Corporation for Public Broadcasting Civic Networking
Project
Davis Community Network -
A Civic Network as a Strategy for Building a "Smart" Community
Narrative Progress Report
7/31/97
Davis Community Network is extremely honored and proud to have
received this grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Our
proposed projects are at the core of the maturing of DCN in its service to
this regional "information society". We are excited to be working on them
with the intent of pragmatic local benefit, and a responsibility for
replication or instruction among new civic networks emerging across this
country and around the world.
This report, along with all other CPB project reports, documents
and information resources are being made available on the DCN web site.
Please refer to this site for complete project information.
(www.dcn.davis.ca.us/dcn/grants/cpb/cpb_index.html)
1. Development and implementation of services detailed in Workscope.
CPB contracts and funding were received in early February 1997.
In order to proceed with proper momentum and effect, DCN and partners
agreed to move all Workscope tasks forward from the original Oct.15, '96
start date to March 1, 1997, with most tasks shifting forward accordingly
through the Sept. 30, '98 completion date. The project has commenced as
proposed since March 1, and is largely staying on track as detailed
implementation proceeds.
We got off to a very good start, with the different project teams,
as diagramed in the original proposal, meeting regularly to develop the
required work plans, and to assign tasks, schedules, and follow-up. The
Steering Committee and Management Teams have been meeting at least
monthly, to coordinate all efforts, under the direction of Vicki Suter,
project manager. The accompanying, revised WorkPlan and Timeline clearly
indicate those tasks that are in-process or have been completed as of June
30. All Organizational tasks have been completed as specified, although
some will be continue to be reviewed over the duration of the project.
A. Task One: Geographic Information System, Document Database
and Web Server Integration.
This component of our contract had two distinctly phased parts.
The first of these was to prepare a City of Davis base map with attached
parcel numbers, and to convert the map to a GIS (GenaMap). This has been
completed.
The second part of our efforts is more complex, time consuming and
interesting.
With the project's primary goal of developing and utilizing integrated
document database, GIS and web access for enhanced public decisionmaking,
we have had numerous technical team meetings to determine critical
hardware and software issues. In order to further refine and specify our
selection of a pilot application for this effort, initially proposed as
focusing on the Willow Slough, we have organized meetings with regional
watershed interest groups, activists and agencies. The result has been
the determination of a broader initiative; an Integrated Bioregional
Watershed Project, with many new partner organizations and stakeholders
(see attached diagram). The selected project encompasses the City of
Davis, Putah and Cache Creeks and Willow Slough, much of Yolo County, and
extends to neighboring Counties. It represents some of the most critical
issues that will require public decisionmaking over coming months and
years in this region. As such, it allows for measurable assessment and
evaluation within the timeframe of this grant, and seems to be an ideal
application for our proposed internetworked systems and processes. The
almost organic evolution of this project selection has already lead to new
partnerships and potential funding opportunities, giving this effort a
life and value that can extend beyond the limited period of CPB funding.
As a result, we have just been notified that in partnership with the
regional office of the US Department of AgricultureUs Natural Resources
Conservation Service, DCN is one of nine new NSDI (USGS National Spatial
Data Infrastructure) Grant awardees. Additionally, the US Army Corps of
Engineers has indicated that it will also fund DCN to develop the
Integrated Bioregional Watershed Project, adding new prototype watershed
analysis software WEAP) to the integration, to help facilitate public
decisionmaking capabilities.
Four key issues have been identified as the basis for documents,
data and mapping layers selection, and that require near-term critical
decisionmaking by everyone from County Supervisors and State Water
Resources Agency experts to the voting electorate and even K-12 students.
They are:
Watershed land use (conservation, agriculture or development?).
Water quality (contaminants?).
Water transfers (what are the implications of allotting limited
regional water resources to the Bay Area and Southern California?).
Flood mitigation and emergency response.
