Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/07/2014
3:00 pm to 4:30 pm
Location
Nonprofit Center
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
Tech Networks of Boston (also known as “TNB”) hosts Roundtable sessions every other Friday afternoon; these are informal discussions and presentations, on a wide range of topics of interest to TNB’s staff, nonprofit clients, and friends.
We hope that you will join us on November 7th, when our featured guest will be Peter Miller. The topic will be “What nonprofit organizations need to know about community technology centers.” Third Sector New England has graciously offered to act as co-host for this session, and we will therefore be meeting in the videoconference room of their NonProfit Center.
Here’s what Peter says about the session:
Community technology centers (CTCs) are ordinarily approached primarily as the institution par excellence for addressing the problems of the digital divide and promoting digital inclusion, with a host of secondary benefits of interest to the organizations sponsoring them. This presentation on CTCs will focus primarily on what have previously been considered secondary benefits and should be of interest to any nonprofit with constituents coming through the door as well as any staff or consultants involved in organizational or technology planning.
Among these benefits are:
1. Any member or client service can be very usefully enhanced by looking at the technology tools and resources available in addressing it and the advantages of having a CTC or in-house computer lab for constituent training, education, and access. Any kind of literacy, health, education, job training, recreational, civic, early childhood to disabled and seniors and aging program that brings people in the door can make a vital contribution if those people leave with enhanced, focused, self-directed technology tools, resources,, and services.
2. A CTC/computer lab facility can also provide a full range of additional services on its own terms: some examples are emerging technology tools, applications, and programs, social media, where to get donated equipment, apps, and connectivity, community-based desktop publishing, data management, and consulting.
3. A major benefit of having a CTC is the expanded opportunity and foundation it provides for collaborations and partnerships, for pulling together and networking services and resources in a particular program area to undertaking general community development on a fuller and more integrated scale.
4. All these considerations together should lead any serious, constituent-serving NPO to conclude: “I need to give a serious look at CTC development — both internally and externally. If we choose not to build/have a CTC as a part of our planning, at the very least we need to know about and have a mutually-supportive relationship with all the special institutional CTCs in our program area(s) and community — at libraries, churches, neighborhood centers, Y’s, and Boys and Girls Clubs, shelters, Senior Centers, ethnic and national orgs, and schools.”
