Wired Volunteers

A city school gets a jump on NetDay

By Lars Kongshem

Lars Kongshem is assistant editor and webmaster of Electronic School.

It's a sunny and hot Saturday morning in Washington, D.C., and the residents of Capitol Hill are browsing leisurely for fresh produce at the Eastern Market. You wouldn't expect to find too many people itching to install cable and upgrade computers for no pay on a day like this, but just two blocks away, there's a telling sign on the door at Hine Junior High School: "Internet volunteers meet on the third floor."

Inside, three dozen community members, teachers, parents, and students are hard at work extending Internet access to additional classrooms at the school. To these net evangelists, though, what they're doing isn't work--it's barn raising for the '90s, a celebration of community cyberspirit.

In one classroom, a large group of well-organized volunteers is performing surgery on the school's assortment of aging PCs, preparing them for Internet access duty. They're adding Ethernet network cards, running diagnostic tests, checking for viruses, and installing and configuring Internet shareware. Few of the volunteers are computer or Internet experts, but that's not a worry--they are teaching one another and learning as they go along.

It's an eclectic crowd: There's physicist Wendy Fuller-Mora, who works at the Naval Research Laboratory and has no kids; police officer Ted Brannum, who is married to a Hine science teacher and has a child in the eighth grade here; and 11th-grade computer whiz Lisa Cozzens, who attends the private Sidwell Friends school. Others run the gamut from teachers to independent Internet consultants. Their shared goal is to bring the net to as many students in this school as possible.

There's technology empowerment going on here, too, as teachers grab screwdrivers and go to work on the guts of the computers their students soon will be using to explore the net. "Getting teachers involved in a volunteer effort like this gives them a stake in using the technology," says science teacher Ernest Williams, the school's de facto technology coordinator. "Besides, if we waited for D.C. Public Schools to do this for us, it wouldn't happen--they're strapped for cash."

Next door, other volunteers are building an Internet server by raiding parts from several donated computers. With a hard drive here, some memory chips there, and a good bit of old-fashioned trial and error, this server soon will host students' home pages on the web. Volunteer Andrew Lightman directs the effort and narrates as the work proceeds, instructing teachers and students on the finer points of building a computer from spare parts. As the server finally boots up after several aborted attempts, Lightman breathes a sigh of relief. "I'm not a computer person--I'm an editor," he grins.

A third group of volunteers is on wiring detail, poking into the second-floor ceiling to run cable from a central communications closet by the administrative office to four separate classrooms. The school's 56 Kbps connection to the Internet comes courtesy of the school district, which installed it primarily for administrative uses. Although the school district initially wired a few classrooms to take advantage of the Internet connection, the greater part of the school was left out of the loop. The intent of this group's volunteer effort is to finish the job and wire the whole school, one floor at a time.

"If we do this two or three more times, we may have the whole school wired," Williams says. Indeed, without the bootstrap efforts of these volunteers, the school's Internet connection would be sitting largely unused in that closet, just a few hundred feet from the kids in classrooms.

All together now

Brought together by a simple desire to help, some of the volunteers at Hine came as an informal group of community members who heard about the project on a local Usenet newsgroup. Others are here as a result of the organizing efforts of Tech Corps-DC, the local chapter of a national, nonprofit organization of grassroots school technology volunteers. Not yet a year old, Tech Corps already has spawned chapters in 34 states and intends to be in place in all 50 states by fall.

"This is a partnership at the school level," says Darryl J. Wood, a computer specialist at the Smithsonian Institution and the project director for Tech Corps-DC. "Schools in D.C. are decentralized and have kind of been left on their own. The administration is swamped, so we do the best we can and try to train students at the same time."

Although Tech Corps-DC has just barely completed the chartering process to become a recognized state chapter of the national organization, there's been no lack of requests from schools for help so far. "Our name is getting around the city by word-of-mouth," Wood says. "I'm going to try my best not to take on any more requests this summer, although I don't want to turn anyone down."

A graduate of the Washington, D.C., public schools himself, Wood is directing several Hine eighth-graders as they go about installing Category 5 wire from the communications closet at Hine to the four selected classrooms. (Category 5 wire consists of eight twisted copper phone wires; if it is installed according to specification, computer data can travel over the wire at high speed--up to 100 Mbps.) The group makes its way slowly but meticulously along the corridor, climbing the ladder, removing ceiling panels, and guiding the wire along the conduit.

"One of the reasons we're moving slow today is that we're also training students," Wood says. Unexpected ceiling obstacles call for quick thinking and creative solutions, so the students get called on as troubleshooters and to calculate the lengths of wire needed. "We're showing them how math is relevant to real life," Wood adds.

Training the students makes sense because the school can turn to them as a resource later, says Mark Root, manager of technology and information services for the Council of the Great City Schools. Root is a cofounder of Tech Corps-DC and one of its chief evangelists. It takes $4 to support every dollar invested in technology, he says, so training students is a cost-effective solution for tight school budgets. "The fact that the students are here on a Saturday shows their commitment," Root points out.

