|
Linking Up Villages offers technical assistance and support for
community residents and organizations interested in developing
various types of community based networks. In this way we help to
connect residents to each other and to local institutions and
resources. We also help community groups to develop an information
infrastructure with which to catalogue and expand on the resources
and links within their community and to develop coalitions among the
various organizations providing community services.
One of the primary ways in which we offer this assistance to
community groups is by aiding in the construction of a technology
plan. The purpose of this technology plan is to develop a blueprint
for getting the services of the organizations within the community
online and to make the residents of that community aware of the
resources available to them. More importantly, we offer residents a
technological resource that enables them to communicate with other
residents so that they can develop and produce their own programs,
services and information gathering activities. Programs and projects
are not sustainable unless they foster a broader dialogue. The
dialogues and forums for discussion that we can help initiate are
one means by which the residents of a community can analyze and
develop perspectives which can address the longterm issues they
face. In a rapidly changing society, communities need the ability to
interpret and discuss the changes going on around them in a way that
promotes renewal and ongoing development.
As part of the technology plan, we collaborate with
Imani Information Systems to offer
a product entitled Multi-User Sessions in Community (MUSIC). MUSIC
is a web-based computer network and shared database developed by Dr.
Alan Shaw, President of Imani Information Systems. The system is
modeled on a community building, neighborhood driven approach to
technology that gives its users an opportunity to collaborate
together as they build and share virtual spaces (rooms and
buildings) within an online community. Dr. Shaw developed this
approach and the theoretical underpinnings to
it in his research and dissertation at the MIT Media Lab (http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~acs).
The MUSIC network helps users put information technology to work in
a context that is very social, very local and very easy to use. It
is a tool for collecting information and organizing programs run by
community organizations and neighborhood residents. MUSIC can be
used by community members to post bulletin notices and
announcements, to send messages to one another, to engage in
discussions, chats, access online and private calendars, and to save
files within a shared database. (See System
Features).
The MUSIC network is being used at several sites around the
country. Some of these sites are single independent community groups
while others are organizations with multiple sites. We have MUSIC
participants in Newark, NJ, San Francisco, CA, Baltimore, MD,
Jackson, MS, and Boston, MA, Japan, Mexico and Russia.
Making Healthy MUSIC
In a project that began in Newark,
New Jersey in 1995, entitled "Making Healthy MUSIC", residents
of a housing development have been able to use MUSIC to organize
community celebrations, teen workshops, talent shows, community
service projects, community fundraisers, student career trips,
projects with Rutgers University, health fair and forums, rites of
passage programs, as well as a number of other activities. Those
residents had had little to no involvement with computer technology
prior to becoming involved with MUSIC. In addition to communicating
with each other, they have also used the technology to communicate
directly with their doctors, the principal and teachers of the local
elementary school, social service providers, the local librarian, as
well as their local mental health association. Eighty percent of
these residents did not know each other prior to becoming a part of
Making Healthy MUSIC. Parental involvement in the school has greatly
increased. Their network is comprised of computers placed in homes,
social service offices, the public library, the local elementary
school, Newark Public Schools central office, an area church, the
University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and the Essex
County Mental Health Association.
The Signature Learning Project
The Rural Technology and
Information Project (based on the SLP in San Francisco)
The Signature Learning Project (funded by AT&T and Wells Fargo)
began its implementation of the web based version of MUSIC in March
of 1998. The Fairmount Elementary School in
San Francisco is working together
to educate and revitalize their community along with the Arriba
Juntos Community Center, San Francisco State University, California
State University in Monterey Bay, and the San Francisco Educational
Services Center. They currently have approximately 160 accounts
comprised primarily of parents.
The Algebra Project
The Algebra Project is a national affiliation of organizations
working to ensure that all children, and particularly low-income
children and children of color, successfully complete Algebra in the
eighth grade and the college preparatory math sequence in high
school. We implemented the MUSIC system in the Stadium School in
Baltimore,
MD in the fall of 1997, to help
students and teachers collaboratively develop curriculum. Each
student/teacher community has the "space" to create and edit
documents within the easy to navigate environment. The teachers and
students have access to email, bulletin boards, shared databases,
calendars, discussions, and chats. Each teacher has a building
within which they can create rooms for the database. Teachers have
set up rooms such as: Algebra Textbook, Curriculum Resources, Credit
Union, "Amistad", "Stories", Config/Sched/Classes, "Internet Sites",
"Flora and Fauna", and "Recycling Club". Both students and teachers
have added files to the various rooms. We are also beginning to
implement MUSIC at Algebra Project sites across the country in areas
such as Jackson, Mississippi and
Cambridge, MA.