University, government and institutional partners are now ready to
provide us with many of the needed data sets and documents. We will be
using ESRI's ArcInfo and Map Objects as our GIS tools, and are going to
make a final selection of our document database platform in the next few
weeks, slightly behind schedule, but with implications and application for
greater than originally anticipated service. We expect that these
proposed project tasks will be fully on schedule again by this Fall.
B. Task Two: Implementation of a Volunteer Recruitment and
Management System for use by the Davis Community.
DCN has been working closely with the Volunteer Center of
Yolo/Sacramento County, and its new Agency Coordinator, Joann Becenti.
With their help, DCN recruited a volunteer Volunteer Coordinator, Lisa
Matlock, who worked 20-30 hours a week from March 1 through June 30, 1997
before she relocated to another community. Lisa contacted the other three
CPB grant recipients and other community networks to investigate volunteer
management systems, with the most productive response for our work coming
from Dr. Curtis Priest and the LINCT system. She also participated in the
civtalk and communet lists in this regard. Since Lisa has left and until a
new coordinator is brought on board, Vicki Suter and Richard Lowenberg are
providing interim follow-through on Volunteer Management.
Between March and the end of June, 1997, the following primary
tasks were undertaken and completed:
DCN's volunteer web pages were developed, and are
available for volunteer sign-ups (with further developments in progress).
DCN provided a free DCN public access computer, modem,
account, and web site to the Volunteer Center of Yolo County.
Other existing volunteer management tools and systems were
researched and evaluated.
Functional specifications for the volunteer management
program were developed in coordinator with the DCN Volunteer
Coordinator, Web Team, and Volunteer Center of Yolo/Sacramento County.
A prototype system for a web-based volunteer time
accounting system has been developed, and is being used by the DCN WebTeam
to track its time. (This system has a web-based front-end, scripted
middleware, and uses Timekeeper (version .73) as the database backend).
The focus of work August, 1997 through January, 1998 will be on:
Refining the semi-automated volunteer recruitment process and the
time tracking system (working with LINCT and Timedollars);
Selecting five representative volunteer-based organizations to
further develop and test processes, procedures,
systems and on-line tools to use as an integrated "toolkit" to support
volunteer recruitment and management over the Internet;
Training staff and volunteers for these organizations;
Refining the applications and processes based on these pilot
tests;
Providing orientation, training & support to other volunteer-based
organizations.
C. Task Three: Utilization of Regional Technology Demonstration
Centers for Education and Outreach Activities.
DCN has made extensive use of the City of Davis' training
facility, with at least weekly public meetings, workshops and training
sessions held since March 1. The UC Davis SunTREC Lab, our other
specified demonstration and training site, is a most valuable new partner.
A highly publicized 'opening' was held there on Oct. 5, 1996, where
Richard Lowenberg was also publicly introduced as DCNUs new Executive
Director. The SunTREC Lab was a host site for the Yolo Area Regional
Network's May 16th Regional Telecommunications Policy Summit, one in a
series of quarterly such events now being planned.
The Policy Summit had over 100 attendees, and directly resulted in
the development and currently in proccess adoption of
telecommunications policies by City of Davis, City of West Sacramento,
City of Woodland, and County of Yolo. All of these entities have formally
committed to regional cooperation for telecommunications infrastructure
development.
On June 5th, DCN hosted a regional GIS/Watershed Stakeholders
Workshop, at the Davis branch of the Yolo County Library, a new project
partner. Over a dozen attendees spent the day reviewing and agreeing on
metadata standards that will allow us all to share and use data; learning
about some new watershed online projects and tools; and making the
decisions necessary for DCN to select the pilot integration project
proposed as part of this grant.
In addition to regularly scheduled public training at the City's
lab, DCN recently provided special Internet classes for Davis Joint
Unified School District teachers and staff, and County Court judges and
staff. During this Summer, the DCN Training Committee is reviewing and
establishing its programs for the coming year.
