connecting*the*dots

(originally uploaded by lisa scheer)

Today is day two of the voting for Netsquared’s Technology Innovation Fund. If you haven’t yet stopped by to vote for The People, Yes, please do so. If we place, we’ll receive solid funding and development resources desperately needed to get us off the ground.

If you’re a blogger, talk show host, stewardess with a captive audience, etc., I’d greatly appreciate your help pointing folk in that direction as well.

Thanks so much.

A few months ago, Ndesanjo and I kicked back at a local pub and after a few drinks, began exchanging stories of past mentors that forever changed our lives.

I told Ndesanjo a few stories about Bill Readings, my revolutionary Contemporary Literary Theory professor from Syracuse University. That man completely altered the way I looked at both language and the world around me by planting his signature Deconstructionism seed in my skull. Without the experience of his class (and conversation over pints at Chucks), I’d be a completely different person today — processing both information and reality sans an apperception filter.

Ndesanjo spoke of Dr. Abdul Alkalimat, his former professor at the University of Toledo. He touched upon Dr. Alkalimat’s 40 years worth of work in the American Civil Rights movement, but even more importantly his forward-thinking thesis for bridging the digital divide and building local/global communities.

Last week, Ndesanjo passed me a speech Dr. Alkalimat gave at the 2004 Black Media Congress. If you have 20 minutes, take a listen — you won’t be disappointed.

Two words: On. Point.

Last Sunday, Ndesanjo, Andy and I attended an event over at A&T, which we thought was a discussion about the digital divide in the African-American community. Well, it turned out to be a much broader conversation — one steeped in collaborative progression towards building stronger community.

What we stumbled upon was The Dean’s Book Club, and this particular meeting was to discuss the ten covenants found in Tavis Smiley’s book, The Covenant With Black America.

As we attempted to get our bearings straight — not quite understanding the format of the discussion — Will Hall approached us and pointed out that his table (one of eight) was the setting digital divide discussion. Once the room filled out and Sharon Hoard, Dr. Ioney James and Dean Lelia Vickers gave their opening remarks about the book and the importance of Smiley’s covenants to the African-American community, each table turned inwards and began discussing the underlying concepts behind a particular covenant.

Will Hall moderating the digital divide conversation

While the discussion was centered on Smiley’s perspective of how the digital divide affects African-Americans, each person at the table had a unique perspective to share.

Barbara Davis of HandyCapable, spoke about how computers have changed the lives of disabled individuals — specifically by providing them with the opportunity to gain skills be repairing computers themselves. She also told the story of how a local woman — grandmother and matriarch of her family — received a computer with an internet connection and soon became the connectivity and application hub for her entire family.

To the right of me sat a number of students and teachers who provided a perspective about technology in the university setting; how it needed to become more infused in the curriculum across all of the schools at A&T in order to improve computer literacy.

Student participation was the centerpiece of the evening

When I mentioned the concept of blogging and how it’s already empowered so many local voices in Greensboro, especially through our local aggregator, the kids (as well as the adults) stared back with blank expressions on their faces — knowing nothing of either blogging or Greensboro101.com.

Living in a town nicknamed Blogsboro, that reaction was somewhat disappointing, but not completely unexpected. It would be foolish to think that all of Greensboro is tracking the latest personal publishing developments, especially when sitting at a table discussing the digital divide. Our blogging community is nowhere close to being representative of the entire community.

Such an obvious divide in local, amplified voices is the primary reason I began working on The People, Yes in the first place. With this reaction as impetus, I’m beginning to consider avenues for expanding our sub-community focus beyond the homeless — post-launch of course.

But I digress… back to the discussion at hand.

Professor and student reading from The Covenant With Black America

Another perspective regarding technology in the African-American community emerged from the two professors at the table. Both men seemed to focus more on the negative aspects of today’s youth, stressing that the desire for excellence with the youth isn’t consistent with the rest of society, which affects the ability to compete for advancement in society. One professor went as far as to blame mainstream media — violent video games, music, etc. — for the degradation of African American youths.

Man, I wish we had more time to explore that one.