Boston, MA
Most recently we have been working with
the Metro Boston Community Wide
Education and Information Service (mbCWEIS). They have been
developing a MUSIC network entitled "Esquare" which is an area for
participants within various adult education programs to communicate
with each other and share documents that they create. We have also
begun working with the MIT Media Lab's
Boston Youth and Community Connections Program. The Boston Youth
and Community Connections program will engage a diverse group of
young people from qualitatively different communities, in a series
of face-to-face and online activities geared toward achieving a
better understanding of themselves and each other. We will also be
working with the Technology Goes Home
project. The goal of Technology Goes Home is to develop and
implement an effective program to select and train low-income
families for distribution of computers to homes. Finally, MUSIC is
being used to assist the network of
Computer Clubhouses in Boston as well as in other parts of the
country and the world to collaborate with each other.
The Urban League
We are currently working with the National Urban League to
develop a network that enables their national office to interact
more efficiently with the various Urban League sites around the
country.
MUSIC SYSTEM
FEATURES
Email: Anyone can send email
directly from MUSIC. Mail will be sent to other participants' email
boxes. Anyone can set up their personal email lists based on
individuals, roles, and/or affiliations.
Bulletin: Anyone can add a
bulletin topic or add a comment to someone else's bulletin topic.
Calendar: A community calendar
lists events that are relevant to the entire community. Those events
can include attachments and links. Only system operators can add to
this calendar.
Chat: Anyone can chat with
anyone else as long as they are logged on at the same time. There is
a place in the Participants area to which one can go to check to see
who is online.
Messages: Anyone can send anyone
else who has an account on that MUSIC site a personal message.
Messages can be sent to others as selected individuals, by roles (as
selected by each participant), or by affiliation.
Announcements: A system operator
can post an announcement that pops up once a user logs on.
Links: A system operator can
post a list of links that are relevant to the entire community.
What's New: Shows buildings,
rooms, calendar events, topics and/or documents that have been added
within the past week.
What's Online: Shows all of the
buildings, rooms, calendar events, topics and documents that are
online.
Participants: Each user has a
participant profile. This includes the person's real name, and any
other information they choose to enter. There are spaces for
address, phone number, affiliation, roles (e.g. teacher, parent,
organizer, etc.), age group, gender, interests, email address, and
favorite websites. A person also has the option of choosing an icon
to represent his or herself online. The icon appears when the person
adds any information to the network. Participants can also upload
real pictures of themselves.
Help: There is an online help
manual.
Buildings and Rooms: The
database part of the site is made up of buildings and rooms. The
purpose of the buildings and rooms is to offer a place to store data
within an easy to navigate area. The rooms contain one of nine types
of documents:
- Normal Documents (with
Owner/Author): To be read by others.
- Shared Documents (without
Owner/Author): To be read and edited by others.
- Documents for Download: To be
downloaded by others.
- Images (Gifs and Jpgs): To
display pictures.
- Hot Links: To add interesting
links. Anyone can add links.
- Discussions: To add a new
discussion topic or add a comment to other people's discussion
topics.
- Calendar: Anyone can add an
event to the calendar. The event is usually relevant to the
building topic.
- Surveys and Polls: A
community group can survey or poll its MUSIC participants. The
results are stored in a database which can be tallied and sorted.
- Customized Forms: A community
group can design their own forms to be completed by MUSIC
participants. The results are stored, categorized and viewed in a
room.
Buildings and rooms can link directly to another website. They
can also be comprised of html documents and files of any type to
create a single webpage or an
entire website.
System Operators
A local community group decides who gets accounts on their site
and who should serve as system operators. A system operator manages
the site. That includes adding and deleting accounts, buildings,
rooms, community calendar events, community links, announcements,
and creating forms and surveys. System Operators can limit access
and/or editing ability to any participant within any building or
room. A system operator can also change the pictures within the
buildings and rooms either by choosing a standard picture or by
uploading their own pictures (Gif or Jpg).
THEORETICAL
UNDERPINNINGS
As information technology continues to rapidly transform our
society, we face the danger of creating a world of information haves
and have-nots. As civic, commercial and educational institutions
continue to go on-line, those with access to this emerging
technology and those without it will live in starkly different
realities, raising old questions about how we can maintain that
American ideal of a society that promotes equality and justice for
all. Access to information technology, however, is not only an issue
of providing more of the networking machinery to those who are
technologically marginalized. Our society must also find ways to
make information technology relevant, easy to use, and inviting to
those who have the most difficult time making their voices heard in
our society. Otherwise, fear, apathy and ignorance may rob the
underprivileged of the benefits of this technology just as readily
as the lack of machinery.
To address these questions, Linking Up Villages uses a networking
system that was developed by Dr. Alan Shaw, President of Imani
Information Systems, at the MIT Media Laboratory, to help users put
information technology to work in a context that is very social,
very local and very easy to use. The system is known as Multi-User
Sessions In Community (MUSIC) and uses text and graphics to interact
within a shared networked environment designed to support activities
taking place in real proximal communities as opposed to virtual
communities. By placing terminals in homes, churches, community
centers, health centers, and educational institutions, MUSIC is
attempting to present a model for how local neighborhood
infrastructure can be advanced by information technologies just as
national information infrastructure (NII) is also being advanced by
these systems.