D. Task Four: Evaluation and Assessment of Project Success.
The Evaluation Team has researched evaluation methodologies
(including the Concerns-Based Adoption Model, the Joint Venture: Silicon
Valley Network Indicators Model, and the Colorado Advanced Technology
Institute's Economic Outcomes Evaluation Methodology). The team has
drafted an evaluation strategy, including a process, and with the
assistance of each of the CPB project teams (GIS, Volunteer Management,
Document Database, and Outreach) has identified criteria for measuring the
effectiveness of the project toward reaching the goals which have been
defined. In addition, the evaluation techniques and instruments to be
used have been tentatively selected.
The focus for August 1997 through January 1998 will be to:
finalize the measurement criteria;
identify external forces which would affect reaching the goals as
defined (those forces not within the project's control);
identify data to be collected, sources, instruments, and
processes;
collect data;
conduct first interim evaluation.
(See accompanying Evaluation Plan for details.)
2. Exploration of the relationship with local regional and national
educational computer networking, broadcasting and other telecommunications
services beyond those of the original relationship.
Since its inception, DCN has been active in telecommunications and
community networking relationship building, regionally and
(inter)nationally). This organizational objective has continued to
develop over the first half of this year.
In this region, including Davis, Yolo County and Sacramento, DCN
continues to build on its partnership with Davis Community Television
(DCTV), with which we share facilities and and developmental interests in
convergent public access media. We maintain a close collaborative
interaction with the Net at Two Rivers, an NTIA supported project in the
Sacramento area, both our projects having been funded by CalTrans as
participants in the California Smart Communities Initiative. Richard
Lowenberg and Vicki Suter will serve in a contracted advisory capacity on
the next two year phase of this initiative. Most relevant to our CPB
grant is the continuing development of the Yolo Area Regional Network
(YARN), a county-wide project with strong regional representation, to date
resulting in enhanced telecommunications infrastructure, as described in
the CPB proposal; outreach and educational events; and a cooperative
agreement among County and city governments on regional telecommunications
policy (resulting from our recent Summit), currently being approved by
authorizing bodies.
DCN is actively building more substantive relationships with the
Davis and Yolo County School Districts and Libraries; other University of
California departments; community non-profit organizations and the
business community.
(Inter)nationally, DCN was a primary co-sponsor of the (originally
face to face, and eventually virtual) CivicNet Conference on the web, with
Richard Lowenberg hosting a week-long workshop on RInformation EcologyS,
and a few DCN Web and Policy Team volunteers also participating in the
wide-ranging discussions. Richard Lowenberg and Kari Peterson, DCN Board
President and ACM member, are also actively participating on DCNUs behalf,
on the Advisory Committee of the newly forming Association For Community
Networking. Richard Lowenberg (Telluride Institute, InfoZone Program
founder/director) is also organizing the Open Sessions for the Rural
Telecommunications Conference, to be held at the Aspen Institute, Oct
19-21, where DCN will also be a presenting organization. We are
continually participating and sharing experiences online via key
listservs, and have recently been hosting visits from other US and some
European and Japanese community networking groups, with whom we will
continue to interact and share ideas. DCN staff and some Board members
are also presentors and participants at many other conferences and working
meetings in the US and abroad.
3. Status of services currently available.
For the past year, DCN has contracted with American Cabling and
Communications (AC&C) to be its dial-up Internet access provider. This
relationship has come to a mutually agreed upon end, and DCN has just
signed a contract with ISP, CWNet to take over those services. DCN
continues to directly handle various community value-added services
including: email spooling, web hosting and content development, DNS, list
services, training and public access system placement. A percentage of
subscriber fees returns to DCN to support such community services. DCN
also provides ISDN and network connectivity to an increasing number of
partner organizations, and free Internet accounts to Sponsored Projects
groups and volunteers. We are actively looking into wireless
applications, especially as more technically appropriate and cost-saving
for more rural neighbors.
