Gary Chapman: Creating E-Community

Important lessons learned from the information technology have-nots

Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the graduate school of public policy at the University of Texas in Austin, and associate director of UT's Texas Telecommunications Policy Institute. He is a widely published author and editor, and writes "Digital Nation," a syndicated newspaper column on technology and society. Here he recounts the surprising results of his organization's efforts to bring technology to the so-called "have-nots."

Educom Review: Tell us a little bit about the 21st Century Project.

Gary Chapman: The 21st Century Project began as an attempt to think about what we might do with the peace dividend, particularly for information technologies. The evidence was mounting that the Cold War was winding down -- this was in the early 1990s -- and we thought there were some new opportunities to move computer research away from defense dependency and toward some new goals. So we tried to lay out what some of those new goals might be. It soon became clear to us that one of the principal questions that would have to be addressed is, who gets to decide what those new goals will be? And so the project began to focus on how to get a wider set of people involved in defining long-term goals for science and technology policy, particularly communications and information technologies. So that's what we explored for a number of years, trying to figure out whether or not there were mechanisms that could be initiated to expand the constituency of people who are consulted on those kinds of issues.

ER: And how did it lead you into what you are doing now?

Chapman: Well, things changed rather dramatically in Washington, D.C., in November of 1994 when the Congress became majority Republican and the agenda of the science and technology committees changed rather drastically. A lot of people who were working in the public interest community felt they had to reorient their work to local community issues, because there was less opportunity for influencing national science and technology policy. And that's what we wound up doing -- turning our attention toward low-income communities in Austin, particularly a community known as the Eleventh and Twelfth Street Corridor, which is on the east side of Highway 35 in Austin. It's a community with a median annual income of about $6,000 and very low computer penetration, existing in the midst of one of the most vibrant high-tech centers in the world. So we started working on the project to explore what it would mean to bring information technologies to that community and how these technologies might be received -- whether or not there were any conditions in that community that would make their reception different than in more affluent communities. So that work has gone on since 1994 and contributed to the development of a community network called "Austin Free-Net" and the beginnings of a new -- and we hope significant -- model for introducing the Internet and computers to low-income neighborhoods.

ER: I think in your Technology Review article about a year ago, if I remember correctly, you mentioned the ridicule that followed [former Speaker of the House Newt] Gingrich's proposal to subsidize a laptop for every poor person in the U.S. What would you think about that now?

Chapman: Well, most people who heard that proposal thought it was kind of extreme and a little bit foolish. Michael Kinsley wrote in The New Yorker that providing laptops for poor citizens in the United States would cost the U.S. Treasury $40 billion, which was clearly not something that the U.S. government was prepared to consider.

ER: Was this before Kinsley went to Microsoft?

Chapman: Yes, I think he was working for The New Yorker at the time. On the other hand, some people -- including ourselves -- thought Gingrich's idea was at least a contribution to the debate about equity in the use of these technologies: that at least the Speaker of the House was raising an important issue, that we risk developing a society of so-called haves and have-nots in the information age, and that this is a problem significant enough to capture the attention of the top-level policy makers in Washington, D.C. So in that respect it had a positive effect, even if the recommendation itself was not something that was likely to generate much movement.

ER: Tell us more about how the project is actually working now.

Chapman: Well, like all projects of this sort, the actual activity is somewhat dictated by opportunities of funding and lessons learned and the receptivity of the constituency that you are working with and so on, so it has changed over the years in a variety of different ways. We began with a research project to just figure out what the level of technological awareness was in this community and we soon moved to a sort of richer understanding of how these technologies would be received. We began to discover that one of the most important lessons was that this community was particularly interested in seeing itself reflected in the Internet resources that we were asking them to access.

ER: So they wouldn't have particular interest in the global nature of the World Wide Web. Is that what you are saying?