Discussions about information technology usually focus people's
attention on how the networks can give people access to expert
resources and programs that are not a part of the communities in
which the recipients live. The issue is usually the global village
and not the local village. Global village issues are important
issues to address, but they are not the whole story. Many of the
most devastating problems people face on a persistent basis have to
do with local matters. In underprivileged communities, people are
often alienated from their own neighbors and suffering from crime
and abuses that are concentrated at the neighborhood level. Working
on these kinds of issues therefore requires straightforward local
village building.
Traditionally, the concept of the village has always relied
heavily on the concept of the social network. Villages often
represent a collection of people who have many connections linking
them to those who live in close proximity to them. These links were
not simply passive social ties, but they were extremely active
forces in helping residents to be productive members in their own
communities. As urban environments have added increasing complexity
and mobility to people's lives, creating and sustaining the social
and communal links that defined the villages of old has become
increasingly difficult.
The MUSIC system seeks to help local community members take
charge of information technology by helping them to become their own
information managers and advocates. Rather than relegating this
technology to the experts to manage and control information on the
"superhighway", MUSIC users can develop and control their own local
information infrastructure, and in so doing, begin to redevelop the
ties and links to one another that are critical for making
"tight-knit" communities. Instead of simply providing programs,
services, and information to residents or members of an organization
through information technology, this system seeks to make the
technology a means for the users themselves to develop and produce
their own programs, services and information gathering activities.
The nature of the MUSIC program is essentially that of a
Graphical MUD, or "Multi-User Dungeon". MUDs are programs that
accept network connections from multiple simultaneous users and
provide access to a shared database of "rooms", "exits", and other
objects. Users browse and manipulate the database from "inside" the
rooms, seeing only those objects that are in the same room and
moving between rooms mostly via the exits that connect them. MUDs
are thus a kind of social virtual reality, an electronically
represented "place" that users can visit. MUDs are extensible from
within - MUD users can add new rooms and other objects to the
database and give those objects unique virtual behavior, using an
embedded programming language. MUDs generally have many users
connected at the same time. All of those users are browsing and
manipulating the same database and can encounter both the other
users and their newly created objects. MUD users can also
communicate with each other directly, in real time, usually by
typing messages that are seen by all other users in the same room.
MUDs have existed for about twelve years, becoming particularly
prominent on the global Internet in the past eight years. Throughout
that time, they have been used almost exclusively for recreational
purposes. Many MUDs are specialized for playing a game rather like
"Dungeons and Dragons", in which the players are assigned numerical
measures of various resources, physical as well as mental
characteristics, and then they engage in fantasy adventures in a
role-playing style. Most MUDs are used almost exclusively for
leisure-time social activity during which the participants spend
their connected periods talking with each other and building new
areas or objects for general enjoyment.
Through MUSIC, users are able to use a MUD-like environment to
work together and provide infrastructure to their neighborhood or
community organizations. It is essentially an example of computer
supported collaborative work (CSCW), which is a mode of productive
work that is becoming an essential part of academic, government, and
business research and development over the past two decades. In
academic communities, this very important function of networking is
mainly supported through electronic mail, on-line discussion groups,
and shared database systems accessible through the Internet.
In keeping with current user-interface trends for this type of
system, the database in MUSIC has been developed around certain
spatial and visual metaphors. The system is designed with a
graphical user interface that has been modeled after a neighborhood
with streets and buildings. The buildings represent the programs
that are being organized on the system.
The data storage and retrieval mechanism is developed around the
concept of "MUD" like rooms filled with objects. Each of the rooms
are organized around a topic which also serves as the name of the
room. The topics identify the types of information in each room. The
information in each room is contained in the objects in each room.
Users can enter a room and list the objects, view an object, edit or
create an object.
MUSIC supports bulletin board postings, discussion groups, and
real-time text communications between users who are logged on
concurrently. There are also private places to support personal
communications and proprietary information. Each person who has an
account on the system has their own private electronic message box
from which they can send and receive text messages, and groups of
individuals can setup spaces for documents that only they will be
able to access. MUSIC has the mechanism for handling on-line voting,
surveying, and polling.
To make the information "superhighways" of the future more
democratic, we need to look for ways to make networks helpful in
promoting local issues and local leadership. We need to try to
discover ways that this technology can help neighbors work on
projects that affect their lives together. Networking should help
people tell their own stories and develop their own programs, not
simply help them to consume more of the stories and programs that
come from the experts. In this way, networking can help people
recapture the magic of a community where everyone is important and
each has something to offer.
For more information on MUSIC please contact:
Alan or Michelle Shaw
Linking Up Villages/Imani Information Systems
33 Algonquin Street
Dorchester, MA 02124
Phone: (617) 436-8048
Fax: (617) 265-7710
Email:
acs@villagenetwork.org,
michelle@villagenetwork.org
URL:
http://www.villagenetwork.org,
http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~acs |
