Self Introduction of Michael Maranda
From:
Dan Randow
Date:
2005 Jul 13 04:59 UTC
Short link
Hi Michael,
Thanks for your intro. Great to have you here.
> I am hoping to advance efforts in Chicago, and statewide in Illinois, where
> community organizations including community technology centers can be places
> of civic engagement, or explicitly involved in the total life of the
> community.
That makes sense to me. Steven Clift recently made the comment that the
democratic divide is wider than the digital divide. So there are plenty
of folks already online to be engaged with edemocracy. For the folks who
aren't online at all yet, my guess is that civic engagement isn't what's
going to motivate them to get on.
To me the starting points are:
- public access
- education
- resourcing existing community groups to take up ICT
To me this last one is where there is most likely to be motivation to
participate.
And also on that, accessibility is one of the reasons we chosen email as
a primary interface for GroupServer. You still have to go to the website
to sign up, but once that's done, it's pretty easy to just read email
and reply by email.