SCN: Geekcorps

[Steve]

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A Techie Volunteer Corps  

(Shaila Dewan, NY Times)---Sarah Wustner, a Seattle software 
engineer, thought about joining the Peace Corps when she 
graduated from the University of California at San Diego in 1998. 
But, she said, "they didn't have anything that really fit my skills."  

Now, with a stint at Microsoft on her resume, she has taken a leave 
of absence from her job at Oxygen Media to live in Ghana for three 
months. Ms. Wustner is part of the pilot team of six volunteers for 
Geekcorps, a high-tech version of the Peace Corps. Instead of 
teaching math, as technologically adept Peace Corps workers often 
do, Ms. Wustner, 24, will help a Ghanaian software company teach 
its workers the Java and Unix programming languages.  

"I want the satisfaction of feeling that all of the expensive education 
that I got helped someone in a really real way," she said.  

Geekcorps was the idea of Ethan Zuckerman, 27, who made a 
modest fortune ("enough to buy myself time," he said) when the 
Internet company he helped start, Tripod, was bought by Lycos in 
1998. Lacking economic expertise, he consulted with Elisa 
Korentayer, 25, who has been both an investment banker and a 
poverty relief worker; she became a co-founder of Geekcorps.  

The idea for Geekcorps came when Mr. Zuckerman was in Ghana in 
1993 on a Fulbright fellowship to study African music. Because of a 
strike at the University of Ghana, he spent a lot of time in the library 
and noticed that it did not have many books published later than 
1957, when Ghana became independent from Britain.  

"I thought, If there was just an Internet connection," he said, "you 
could more than double this library."  

In 1999 he left Lycos and began looking for a way to harness the 
philanthropic urges of his newly rich friends. The budget for 
Geekcorps's first year, $350,000, was financed largely by Mr. 
Zuckerman and people he knew from Tripod. Geekcorps is based in 
North Adams, Mass., in the dot-com corridor of the Berkshires.  

Geekcorps is not unique. Volunteer programs designed to bridge the 
"digital divide" have been proliferating. The term itself, once used 
primarily to describe the gulf between Internet haves and have-nots 
within Western countries, refers more and more frequently to the 
huge disparity in access between the world's economic giants and 
its fledgling economies. Nearly 400 of every 1,000 Americans are 
Internet users, according to the International Telecommunication 
Union, as opposed to 3.5 of every 1,000 Africans.  

Since Aug. 1, the United Nations has sent 37 high-tech volunteers to 
countries like Benin, Botswana and Ecuador. The State 
Department's version, called the Global Technology Corps, began in 
late 1998 and has sponsored more than 20 projects in Kosovo, 
Nigeria, Poland and other far-flung locales. Still another project, Net 
Corps America, focuses only on Latin America and the Caribbean. 
And in August the Peace Corps began to include information 
technology among its specialties, sending 10 volunteers to Belize.  

These programs reflect the idea, enunciated this summer by the 
United Nations and the Group of Eight, that the Internet can provide 
medical information, economic opportunities and online courses that 
will enable developing countries to leapfrog ahead. But there are an 
infinite number of ways to chip away at the obstacles to total 
connectivity, including putting computers in schools and rewriting 
telecommunications regulations.  

Geekcorps, although tiny, has attracted the attention of people like 
Denis Gilhooly, the director of information and communications 
technology for the United Nations Development Program. "The key 
to information infrastructure is a dual approach of bottom-up 
development, exemplified by Geekcorps," he said, "and top-down 
efforts, which would be exemplified by the UNDP Global Network 
Readiness and Resource Initiative." What Geekcorps is doing, he 
continued, is "seeding the next generation of entrepreneurs, and 
that's invaluable in these countries."  

Both Mr. Zuckerman and Ms. Korentayer, who is the Geekcorps 
program director, said they had been pleasantly surprised by the 
number of Ghanaian businesses — including an art gallery, a graphic 
design firm and a software company — that asked for help. "There 
were so many companies that were so well positioned to receive the 
kind of help that we can offer," Ms. Korentayer said.  

In the future Mr. Zuckerman plans to pursue high-tech companies as 
donors and to persuade "venture philanthropists" like the Noaber 
Foundation, which gave Geekcorps a grant, to pump capital into 
Geekcorps's Ghanaian clients.  

The main thing that sets Geekcorps apart from other volunteer 
efforts, Ms. Korentayer said, is the fact that it was started by dot-
com insiders.  

"Geekcorps is far better positioned to appeal to the techie sector in 
the U.S.," Ms. Korentayer said. "Our competitive advantage is that a 
lot of techies have heard of us."  

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company  







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