All posts in the topic Self Introduction of Michael Maranda (Short link)
Summary
- There are 2 posts — by 2 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Dan Randow at 2005 Jul 13 04:59 UTC
Greetings to all,
I've been a Chicagoan for about 10 years now. I'm heavily embedded in the
Community ICT sector, serving on several non-profit boards and working for
CTCNet Chicago Chapter.
I am currently President of the Association For Community Networking
(www.afcn.org), and co-Chair of the ilctc (www.ilctc.org).
I am interested in advancing digital literacy, access and equity and working
through community technology & networking to promote civic engagement.
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.
I recently attended the two day worksop in St. Paul, Minnesota "Deepening
Online Deliberation" and hope we can bring the ideas discussed there to
fruition.
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.