Chapman: Yes, the sort of global marketplace of ideas and shopping and things like that were not typically appealing to the people we were working with. They were more interested in the kinds of things that were salient within their own communities. And of course those resources were very meager, almost non-existent, because of the character of the World Wide Web. So it became important for us to figure out ways for these people to get their own content online so they could feel as if they were participants and not merely observers. We quickly moved to a strategy of developing ways for them to get content online, such as increasing the use of digital cameras to get pictures of them onto the Net, developing a system where they could create Web pages without having to learn HTML, and things like that. And that was a lot of work and took a lot of thinking. We were moving sort of two steps forward and one step back for a couple of years.

ER: Where is it now? What is the level of enthusiasm among people in the community?

Chapman: We continue to work with a nonprofit organization in Austin called the Austin Learning Academy, which is a program for both parents and kids to continue their education. For the kids, it's after school programs; for the parents, it's adult learning during the day and in the evenings. This is a group of about 150 low income, largely minority families -- somewhere in the neighborhood of five to six hundred people -- and the enthusiasm among these people is very high, and they have taken to the technology in ways that are very encouraging to us. But the lessons we have learned about them needing to see themselves mirrored in the Internet are still important right now. So we began with putting public access terminals into all the public libraries in Austin and focusing a lot of attention on the library branches that were in the low-income neighborhoods. Then the next phase was to put computers into places other than libraries, such as recreation centers and churches and community policing centers and schools and so on. The public access model was another of the important lessons learned -- that this was a more viable way of introducing the technology to the community instead of fighting for public subsidies for personal computer ownership.

ER: Do you have anywhere close to enough money to do what you want to do?

Chapman: So far money has not been a terrible problem -- it is still a problem, but not an insurmountable one. We have received a number of significant grants, including one large grant from the Department of Commerce at the federal level, and we've received support from the community, from corporations, and from the City of Austin. The main problem that has been a stumbling block from a logistical point of view is that we have lots and lots of volunteers who are very technically skilled. But the missing element is the ability to manage those volunteers well and I think that's an experience that's being repeated across the country among other community networks. There's a lot of interest on the part of technically skilled people to help low-income and unskilled people, but there's not a lot of experience in being able to manage those skills very well. So that's one of the problems we've run into, and I think we need to pay more attention to that -- how we bring skills to these communities in a way that is both rewarding and effective for the people who are volunteering those skills.

ER: The volunteers you are talking about sound like they are mainly outside the community, and is the problem of management sort of a logistical problem getting them to a particular place as they are needed?

Chapman: Yes, that's part of it -- just trying to apply the volunteers in an effective way. But another problem is that there are large differences in cognitive styles and ways of teaching between these communities so it becomes a problem of teaching the volunteers how to deal with unskilled users. Often you find that very skilled users take a lot for granted about how people learn and so we need to have much more intensive research about how we can get highly skilled technical people to understand the difficulties and hesitations of people who are less skilled.

ER: Say something about the skills within the community as opposed to outsiders coming in. Do people within the community teach their fellow community members?

Chapman: Yes. We've made it a condition for free access to classes in how to use the Internet that the people who are enrolled in those classes make a commitment to teaching other people in the community what they've learned. So we are trying to use this as a kind of seed mechanism to get a core group of people in the low-income neighborhood who are technically skilled so that they can pass on that knowledge to other people.

ER: How do you think this would scale into a larger project, or how would it extrapolate into other kinds of poor environments -- high rise ghettos in Detroit or something?

Chapman: There are a lot of similar things going on around the country, and we talk to those people a lot. IBM is introducing computers in public housing projects in Oakland, California. We have fairly good connections with Charlotte, North Carolina, which is doing some similar stuff. Community networks all over the country have changed their focus over the last few years from being low-cost entry points to the Internet to serving low-income residents -- mostly because they can't compete in the price for Internet access with large carriers. So there are similar experiments going on all over the country. Most of them are pretty much bootstrap kinds of operations and they tend not to be focused on research the way ours has been. We know they are experiencing a lot of the same kinds of things that we've identified, but they haven't formalized those experiences. That's what we are trying to do.

ER: Where do you think that will lead?

