US community technology specialist Terry Grunwald explains how the the Community Technology Toolbox has grown into a Garage - and how you can use it to tune-up your strategy. More here on Terry's taxonomy of the contents of the garage.

As the Community Technology (CT) movement mushrooms, the small toolbox of models once known simply as community access networks, community technology centers, community web sites, and training classes has grown exponentially. Today, we have models that range from community asset mapping and circuit riders to laptop lending and virtual volunteers.

The little toolbox, in fact, has now grown into a rather messy and poorly organized garage. Rather than signing on to a single model, community leaders today are faced with the tougher challenge of selecting a balanced and somewhat larger tool chest of mix-and-match CT options. Decision-making is much more complex, so what’s to do?

First, let’s peek into the CT garage and take a tour, shall we?

As overwhelming as this wealth of choices can be, it also offers immense opportunities:

• to help community leaders think more strategically about how Community Technology can be applied to local problem-solving

• to promote wider participation and "buy-in" by diverse and excluded populations for whom some of the new CT tools have been developed
  
  
• to customize these tools to meet specialized local needs and capitalize on local assets (and then share them with other CT practitioners)
  
  
• to promote more integrated strategies based on partnerships and collaborations

Choosing and applying these tools presents a number of challenges as well:

• Disempowerment. Since the earliest days of the CT movement, tool selection has been the province of technophiles rather than community activists. Savvy grassroots leaders who have no problem making their voices heard on issues like affordable housing, childcare, and education, often feel uncomfortable around technology issues. In some cases, they feel just plain dumb. Consequently they give up power --to "boxes and wires" enthusiasts or increasingly to mainstream economic developers pushing a high tech corporate agenda.

• "The Candy Store Syndrome" Community leaders are rarely aware of all the tools available. Therefore when they see a high profile model - in their own state or region, they determine they want some of that "shiny candy" - whether or not it makes sense for their own community. There is no single jack-of-all-tools, but all these models gain credibility by touting themselves as * the * solution to the Digital Divide. However, the right tool for the job depends on local needs, capacity, and resources. What works in a thriving university community may not translate to a small town in a depressed rural area.

• The "Silos". We spotted those silos in our tour of the CT garage, and unfortunately they reflect the landscape of most communities where technology resources tend to cluster intra-institutionally around discrete funding streams. Public schools close their media centers at the end of the school day. Colleges use videoconference facilities for distance learning classes but little else. Cooperative extension has learning labs for their own staff, but not local citizens. Many leaders, in fact, don’t know these resources exist within their own community.

• No one is responsible for a 360Ÿ view. Public access sites - with slightly different target groups are sprouting up - often within blocks of each other but too often they no time or inclination to communicate with one another. The institutional "silos" don’t publicize their resources and tend to keep a low profile. Businesses may have facilities or a pool of potential employee-volunteers, but are never asked to share them. There is rarely anyone with a community-wide perspective in his or her job description. No one is aware of - much less inventorying all the tools.

Need help? Here are 7 guidelines to improve community decision-making around technology:

1. Learn the CT Toolbox. Unfortunately, a formal CT tool catalog doesn’t yet exist, but check out the sidebar to see the basic categories of public interest IT models now available. Realize that this list is dynamic with new tools constantly evolving.
   
   
2. Survey your local CT garage. Know the resources and tools that already exist or are planned for your local community - and not just the CTCs, libraries, broadband infrastructure, and computer training courses at the community college. Dig deeper to find the technology champions, potential sources of computer donations, tutoring programs that use e-mentors, and local corporations with volunteer programs. See our checklist of CT building blocks.
   
   
3. Map your CT Assets. Use GIS techniques to create a visual display of access sites, computer labs, training programs and other geographic based assets - whether or not they are currently open to the public. If your resources are limited, see if a local college will take it on as a class project. Use maps and surveys to identify untapped resources within the "silos", underserved areas and gaps, duplications in service, and opportunities for collaboration.
   
   
4. Empower citizens to select appropriate CT tools based on local needs. Community support and "buy-in" to tech initiatives evolve naturally with participation in early decision-making. Grassroots leaders need to connect IT solutions with their own lives and dreams for their community. Community practitioners need to grasp the opportunities to enhance and extend existing local initiatives. One effective way to build awareness of the CT garage and enable non-techies to understand the trade-offs between competing options is our Community Technology Game . Developed by colleagues David Wilcox and Drew Mackie of Making the Net Work, the Game is a down-to-earth exercise that enables average citizens to deliberate about the pros and cons of implementing various CT tools.
   
   
5. Find out what works - and what doesn’t. The landscape of the community technology movement is strewn with short-lived projects that seemed to make sense at first but turned out to be more complicated than expected. "Let’s collect used computers and distribute them to schools and nonprofits." is one such "quick-fix" tool. "Let’s recruit some volunteers to staff the center." is another. For every model, seek out the best practices and lessons learned. When possible, buy the battle-scared pioneers a beer and probe for the real-life problems that didn’t show up in the case studies.
   
   
6. Seek a balanced approach. Don’t make all your CT investments in one section of the garage. Infrastructure and hardware tend to be high-powered vacuums and suck up available funding - often all of it. The money saved by waiting a year to deploy broadband could be used to host web sites for local nonprofits, do a community storytelling project, and provide e-commerce support for local businesses. You will be building demand for telecommunications services and … who knows, next year there could well be more affordable broadband alternatives available from the private sector - or heightened interest in establishing a local cooperative ISP. Investments in computer workstations need to be balanced with staffing, training, technical assistance, awareness building, facility maintenance, and program development. And the most overlooked CT investment is a community tech planner - that person with the 360Ÿ perspective who suggests more efficient use of existing resources, creates incentives to open up the institutional silos, facilitates collaborations, builds "growing the pie" coalitions, and keeps his or her eyes open for new tools that "fit’ local needs
   
   
7. Participate in the CT networks. Stay current with the latest tools (many of, which are new twists or innovative ways to address the problems encountered in older models) through discussion lists, e-newsletters, web casts, and conferences. Pay special attention to the techno-realists that speak from solid experience and activate your hype-antenna.

Selecting the right tool for the job is getting more and more complex, as the choices continue to grow. Today a garage; tomorrow Home Depot? But remember that Community Technology is ultimately not about the technology and what it can do, but about the needs of communities and the ways technology can be used strategically to meet those needs.

Terry Grunwald
May 2001