Homelessness and the web

[Lorraine Pozzi]

On Fri, 9 Jan 1998, Rod Clark wrote:

> > ... Anitra was briefly active in SCN but has found a better
> > deal at Speakeasy. 
> 
> Lorraine, 
> 
>    A number of good sites have found a home at Speakeasy. Can 
> you, or someone familiar with how they do things, say what 
> Speakeasy does that tends to help those groups along - what 
> is it about Speakeasy that generally works well for groups who 
> work with them - and whether SCN might learn something from 
> them or adopt some of their more successful methods of working 
> with non-profits?

What I have heard from a number of "migrators" is pretty 
much that they find someone who responds to them when
they need help, the ability to use the fast connection
when they want to review their work (people like Anitra
don't have their own high-end equipment and work on old
text-based terminals or borrow -- when they can -- graphical
systems, and a place where neophyte and expert can sit
down side-by-side and work together building skills as
well as the Website.

I am NOT knocking the Help desk.  They are understaffed
and overworked.  But I believe that many of the problems
on Help are related to registration problems that should
never have to be dealt with in the first place (just my
opinion, of course, I don't work on Help).  I've heard
some griping about the "trivial" problems that have been
bumped up to the board level -- that board members should
NOT have to deal with this stuff.  Again, I could not
agree more -- IF we had systems in place that were working.
Until then, I think board members should expect to have
"trivial" complaints dumped in their laps.
> 
> > ... Several transitional housing sites -- one step up from
> > the emergency shelters -- give their residents access to
> > computers.  Most do NOT have modems and phone lines.  

Ah, the big rub is not so much the modems as the phone lines.
Folks are * BEGINNNING * to perceive the value of the Web
for low-income/homeless people.  Fremont Public Association
has put in a free access point in their Aurora office mostly
for job-seeking.  I talked with Janet Barry of the Office
for Civil Rights -- she is interested in the whole access
question.  Angelines, Lutheran Compass Center, Jubilee,
Sojourner Place, the Millionair Club's Family Center,
and the Archdiocese's Housing office are
all interested in better access.  I think only Sojourner
has a dedicated phone line right now.

I'm going to call a few of them and see if they would be
interested in putting together a Technology grant for
either Ricochet modems or phone lines.  I agree that
Lynx is not the greatest -- but I've trained a few women
from Sojourner and Jubilee who have found some very good
resources for themselves.  

Anybody else got some ideas about how we might help
serve this population?
> 
>    Ralph Pfister of King County Seniors Online has quite a large
> basketful of medium to high speed modems, donated by a local
> ISP, probably more than are needed for the senior centers
> themselves. He's expressed a willingness to help SCN in general
> with some of this. This past week, we set up a Boeing-donated 
> 486 at Hamilton House as an Internet machine, with what (if I 
> can get it a bit more organized) will be a standard set of 
> Internet software that can be installed on similar machines 
> elsewhere. 
> 
>    Needless to say, it's connected to a commercial ISP, 
> since a text-only connection to SCN is really out of the 
> question there, and at most similar locations, because SCN's 
> text interface is so limited and so hard to use that it would 
> defeat most of the value of having a connection in the first 
> place.
> 
> Rod
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