Chapman: Well, I think that it just fits into a sort of a puzzle. For instance when the Rand Corporation called for universal access to e-mail, one of our responses was that that may be a long-term public policy goal but that the social issues and complications of providing low-income citizens with e-mail are more than just access to the technology; our research had shown that there are environmental and social factors involved with that -- the idea of subsidizing computers for poor people was misdirected, because of some of these things. So that's the kind of thing that I think we contribute to the debate.

ER: The idea of subsidizing computers is misdirected? Why?

Chapman: Yes. Just simply handing computers over to people of limited means is not the right approach -- there are all kinds of other factors involved. And to a certain extent this has been borne out by the studies that other researchers have done on the character of the Internet-using population. You know, there is a low participation among African-Americans, for example, across income levels. And you have to start asking the question, why would that be the case? And one of the reasons might be that there is little in cyberspace to reflect their community or reflect their concerns, and so the content issue becomes more important than people might expect. So things like that are contributions to the national consideration of the social justice issues, about whether or not to deploy the technology in particular ways, if you understand what I mean.

ER: Earlier you said that you originally expected more interest in bringing the outside world to these people, and were somewhat surprised that the focus turned more inward.

Chapman: Yes, that issue has been kind of controversial among some of the researchers, about whether or not these communities are all that different from other communities. As I said, we experienced the sense that people in these communities weren't interested in looking at Time-Warner's Pathfinder site, for example, or some of the things that we might have thought were interesting for them to look at. Of course, the kids were interested in looking at things that all kids are interested in looking at -- sports, celebrities and that sort of thing. But we tended to see a more community-oriented kind of identification, particularly among adults, than of looking at the Internet as a global repository of unlimited information. They tended to want to see the kinds of things that were relevant to them, and the boundaries of that were much closer to their own community than we expected.

For example, in one of our first training sessions we had these people sitting in front of a bunch of computers, and we were showing them sites that we thought were interesting, which tended to be things that were scattered all over the country or the world. And one of the questions that came up was that there was a controversial school bond vote, which this community was very concerned about. That was sort of a hot issue in the community at the time, and so the first question that came up was: How do we find information about this school bond vote? And we had to sort of scratch our heads and say, well, gee, is there information about that because it is not something that we had anticipated. And eventually we did find that information, and then the next step was, well, how do we tell everyone what we think about this school bond? And that was kind of a breakthrough.

We discussed this in our article in Technology Review last year, where we said the ultimate step is what we call "There's gotta be a way." And that was the stuff we were looking for, the kind of breakthrough that people would say, "There's gotta be a way for me to say what I think." Or to make something happen, using this technology, instead of just being a spectator. And that's the sort of thing we were trying to encourage and promote. And typically the trigger was some local issue, something that they were concerned about, that they were engaged with already in some form or fashion but they wanted to transfer to cyberspace.

ER: And how would you put into words the biggest lesson learned?

Chapman: I think it's just a matter of bringing life experience to this technology and to this communications medium, which is somewhat different than the way it is typically used in more affluent communities. And one of the things we learned, which we found very interesting, and I think it is distinct about the way this technology is used in low-income communities, is that the networking that was going on tended to assume and take on the character of the work that was going on in the community already, whereas on the west side of town, in more affluent communities, the character of cyberspace was really more sort of diverse and individual and sort of idiosyncratic in a way, if you know what I mean. So we've tended to say that in more affluent communities cyberspace is literally just the aggregate of whatever it is that individuals are interested in looking at and doing. But in our experience in low income communities, cyberspace tends to be much more closely allied between technology and environment and sociological phenomena, or tied to what's going on in the community itself.

ER: Is there any other point that you would like to make?

Chapman: Well, I guess the only other thing is that these kinds of efforts that are going on around the country need support, and they need support from a policy level and they need support at the local level. One of the issues that is facing community networks right now is that there is uncertainty about their tax status and because they are in the telecommunications services there is a possibility the IRS may not consider such efforts educational and that they may then be taxed as service companies -- in other words that their so-called 501(c)(3) status may be jeopardized. That is the kind of thing that would kill a lot of these projects if the IRS interpretation goes against these organizations. That is the sort of issue people need to pay attention to, to make sure that from a policy point of view these organizations are nurtured and supported.

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