Community Technology and Community Building: Early Results from the Creating Community Connections Project

Received 1 February 2002; accepted 2 November 2002. The Camfield Estates–MIT Creating Community Connections project has been a true team effort. Leadership at Camfield Estates consists of Paulette Ford, CTA President, and Nakia Keizer, Project Leader and MIT Reflective Community Practitioner, along with the following board members and advisors: Constance Terrell, Malissa Evans, Luon Williams, Edward Harding, Susan Terrell, Marzella Hightower-Hunt, Cora Scott, Alberta Willis, Minnie Clark, and Daniel Violi. At MIT, Randal Pinkett, PhD candidate, MIT Media Laboratory, and Richard O’Bryant, PhD candidate, MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), are the co-principal investigators, under the supervision of Professor Mitchel Resnick, MIT Media Laboratory, Professor Joseph Ferreira, Jr., DUSP, Professor Ceasar McDowell, DUSP and Director of the Center for Reflective Community Practice (CRCP), Professor Brian Smith, MIT Media Laboratory, and Professor David Gifford, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS), with assistance from undergraduate students Megan Henry and Wei-An Yu. Without support from the following individuals and organizations, as well as countless others, the project would not have been possible: Dr. Gail McClure and Caroline Carpenter, Kellogg Foundation, Thaddeus Miles, Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency (MHFA), Wayne Williams, Jackie Williams, Garfield Williams, and Luis Herrera, Williams Consulting Services, Donna Fisher, Cornu Management, Bess Stephens, Catherine Gowen, Camilla Nelson, and Robert Bouzon, Hewlett-Packard Company, Dave Mitchell, Microsoft Corporation, John McGeough and Ken Rahaman, RCN Telecom Services, and Philip Greenspun, ArsDigita Corporation. I particularly thank Mitchel Resnick, Richard O’Bryant, and Ceasar McDowell for their guidance and support. Above all, I thank all of the residents at Camfield Estates for the wonderful opportunity to work together with them. For more information about the Camfield Estates– MIT project, visit http://www.camfieldestates.net. Address correspondence to Randal Pinkett, PhD, BCT Partners, LLC, Carriage Office Building, 900 Park Avenue, Plainfield, NJ 07060, USA. E-mail: [email protected]; web site: http://www. bctpartners.com exclusive. This article sheds light on the possibilities inhered at this nexus. The project that constitutes the basis for this paper is the Camfield Estates–MIT Creating Community Connections Project, an ongoing effort at Camfield Estates, a predominantly AfricanAmerican, lowto moderate-income housing development. As part of this project, we worked with residents to establish a technological infrastructure by offering every family a new computer, software, high-speed Internet connection, comprehensive courses, and a web-based community-building system, the Creating Community Connections (C3) System, that I codesigned with residents. This article presents an overview of the Camfield Estates–MIT project, theoretical framework developed in relation to this work, research design and methodology, project methodology and timeline, and early results. It concludes with a set of recommendations for the community technology and community-building movements.