APPENDIX D

LETTERS OF SUPPORT

Andrew Carvin
CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING
901 E Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20004-2037

Dear Mr. Carvin:

The Yolo County Board of Supervisors supports the Davis Community Network's proposal for the development of regional technology demonstration centers in Yolo County. County government has been working closely with the local civic network, the Davis Community Network (DCN) and its partners for the past two years and understands the benefits and advantages of cooperative partnerships of this nature to leverage scarce public resources.

County government is responsible for a variety of countywide programs such as land use planning and code enforcement, law enforcement, environmental management, social and health services, community libraries, public works and regional parks.

Yolo County continues to seek the means of providing services to an expanding population through the exploitation of technology and collaborative management of resources. Telecommunications resources between Yolo County government centers and other public agencies is based on a county-owned and operated fiber-based telephone and data communications system, the county's electronic backbone. This "backbone" supports an increasing number of interdependent networked information systems located in public agencies. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 will allow public and private entities to cooperate in the future in the joint use of existing resources in new and important ways.

One of the challenges to local governments is the cost of acquiring, operating and upgrading new information technology systems compared to the need to provide and value of such new systems to respond to citizen service demands. An example of an emerging service demand is for document handlers which can place on the Internet (home, library, kiosks, or other sites) a variety of governmental regulatory information and indexed organizations providing public services and assistance.

Another example of providing a traditional service through different means is by expanding geographical information to a variety of new users as well as the traditional users.

Yolo County is committed to support the technology demonstration projects described in the grant application through the use of the county's electronic backbone, through the use of new and existing systems, and through matching funds for staff involvement in these projects.

Sincerely,

Tom Stallard, Chair
Yolo County Board of Supervisors

c: Congressman Vic Fazio

Dear Sir,

The University of California, Davis, Information Technology, Distributed Computing Analysis and Support (DCAS), is writing to support the Davis Community Network's proposal for the development of regional technology demonstration centers in Yolo County.

UC Davis has, as part of its mission, a commitment to public service. Information Technology has supported this mission through community networking for the last five years. UC Davis staff were part of the team that initially proposed the Davis Community Network (DCN) to the Davis City Council and worked with the State of California Department of Transportation to establish the network. UC Davisi partnership with DCN has been very successful and will continue with a focus on collaboration with local government and educational institutions to solve common problems while providing a foundation for building services which are valuable to the local community.

The development of a data communications infrastructure and local community-focused electronic services is very important to UC Davis. Our students live in the City of Davis and the University is the largest local employer. The University is developing an extensive body of information resources which it would like to make available to the community. In addition, the University would like its students, faculty and staff to have access to similar resources from local agencies. The development of this type of technical and social infrastructure can not be built by the University alone and must be driven by the community. The University has demonstrated its commitment to contributing to this development in collaboration with the community and views the DCN demonstration centers as a key component of this work.

If the proposal is funded, as the campus unit with four years of experience in the management of a community network and other wide area network projects, DCAS will provide an experienced project manager's support as part of local project match, with over .11 FTE of Vicki Suter's time (see attached resume) for overall project management and coordination. In addition, the unit will apply its network and technology feasibility analysis experience gained in a three-year research contract with the State Department of Transportation for an additional 5% of Ms. Suter's time as local project match for feasibility analysis on regional technical integration of GIS and document database technologies.

As a technical project manager, member of the DCN Executive Committee, long-time participant in the Davis Community Network project (from its beginnings as a Davis City Council task force), and member of several statewide education network planning groups (see attached resume), I will also bring my community and wide area networking expertise to bear on coordinating the civic networking evaluative study, with at least 100 hours committed to working with the other agency representatives, in addition to the six or more hours per week that I already volunteer for support of DCN.

Thank you for your consideration of the DCN proposal. We look forward to working with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in support of civic networking.

Sincerely,

Joan Gargano
Director, Information Technology
Distributed Computing Analysis and Support

Andrew Carvin
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
901 E St. NW
Washington, DC 20004-2037

Dear Sir,

As department head for the University of California, Davis Advanced Networking and Scientific Application unit, I am writing in support of the Davis Community Network's proposal for the development of regional technology demonstration centers in Yolo County in response to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Civic Networking Request for Proposals. Our interest is specifically in the demonstration projects associated with geographic information systems (GIS), and the integration of geographic information systems and document database/web services.

Our unit is a technical support unit, part of the Division of Information Technology. Among other services, we support a Visualization Lab and coordinate GIS activities on campus (help faculty, staff and students produce maps for use in almost any academic discipline; consult on information manipulation for managing, analyzing, and mapping information on high-resolution color graphics workstations and linking descriptive data to the geographic information; and support specialized input/output devices such as digitizers and color plotters).

