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Wire Nova Scotia (WiNS)
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Date: Sun, 29 Sep 1996 11:02:01 -0300 (ADT)
From: Michael Gurstein
[...]
As some of you know, the Centre I direct, the Centre for Community and Enterprise Networking (C\CEN) at the University College of Cape Breton in Sydney, Nova Scotia in conjunction with the Provincial Department of Education and with funding from the Canadian Department of Industry and four other Federal and Provincial agencies put together a program this summer to hire about 60 students to work throughout rural Nova Scotia linking small businesses, young people and the general public to the Internet through public Internet Access sites. (We called it Wire Nova Scotia--WiNS.)
The program went off extremely well...we trained some 3-4000 people on Internet access, we helped organize a public Internet access program in some 40 or so rural communities around Nova Scotia, several of the students have been offered more permanent work and others have decided to re-orient their work aspirations, a public access/training program is being developed for people with disabilities in the province, a Virtual Centre for Cape Breton Music is being created as we speak...
Most of the students have gone back to their respective schools and we have now negotiated agreements with various agencies (Social Services, Unemployment Insurance, TAGS--the unemployed fisherman's transition program) to allow their "clients" to come in to replace the students as "volunteers".
Through the system of regional co-ordinators and the electronic network set up to manage WiNS we will be providing Internet and community access training to the "volunteers" and we will be providing assistance to the Internet Access sites in taking on and managing the volunteers and programming their sites. We expect to have upwards of 70 "volunteers" in place by the end of September.
All of this is being done with virtually no "new money" in that it is simply re-directing how existing (and committed) expenditures and energies are being directed (welfare payments, student employment schemes, unemployment insurance payments...)
Indications are that some of the sites may look to make these arrangements more permanent, by finding ways of making the sites generate revenues or by re-directing funds which are currently going into such areas as "industrial development/promotion/tourism" (frequently outside of the community) into these channels.
We will be sending our first two International Internet-workers to Angola to support the work of an NGO in Luanda in October...one will be a young unemployed ex-fisherman, using his Government funded computer training for the first time, and the other a University College of Cape Breton Geographic Information System student helping to install a GIS program with the NGO to help in the re-building of Luanda.
We've been thinking about the process a bit and some reflections might be useful for anyone considering doing something similar.
The project worked (and didn't work) for several reasons: --we put together a project which we thought would succeed and then we went out and found the money for it...rather than putting together a project which fit one or another of the funding criteria for student employment or other programs which were available to us. This allowed us to build in things like training, hand-holding, selection criteria, centralized administration which the programs which we were presented with (and which we ultimately got funding from) didn't provide for.
--we had access to an institutional base (the University College of Cape Breton) and to some development money which could be spent as required (research funds from my Chair) which meant that we could do some planning in advance and put pieces in place to prepare for the project money once it came about
--we built in supports for success...we had skilled and experienced people as regional co-ordinators to back up the students and we provided training and support to them and to the students through the co-ordinators; we provided all of them with access to electronic media for communication; the student selection was done jointly by the regional co-ordinators and the local community access site based on public advertising so the students who were selected had skills but also were acceptable locally;
--we made extensive use of e-media in all aspects of the project and especially in linking ourselves to the regions and finally in linking the students to each other. We should have done more (it saved us a bundle of money), and we should have had better techie support than we had...it will be better next time...but the stuff does work if you have to make it work.
--we didn't do much for economic development for small business in rural areas as we had expected/hoped we might...the small business folks were not interested/didn't have the time/couldn't see the point...so we did what seemed to be appropriate which was a lot of training/hand holding and especially with kids and with the general public. Next time we will do a lot more training in these areas with the students (train techie students on business stuff and business students on the techie stuff) and also spend time training the site managers (who generally are volunteers but have day to day responsibility for the site)
--our best projects were those where we had a specific target/ focus/client group...training a disabled advocacy group (they want to set up a network of all the provincial disable advocacy groups), developing a virtual centre for Cape Breton music (we are getting funding to make it professional), working with the local Community Economic Development Corporation (they are working on some CED/techie projects), rather than simply sending kids out as "fieldworkers".
What we are doing now which is replacing the students with social service recipients, unemployed fisherfolk, etc. is the most challenging but most exciting partly because we have to convince the "powers that be" that this is "worthwhile activity" (more worthwhile than sitting at home and watching the soaps or banging on closed doors for jobs that don't exist...that really means). We have waiting lists of people who want to "volunteer" to replace the students--remember that they will only be getting whatever financial support they are currently getting--the problem is to convince the bureaucrats that they should be allowed to do this and still continue to receive their support payments.
The argument we are making is that though there may not be a job at the end of their "volunteer" stint (there may be though, a number of the students have stayed on part-time, several have been offered full-time jobs and others have shifted their career aspirations)...nevertheless the "volunteers" are "adding value" to themselves through training/upgrading/ job experience, to their families through the increased skills and self respect they bring home, and to their communities through helping to make the technology more accessible/usuable in rural areas.
The bureaucrats though are looking for "jobs...jobs...jobs", whatever that means in these times and in these places...but slowly we are breaking through.
Regs
Mike Gurstein
Michael Gurstein,Ph.D. ECBC/NSERC/SSHRC Chair in the Management of Technological Change Associate Professor Organizational Management and Director: Centre for Community and Enterprise Networking (C\CEN) University College of Cape Breton Sydney, NS, Canada B1P 6L2
Tel. 902-563-1369 (O) 902-562-1055 (H) Fax 902-562-0119
EMail MGurst@sparc.uccb.ns.ca ```
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