Ndesanjo attempted to deal with the issue, as he touched upon his work at the Boys and Girls Club, expressing the importance of teaching the youth to view the web as an opportunity to participate in an upload culture by creating media — even their own games — for distribution. It was a poignant message, but I don’t think it quite stuck as the conversation quickly moved to hit the major points of Smiley’s covenant before our student representative reported our discussion back to the entire room.

As we moved from the digital divide conversation into the presentations of the various covenant discussions, I began to get a sense of how this particular community of professionals, educators and students approached building strong, supportive, humane community. Tavis Smiley might have set the framework in motion, but the pragmatism, compassion and righteousness of the participants in the room exposed me to yet another dynamic aspect of Greensboro community.

I’m telling you, there’s gold in these yonder hills; nuggets of community I’ve yet to experience living elsewhere.

BarCampRDU came and went this past weekend and I completely missed out. With the stress of moving into the new house, completing my proposal work and working on the number of scattered projects I’m on, I just couldn’t find time to make the trip. But truth be told, as much as I wanted to check out the BarCamp experience, I was much more amped about spending some quality time with the Bonnie and Clyde of Web 2.0 themselves: Chris Messina and Tara Hunt.

We stumbled into connecting last year through one of my posts, followed up by chatting a bit via email and Skype and eventually met in person in a group lunch at SXSW in March. Since I couldn’t make it to Raleigh, I pinged Chris late last week with an offer to crash at my spot if they needed a place to stay. Low and behold, they did.

(shot at Finnegans, before we realized they didn’t serve breakfast and split to Jimmy’s Corner Cafe)

So… what do you do with a couple of uber-progressive, multi-tasking, San Fran geeks in Greensboro, NC with 18 hours on your hands? Keep it simple, stupid; beer, grub and talk shop.

Once they arrived and got settled in, we ended up walking downtown, settling in on MCouls rooftop and chatting about our latest geek ventures over Fish ‘n Chips and pints of Guinness (Tara, you’ve got to get the Guinness tolerance up).

Even though we all share a bunch of the same philosophies regarding business, marketing and technology, it’s still kinda amazing how much overlap our latest ventures have with one another. Both Citizen Agency and dotmatrixproject are efforts to:

• support our passionate desires to consult, design and build technology independent of a full-time gig
• work smarter (not necessarily harder) with great clients and interesting projects
• network with loosely connected, brilliant talent instead of building a salaried bench
• using collaborative blogging to generate credibility, trust and thinktank-like conversations — across our own teams and with the community of folks that participate in the resulting discourse

I’d like to say something grand, like, it’s the sign of how we can all work in the future, but I know that’s not true… at least not yet. Major props to Chris and Tara on that front though, as they believe 1000% in documenting their every success, failure and step along the way with the hope that their efforts can provide building blocks for others on a similar journey.

I completely share that philosophy and enthusiasm, but aside from transparent blogging, I’ve yet to implement it in tangible ways across my everyday (note to self: do that).

We ended the evening with a pretty intense conversation about geo-specific social networking, the digital divide and citizen media, or to be more specific, The People, Yes.

In a nutshell, Chris and I started off with slightly different perspectives of community. The concept of a geo-specific network didn’t seem to register with his quixotic stare, but I think we both nudged a bit closer to each other’s thinking by the end of the conversation. I’m all about working with people who’ve been there and done that, but I’d like for the majority of the grass-roots work and business and technology development to run through the people in this community.

Tara seemed to get my desire to work specifically with the people of Greensboro to build out a Greensboro-specific social network — as the more we work together as a community, the more we’ll come together as a community. Essentially, I want to start local and focus on the needs and strengths of the entire community of Greensboro to flesh the project out.

I mean, who knows what nuggets we’ll find in these fields and streams and underpasses and buildings?

In any event, I’m sure it wasn’t the last conversation we’ll have on the project. Both Tara and Chris are revolutionary thinkers, with their heads constantly spinning about with progressive ways to use technology to help us work, play and function better with one another. I’m only in the embryonic stage with The People, Yes, so I’m looking forward to many more chances to imbibe and share knowledge and perspective.

This weekend came and went way too fast.