Because of the University's community service mission, we are interested in providing resources to the efforts of local and county governments to utilize GIS technology to improve analysis, decision-making, and public service. In the area of wide area networking, I have also been very involved in the Davis Community Network (I serve as chair to the Technical Committee), and the Yolo Regional Network effort (I am a member of the infrastructure and mapping effort that is currently going on, and part of the planning effort to share and leverage regional telecommunications infrastructure). Success of these networking efforts goes beyond the University's community service mission to advancing the University's basic educational and research missions, through development of an adequate regional telecommunications infrastructure for use by faculty, staff and students who live and work in the region, and by providing connectivity alternatives for off-campus University offices.

If the CPB grant proposal is funded, ANSA will provide technical support to the GIS and integration of GIS/document database-web services pilot projects. Our approach is to provide training and technical consulting to develop self-sufficient users of the technologies. In addition, we will provide advanced technical consulting as necessary to deal with issues of export/import from various GIS software packages, and provisioning of GIS data through the world wide web. Finally, we will act as liaisons to academic classes in GIS and geospatial analysis, and recruit and manage students for student projects that would advance the regional GIS projects and provide valuable "real-world" experience to the students at the same time.

Sincerely,

Russ Hobby
Advanced Networking and Scientific Applications

(916) 752-0966
FAX: (916) 752-8666

July 23, 1996

Mr. Andrew Carvin
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
901 E Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20004-2037

Dear Mr. Carvin,

As Director of the newly endowed UC Davis Sun Technology and Research Excellence Center (SunTREC), I write to express my very strong support for the proposal being submitted to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting by the Davis Community Network and its regional partners. The proposal anticipates the formation of several regional technology demonstration centers in the northern California region that is centered on Yolo County. Since the UC Davis SunTREC would be an enormously powerful and attractive site for these demonstrations, let me outline the origins and purposes of the UC Davis SunTREC. I will then outline the challenges we face and the commitments we would like to make in meeting those challenges with your support.

Sun Microsystems Inc. and the Department of Political Science at UC Davis have recently agreed along with several other partners to establish a Sun Technology and Research Excellence Center (SunTREC). The Center will be one of only seven in the world and will be much larger in endowment and scope than the more numerous SunSITES previously created by Sun and participating universities.

The chief purpose of the UC Davis SunTREC is to explore, develop, and deploy applications of high-powered and high-capacity networking to problem solving by government institutions at all levels. The Davis SunTREC will be housed in the new Social Sciences building on the Davis campus, in the space formerly occupied by the AT&T Computer Lab and Classroom, an earlier gift to the University in 1994.

The gift from Sun includes substantial numbers of powerful server and workstation platforms. Some of this equipment will be used to create a teaching, research, and demonstration lab at Davis sufficient to accommodate eighteen users and a systems/network administrator.

The Sun gift will also equip a smaller facility at the UC Davis Washington Center in Washington D.C., which is directed by my departmental colleague, Professor Bruce Jentleson. The Davis and Washington D.C. facilities will be linked to each other and to additional SunTREC partners in Albany, New York, by video-conferencing technologies, as well as through a standard suite of network utilities. Each distributed component of the UC Davis SunTREC is intended by Sun to be a showcase demonstration site for a wide range of international and domestic visitors. At present, the SunTREC is being set up and tested. It will become fully operational by mid-summer and will be formally opened in campus ceremonies scheduled for the early Fall.

As you can see, the fit between SunTREC and the Community Network grant proposal purposes is good. Since our express purpose is to find new ways to bring government and technology together, one of our first challenges is to reach out to people in local, state, and federal agencies and organizations. The Community Network proposal to CPB helps us begin that process in our own local region in precisely the way we want, i.e. by bringing government people onto the campus and into the lab for direct, hands-on practice and experience.

We are especially excited by the opportunity to develop and demonstrate arrangements whereby technology makes it possible for each local jurisdiction in a region to develop and maintain, as they legally must, separate governmental databases but also allows regional access to and use of information that jurisdictions can profitably share.

A little further along, an even bigger challenge will be to bring this hands- on approach to demonstration and training to a larger public audience, something we cannot do within the physical consraints of the SunTREC facility itself. I have considerable experience, however, in the use of satellites and television in transcontinental teaching and communication and will certainly want to explore the applicability of this expertise to an expansion of the demonstration activities this particular grant targets to elected and appointed officials in the immediate region.

