
Of course, the question is how all this can work in a top-down political economic context of dictatorial corporate domination and a welfare state that is used to doing for rather than with. The corporations we must ignore for the moment, for we will never be able to create a democratic economy until we first create a democratic polity. So let's begin by concentrating on how to bring the modern welfare state into this process. Let me be very clear. I'm not opposed to the welfare state. Providing for the common good and the individual welfare is what government is for. The concern arises when government tries to do the welfare state the way government wants, rather than the way the people want. I am also not accusing any level of the Australian government with any unique misdeeds. Indeed, even our liberals in the U.S.(not to be confused with your Liberals who, even though they are conservative here, are often still more liberal than our liberals) espouse a liberal welfare state ideal that imposes welfare rather than provides it. I also want to be clear that the problem is also not the oft-asserted dependency of community members on the welfare state. Both the community organizations and the community members are quite independent, when they are given the opportunity. No, the problem is something else.
Those who provide resources and services - be they service organizations, government ministries, or others who are trying to "help" - typically approach their work deciding for themselves what the poor and disenfranchised need, and then try to give it to them.
Look at how politicians campaign. Each candidate tries to have a better idea. One wants to provide better schooling for kids. Another wants to reduce crime. A third wants to protect the rights of women. A fourth wants to save the environment. None of them proposes a better way to find out what the people, particularly the people who are usually not heard, want. Imagine a politician who campaigned on the platform of "I will be a better listener."
Imagine the social welfare provider who refused to design programs alone, but only with the people the program was to serve. Indeed, simply empowering the people themselves to create their own program could be the program. To the argument that social work is really about social control, because it places experts between the people and the power, the response of progressive social workers can be to remove themselves as barriers and insert themselves as facilitators. They can design programs in collaboration with those who will use them, and find ways to put the users in charge of managing those programs.
Most importantly, imagine the academic who refused to "teach" people and instead organized them to gather their own information, conduct their own analysis, and create their own knowledge. These are the educators who have not just read Paulo Freire[10] but have taken his words to heart. They, too, become facilitators rather than barriers.
This brings us back to the Microbus and the role of information and communication technologies in these contexts. The Microbus was a uniquely flexible piece of technology. Small, compact, and affordable, it was an example of the people's automobile. At the same time, it was a rolling apartment for many 1960s hippies. It was a camper for others. It was a rolling office for others. And particularly in contrast to today's minivans, whose bulk and automatic transmission demand expensive expert assistance when the battery dies, the Microbus could be started with a brisk push down the street and a skilled clutching maneuver.
Can community information technology be an information Microbus? Computers are too complex, you say. The software's too expensive and difficult to understand, you say. Here is where the driver's education program is important. It's not hard to put petrol in your car. It's not hard to put more memory in your computer. Linked to a community of people with similar needs who share information, it's not hard to do basic maintenance on your automobile and learn little tricks like how to start a car with a dead battery. Linked to a community of people doing similar work, with similar information needs, it's not hard to find out what the best software is and how to use it. There are ultimately, three basic steps to linking community information technology and community work.
And remember, most of all, that there is joy as well as labor in reducing alienation from technology. Learning technology in a creative way, beginning with what you want and then figuring out how to make the technology give you what you want, and then engaging others in the same de-alienation process, builds relationships and self-confidence. Those relationships and the technology can both be fun because, remember, both the Microbus and community information technology are the ultimate surfing machines.
[1] See http://www.gnu.org and http://www.linux.org, as well as Randy Stoecker "Cyberspace vs. Face to face: Community Organizing in the New Millennium." forthcoming. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology. An early version of the paper is at: http://comm-org.utoledo.edu/papers2000/cyberorganize.htm
[2] Find the Organizer's Collaborative at http://organizenow.net/
[3] Douglas Schuler. 1996. New Community Networks: Wired for Change. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. Reading, Massachusetts.
[4] see http://comm-org.utoledo.edu/
[5] see Clifton Chow et al., Impact of CTCNet Affiliates: Findings from a National Survey of Usersof Community Technology Centers, July 1998, http://www.ctcnet.org/impact98.htm; also see Ars Portalis Project, "Community Networking Gets Interesting: A Synthesis of Issues, Findings and Recommendations." Strategic Planning Retreat, Sept. 17-19, 2000. Whidbey Institute, Langley, WA. http://www.arsportalis..org/cnet_white.htm
[6] find Duke Street at http://home.vicnet.net.au/~dukest/
[7] see Randy Stoecker and Angela Stuber. 1999. "Building an Information Superhighway of One's Own: A Comparison of Two Approaches." Research in Politics and Society, Vol. 7.
[8] Randy Trigg and Andrew Clement. 2000. Participatory Design. Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. http://www.cpsr.org/program/workplace/PD.html
[9] Richard Civille. 2002. Improving Community Network Practice. DIAC-02 Pattern Resource. http://diac.cpsr.org/cgi-bin/diac02/pattern.cgi/public?pattern_id=143
[10] Paulo Freire, 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York, Continuum.
September 8, 2002