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February 27, 2005
Announcing Digital Divide Meetups
Hi everyone,
I've got some exciting news... Some of you may remember the podcast I posted a couple of weeks ago when the Digital Divide Network (DDN) hosted an informal meetup in Boston during the LinuxWorld conference. It wasn't a real "meetup" in the sense that we didn't use the website meetup.com to organize it, but it was in spirit of that website, which helps people organize meetings with like-minded people in their local community.
As it turns out, the podcast caught the attention of the people who run meetup.com, and they contacted me to say hello. In our conversations I mentioned to them that Meetup.com didn't have an easy way to organize local community gatherings specifically around the digital divide, as "digital divide" wasn't one of the topics they had categorized on their site. Within a few hours, that problem was solved, as Meetup.com has set up a digital divide community just for us:
Effective immediately, anyone who is interested in organizing a community gathering to discuss the digital divide now has a free tool to do this. When you register with the site, you'll be able to organize your own digital divide meetup in your town; then anyone who is interested in discussing the digital divide can come and join you. The site even has a notification system that will email you when someone has organized a digital divide-related meetup in your community.
I can see this service being used by us a couple of ways. First, it allows any of us to organize our own community meetings to discuss the digital divide, whenever you want -- your library, a coffee shop. the neighborhood church. So if you just want to do it once, or if you want to make it a monthly event, it's up to you. And now that "digital divide" has been added to the list of topics for Meetup, other Meetup members who have no experience with DDN can still find out about your meeting and participate.
Second, while this may be wishful thinking, I could see us organizing simultaneous DDN meetings all over the world. For example, let's say we decide to make June 1 International DDN Day; DDN volunteers would then organize local meetings to discuss the digital divide, all for that same day. Members would be encourged to make podcasts, video clips, take notes, etc, then share their experiences on the list and on the DDN website. Just yesterday we were talking on the list about why there should be WSIS-related meetings in real communities rather than places like Geneva. So who's to say that in the third week of November of this year, communities all over the world organize their own WSIS mini-summits to discuss the digital divide locally?
So for those of you who have thought about organizing or participating in local meetings to discuss the digital divide, I encourage you to go to ddn.meetup.com and organize a meeting. I think it could be a powerful way of adding new depth and real-world action to the Digital Divide Network.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at February 27, 2005 11:57 AM
Listen to a computer-generated podcast of this article