As the terms of the proposal indicate, we commit an appropriate fraction of the time of the SunTREC systems administrator to set up and supervise the demonstrations. We also commit, if the proposal is funded, to recruit, train, and supervise undergraduate student teaching assistants, who will be present during each demonstration session.

We look forward to your funding the project and to working together with our other partners in this new technology and telecommunications endeavor.

Sincerely,

Larry Berman
Professor and Chair
Director, The UC Davis SunTREC

August 6, 1996

Andrew Carvin
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
901 E. Street NW
Washington, DC 20004-2037

Dear Mr. Carvin,

The Volunteer Center of Yolo County is writing to support the Davis Community Networkis proposal for the development of regional technology demonstration centers in Yolo County.

The Volunteer Center is a non-profit, community based organization that recruits volunteers, identifies their skills, and refers them to an agency of their choice. Each year hundreds of volunteers are referred to over 35 non-profit educational, governmental, health, environmental, cultural and welfare agencies in Yolo County.

Todayis volunteer is very different from the volunteer of just a decade ago. Traditionally, it was homemakers who gave their time, but today it is also students, retirees and business people. Currently, Volunteer Center is faced with the challenge to communicate volunteer needs to this cross section of the community. The Center does not have access nor the training to use information technology and telecommunications. With the assistance from Davis Community Network the Volunteer Center would be able to provide on-linee infomation about local non-profit agencies, volunteer positions, and community volunteer needs.

Cordially,

Alison A. Jauch
Agency Coordinator

August 13, 1996

Andrew Carvin

Corporation for Public Broadcasting

910 E. St. NW

Washington, DC 20004-2037

Dear Mr. Carvin:

On behalf of the City of Davis, I am writing to support the Davis Community Network's proposal to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The city was an early supporter of the Davis Community Network as a means of improving access to the government for citizens and is committed to providing information on-line directly to citizens and supporting the development of local content.

Recognizing the benefit to the city of providing service on-line, the Council approved a pilot project with the Davis Community Network in October, 1994. Council recognized that a system to provide citizen access to electronic information and communications was an important community service, one which was likely to be as important to the continuing economic development of the community as basic infrastructure such as water, sewer and roads.

The city itself has been extremely pleased with the results of the Electronic City Hall project. It provided easily accessible information to citizens on a 24 hour basis and allowed staff using the Internet to perform their jobs more effectively. The city staff have adopted the use of Internet e-mail, file transfer and hypertext whole heartedly.

Budgetary constraints do not allow the city to implement a full geographic information system. However, this grant will support cooperative efforts between governments that will allow the city to use geospatial analysis the city's own planning efforts as well as providing this information directly to citizens for easier analysis and vastly improving the decision making process for both staff and citizens.

The city is firmly committed to using technology to maintain and enhance services and information delivered to citizens in this period of declining budgets. We also feel that promoting the development of these skills in the city staff and the community as a whole will attract economic development opportunities from companies that need those skills to compete effectively in the marketplace.

Sincerely,

John Meyer

City Manager

Andrew Carvin
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
901 E St. NW
Washington, DC 20004-2037

Dear Sir:

Genasys II is writing to support the Davis Community Network's (DCN) proposal for the development of regional technology demonstration centers in Yolo County.

Genasys II, Inc. is an innovative software company specializing in designing, developing and supporting integrated GIS solutions. Genasys has developed GIS software for applications in all levels of government, planning and resource management.

In support of the DCN project Genasys II will provide the Spatial Web Broker, an Internet gateway to the Genasys family of products and GenaMap, a full function vector/raster GIS. These software products will provide Internet/Intranet access to maps and other geographically referenced data as well as providing the capability to conduct spatial analysis.

Genasys II will provide software support for the first year for the educational discount of $2500. Software training for Spatial Web Broker, Genamap Scripting and Advanced Genamap will also be donated during the start up phase of the project. Travel expenses for Genasys II employees or DCN employees are not included in the donation however.

Thank you for the opportunity to provide this assistance to our local government and educational institutions.

Sincerely yours,

F. Joe Yeager
Western Regional Sales Manager

Mr. Andrew Carvin
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
901 E Street NW
Washington, DC 20004-2037

Dear Mr. Carvin,

On behalf of the City of Woodland I am writing in Support of the Davis Community Networkis proposal for the development of regional technology demonstration centers in Yolo County.

The City of Woodland, a community of 43,000 people, is the County seat of agriculturally rich Yolo County. With scarce public resources yet a strong need to enhance the ability of our residents and businesses to communicate, our City has encouraged taking advantage of opportunities in new information technology.

