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 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.
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:
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).
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: ashaw@villagenetwork.org,
michelle@villagenetwork.org
URL: http://www.villagenetwork.org,
http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~acs