East St. Louis Action Research Project
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
East St. Louis Action Research Project
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"No one else will ever care about a community half as much as
those who live there... Everything we do...should ultimately be about empowering
people at the grassroots, to assume responsibility for their own lives,
their own communities..."
-President Bill Clinton
The information and communications technology revolution
is getting much closer to citizen action in many ways. Community computer
networks have sprung up in more than a hundred cities. The Department of
Housing and Urban Development has announced that it will make Home Mortgage
Disclosure Act data-critical to the work of housing advocates-available
on-line. Nearly one-third of public libraries are estimated to have Internet
access today, with about half of those offering public access terminals.
The Advertising Council has taken two of its recent natinal campaigns on-line
through Prodigy.
Market forces are beginning to bring business players into the information technology arena in a way that will have significant implicatins for revitalization and renewal. Each of the major commercial providers of on-line services, for example-America Online, Prodigy, and Compuserve-has services that provide information and connectivity to people who care about community service/action issues. The Public Information Exchange-a new partnership of Sprint, Electronic Data services, the Online Computer Library Center and the Reference Point Foundation-is creating a new information and data"utility" to offer non-profits and government agencies a way to disseminate, exchange, and retrieve information nationally with considerably more ease thatn is now possible on the Internet.
Document author(s):
YinYuan Qing
HTML by : YinYuan Qing
Last modified: 13 Sept, 1995
East St. Louis
Action Research Project