Key barriers to expanding information technology in our community have been the cost of equipment and the communityis limited awareness of its enormous potential. In order to support the larger expenses associated with adapting entire communities to new technology it is important for communities to see and feel what the new technologies are and what they can mean. Demonstration centers fit this need perfectly. A demonstration center located within our community, through the County offices, can give residents and businesses a first hand view of what is possible. This will build support for future private and public investments needed to bring these technologies to the community in greater volume.

The City of Woodland has been and will continue to be a partner in the Yolo Regional Telecommunications Group and will assist in these and other activities which benefit our community.

Sincerely,

Kris B. Kristensen
City Manager

Phone: 916-756-0191 Fax: 916-756-1227

E-Mail: explorit@dcn.davis.ca.us

URL: http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/GO/EXPLORIT/

August 13, 1996

Andrew Carvin

Corporation for Public Broadcasting

901 E Street NW

Washington, DC 20004-2037

Dear Sir,

As a co-founder of the fourteen year old Explorit Science Center, its executive director for ten years, a current member of the board of trustees, and the webmeister of its one year old web site, I am pleased to have the opportunity to write to you in support of the Davis Community Network's proposal regarding regional technology demonstration centers in Yolo County.

Although Explorit is a small science center it serves the whole of Yolo and Sacramento Counties, and extends its reach with traveling science programs into twelve other counties of the region. The general public visits daily and school groups come by appointment for organized

lessons. About forty-five thousand people are served each year.

Communication with clients and potential clients is a continuing challenge that could be very positively affected by the Davis Community Network's proposed project. Explorit has found that the information and interactive opportunities (online membership and class registration forms for example) in its web site are quite poorly used by the communities we serve. I believe this to be because the families and school teachers served by our science center do not yet feel impelled to provide themselves with the equipment and know-how that would make electronic local, regional or national information and interaction available to them.

The Davis Community Network's proposed project will make a very significant difference in the amount of generally useful material accessible in the local (University, City and County) networks, and so will make it much more worthwhile for people in all walks of life to make the effort to educate themselves to take advantage of the new communication technologies for both presenting and obtaining information. I plan to cooperate in the implementation of the project to the fullest extent possible.

Yours truly

R. Anne Hance

KIMBALL J.P. SARGEANT

August 15, 1996
Mr. Andrew Carvin:
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
901 E. Street N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20004-2037
Re: CPB Grant Proposal,
Davis Community Network

Dear Mr. Carvin:

I am an appellate attorney practicing in Davis, California, and am also the Vice-President of Davis Community Network. I write in support of the grant proposal to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting by Davis Community Network and other institutional partners, including the University of California, Davis, the City of Davis and Yolo County.

One strong element of DCN's proposal is to explore the feasibility and application of a volunteer management system employing the Internet as the medium. I have personal experience with volunteerism and the need for new and innovative ways of managing volunteers for non-profit organizations. Davis has a large and well-supported youth soccer program and I have a ten-year-old daughter who has been an active soccer participant for a number of years. For that reason I have for the past three years served as a volunteer coach for the Davis region of the American Youth Soccer Association ("AYSO"), an all volunteer- run organization. My wife also serves as a volunteer referee. Last Spring I arranged for my Select Team, "Wipeout!," to participate in a pilot project to evaluate use of e-mail and Internet accounts for team members, parents and coaches to coordinate practices, games and other team activities. Also, for the past two years AYSO in Davis has arranged with DCN to receive a number of free Internet accounts for coaches, referees and volunteer leaders to use in coordinating soccer programs. I have personally experienced the problems and difficulties of communicating with, organizing and scheduling volunteers within AYSO.

One unmet need of AYSO and other non-profit organizations which rely heavily on volunteer services is an effective and easy means of volunteer management. This includes recruiting and scheduling of volunteers and tracking of volunteer hours contributed to the organization. These problems are even more acute for organizations with a dispersed volunteer base and no centralized facility such as AYSO. I believe that DCN's grant proposal, which seeks to promote and develop expanded volunteer recruitment services (through the Yolo Volunteer Center) and wider availability of automated volunteer management software (the Sutter Time Exchange Program) will be of great benefit to local non-profit organizations. Additionally, the development of such a program locally should produce a volunteer management system which can be replicated elsewhere to the advantage of non-profit causes throughout the country.

Please give this proposal your serious consideration. I anticipate your funding of this project, with all the resulting benefits it will bring to use of telecommunications tools for non-profit purposes.

Very truly yours,

LAW OFFICE OF

KIMBALL J.P. SARGEANT

KIMBALL J.P. SARGEANT