4. Status of population demographics for local area currently having
access to services.
Davis is a university town in largely agricultural and rural Yolo
County. It is 12 miles from Sacramento, the state capitol. Davis has a
population of 55,000 people, over 25,000 of those attending the University
of California. Yolo County's population is about 250,000, mostly centered
in Davis and the cities of West Sacramento and Woodland, the county seat.
DCN was the first off-campus Internet access provider in the local calling
area, three years ago. Today, there are numerous commercial ISPUs serving
the region, allowing DCN to appropriately shift its attention to
developing the value-added community networking services described in its
mission and in this project. Although we do not have accurate statistics
on regional Internet use, a recent study indicates that almost 80% of
small farmers in Yolo County own and use computers. This is one factor in
DCNUs developing a new working partnership with the USDA Agriculture
Extension Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service. DCNUs joint
venture with CWNet also means that we can now offer local dial-up access
to the Internet from throughout Yolo County and most of northern
California.
5. Status of the number of users, and the frequency and nature of
utilization.
DCN has approximately 1,300 subscribers; about 700 of those paying
for dial-up accounts, and the other 600 being free or subsidized
institutional dial-up or ISDN connected Community networking partners such
as local government, schools, non-profit organizations and DCN volunteers.
The DCN all-volunteer Web Team spent the Winter months overhauling and
redesigning our web site, debuting the communityUs online presence in
early May. General statistics about the DCN web site include:
March 2-8, 1997: 157,599 hits, with 389,858,987 bytes transfered.
June 1-7, 1997: 83,568 hits, with 222,128,424 bytes transfered
(reflecting a 40% population drop in the Summer.)
6. Status of the host Internet server and communications systems.
Some of the applications supported by this project require high
bandwidth network infrastructure (for example, sharing of large GIS files
collected from different servers for each of the project partners). Part
of this project also involves exploring how such an infrastructure can be
established in a community by sharing existing resources, and leveraging
resources through joint networking projects.
The partners involved in this project have inventoried and mapped
the existing network infrastructure and resources throughout the Yolo
region, and have identified methods of:
Sharing and leveraging existing resources;
Supplementing existing resources with additional infrastructure.
The University (UCD) and City of Davis have completed a joint
fiber project with other local partners, which connects DCN, the City of
Davis, and the University, and will ultimately connect the County of Yolo
systems in Woodland (utilizing County fiber already in the ground, and
identified by the infrastructure inventory). In lieu of a fiber run
between DCN and UCD, UCD has installed a T-1 line between the sites.
The University has also provided wide area networking consultants
to develop a detailed regional network design, and has provided,
configured and installed the routers and other equipment to implement the
design. Other project partners have provided other communication equipment
to complete the network. (See the web site and accompanying, "Network
Infrastructure," for the network design map and a list of equipment
provided by the various partners).
UC Davis SunTREC lab has made available a Sun SPARCcenter 1000 for
the installation of GIS and document database web server applications. In
exchange, the project pays for part of the site administrator's salary.
The focus of network infrastructure work from 8/97 through 1/98
will be to:
complete the activation of the fiber link for data communications between
the County of Yolo in Woodland, and the rest of the network; develop
network operations and control processes and procedures for a network that
is shared by a number of public organizations; develop cooperative
arrangements with additional organizations in the
county, including the Yolo County Superintendent of Schools office, and
the City of West Sacramento.
7. Creation of the electronic base map.
The City of Davis base map has been cleaned up, with parcel
numbers attached, and conversion to GIS mostly completed. It is not web
accessible yet.
(See Report Section A, Task 1)
8. Development of the Toolkit, the Toolkit Workshops, and the online
versions of the training curricula and workshop outlines.
These tasks are to be undertaken and completed in a later phase of
the project.
9. Status of the weekly series of local training activities as well as
demonstrations of the project.
These tasks are to be undertaken and completed in a later phase of
the project.
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