Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh
Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh
Discussions continued through the quarter on the best placement of cable drops at East Hills Elementary School and Westinghouse High School. Since Mellon Institute lacks convenient aerial access, it was decided to employ pre-existing fiber running from downtown Pittsburgh to Mellon Institute. The fiber connection will require an agreement between TCI, which has fiber running from downtown to just outside Mellon Institute, and Penn Access, which owns the fiber entering Mellon Institute. Additional equipment will also be required to drive this fiber link.
User devices were purchased at discount from Digital Equipment and deployed to sites with high-bandwidth connectivity in the following numbers:
The first server constructed on an Intel platform and running NetBSD was deployed at Schenley High School. The local server allowed greatly expanded student use of network resources. The use of NetBSD on an Intel platform is significant in that it provides for high performance at extremely low cost.
In response to this level of interest, plans were initiated for an expanded Hill House Community Access Network. A draft description of this activity can be found online at http://www.pitt.edu/~crssw.
In early March computers were delivered to each of the six seed sites and to Hill House. LAN connectivity was established at Hill House via a 14.4 kilobit dialup link. A Hill House server was built and deployed at the Common Knowledge central site pending the establishment of higher bandwidth connectivity to Hill House itself. This server followed the architecture developed for school sites in Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh and included a range of Internet resources.
Hill House personnel quickly established a presence on the network, initially at the Common Knowledge beta site, http://hermia.woolslair.pps.pgh.pa.us/user/thomaseu/hhhome.html Within weeks they were able to demonstrate these capabilities to visitors from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, who expressed an interest in using this technology to link the 60 Enterprise Communities and 6 Empowerment Zones funded by HUD. It was proposed that CK:P, Hill House and the City of Pittsburgh develop a proposal to provide this service.
At the end of March, Internet and e-mail training were instituted for Hill House staff. Network accounts were created, and orientation handbooks were distributed. By the end of the month another 50 community residents had registered for activities in the computer lab.
With the installation of phone lines at the six seed sites, Internet connectivity was established. Teacher inservice sessions took place in February with discussions of the World Wide Web and hypertext markup language following in March. At Vann Elementary School a project was initiated to create a school home page.
While the driving impulse behind the exhibit has been the photographic collection of the Pennsylvania Department, unusual and informative text has proved to be a crucial element for the success of the exhibit. A great deal of time and effort went into organizational questions such as the selection of icons to give the exhibit a unique identity and assist users in locating themselves in the exhibit. The selected icons are part of a "baseball alphabet" published in a Pittsburgh newspaper at the turn of the century and converted into transparent gif images for the present purpose.
As the number of neighborhoods represented in the exhibit increases, the number of cross-links will increase, giving the presentation a remarkable depth and interest. An intern from the University of Pittsburgh's School of Library and Information Science has begun researching and writing biographies for photographers represented in the exhibit. This material will be included online.
The exhibit has been viewed informally by a number of people from within the Carnegie and outside. This has included staff from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the Preservation Advisory Committee of the Pittsburgh Regional Library Center - two groups who may find this technology useful in their own areas. The January issue of "Computers in Libraries" highlights the exhibit in a cover story.
Contacts with the business community and with representatives of city and county government suggested that these groups were ready for activities more focused than a conference, and plans began to be developed for a formal regional infrastructure planning process. With the announcement of the 1995 round of TIIAP grants, it was decided to develop the planning process in the context of this program. Matching funds for the grant proposal involved a number of activities already planned or under way throughout the region. These demonstration projects will provide the baseline for future planning.
Major participants in the planning process will include representatives of education, business, government, medicine and nonprofit organizations. A parallel effort will seek to stimulate the development of new demonstration projects, with major funding by local businesses, foundations and governments.
Katherine Yasin began her work on the assessment component of the project, collecting information which will be used in describing and analyzing the outcomes of various grant activities and the processes leading to those outcomes. To familiarize herself with these activities she attended monthly staff meetings and took extensive notes on the activities discussed there. She visted Hill House to conduct informal interviews with Chrishelle Thomas-Eugene and met with Barry Chad and other staff at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. The assessment staff have also been gathering printed materials flowing out of the project activities and collecting copies of e-mail between project participants. This technique has been used effectively in other areas of Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh to document the kinds of issues which arise in the collaboration and how resulting problems are dealt with.
The challenge in the upcoming quarters will be to pull together the strands of interest evident among all these groups. Although the focus for regional network planning has been the 1995 round of TIIAP funding, the expectation has been to go forward with the planning process whether or not federal funds are forthcoming from this source. Individual demonstration projects can be funded from local sources or present funding, as can pieces of the planning process such as surveys, online initiatives and a regional workshop.