"They have a go-getter attitude," Wood agrees. "They don't mind going up into the ceiling. And they're anxious to come back, because we have a couple of more days' worth of work to do. They're kids, but I'll put them up against any wiring professional. When I say you can get paid $20 an hour doing this, they say, 'Where do I sign up?'"

Not just nerds

Is wiring a school a task that can safely be attempted by volunteers who have no technical expertise? Provided they get technical guidance, Root says, the answer is Yes.

"Most people think pulling cable through a building and connecting it to the Internet is a difficult task, but it isn't," he says. "Most of our volunteers are not technology professionals. We have people who like technology and really want to get involved. It's not that technical, and as long as there are a few engineers present, we're fine. The common thread among our volunteers is that they like technology."

The feasibility of using properly supervised amateur labor to install computer network wiring at little or no cost to schools was demonstrated on March 9 this year. That's when more than 50,000 volunteers installed 6 million feet of cable in 3,500 schools during a one-day networking blitz in California. The organizers behind that much-publicized event--known as NetDay96--now intend to replicate it on a nationwide scale during four Saturdays this October.

Michael Kaufman, the energetic cofounder of NetDay96, is a former teacher and school administrator who knows from firsthand experience how the lack of adequate wiring in classrooms isolates teachers and schools from parents and local communities. "Schools are handicapped by the missing link to the outside," Kaufman says. "We communicate with parents by tacking notes to kids."

Hatched in 1994 as a plan for parents to help wire classrooms for telephone and e-mail access, Kaufman's scheme caught the attention of John Gage, the chief scientist for high-end computer maker Sun Microsystems. Experienced community organizers both, Kaufman and Gage distilled the NetDay plan to a core concept: A one-day wiring extravaganza funded by the business community, accomplished with volunteer labor, and organized through information distributed on the web. (Because schools need access to the NetDay96 web site to participate, MCI offers one free Internet account to each school that needs it in order to prevent a chicken-and-egg situation for schools that have no current Internet access.)

The plan was purposefully limited in scope--install just the wiring, and link just five classrooms and a library or computer lab to a central point inside the school--to ensure that the event's goals were achievable. With this basic internal wiring infrastructure in place, schools would be ready to take the next step: connecting classroom computers to one end of those wires and an Internet access provider to the other. NetDay96 was endorsed last fall by President Clinton and Vice President Gore and the rest, of course, is cyberhistory.

"This is not a technology project, this is a people project," Kaufman says. "The idea is to develop supportive communities around schools." Indeed, the success of a particular school's NetDay activities depends entirely on local organizers. The NetDay model also counts on sponsoring organizations to donate $500 standardized wiring kits that include the necessary materials to wire one school, as well as the technical staff to assist in planning the installation and testing it upon completion.

Although the California NetDay event was hugely successful by most accounts, some schools may have been disappointed in the outcome because of "implications in some of the media that there was more to NetDay than just the wiring," Kaufman says. "There never was. Of course, there were those with greater ambitions who wired the entire school, installed routers, and arranged for Internet access, too. It all hinged on the level of local initiative."

At one such location, a middle school in San Jose, 100 volunteers--including a contingent of local cable and telephone installers--wired the entire school with three outlets or "drops" in every classroom. "People drove for miles to come to our school," says Barbara Brisson, the school's technology coordinator. "It was an amazing event. And yes, it took hours and hours of planning to pull it off successfully, but it was worth it."

The California NetDay event even overcame a bitter labor dispute, a testament to the power of volunteerism to unify a community around a common need. In Oakland, where teachers were in the middle of a contentious 21-day strike as NetDay96 approached, intense membership support persuaded the union leadership to sanction the event despite the walkout, Kaufman relates. The result: teachers pulled cable alongside administrators, labor strife notwithstanding.

Every day a NetDay

What happens after NetDay? In many California communities, NetDay really never ended, and activities to finish wiring the schools are continuing every weekend, Kaufman says. "Once a community like this forms, it continues to work on the project. NetDay is a happening, an event to raise awareness. We kick it off, and we'll support whatever happens afterwards."

That's where Tech Corps fits into the picture, says that organization's executive director, Karen Smith. "NetDay and Tech Corps are very complementary," Smith says. "Tech Corps volunteers assist schools in a number of ways, including mentoring and staff development--activities for which there is a natural need once a school has been wired. We believe that the two organizations, working hand-in-hand, can do some pretty terrific things."

For the three-quarters of the U.S. population without school-age children, Tech Corps and NetDay provide natural vehicles to get in touch with and help local schools, she says.

"There is a resurgence in volunteerism in general across the country," Smith adds. "Technology-minded people like to share their knowledge, and they are acutely aware that technology is lacking in schools. There's also a general recognition that money alone can't solve this problem--it also takes people. Money is key, but the investment of people can help maximize that resource."

There is, of course, an additional important component to the motivation behind this volunteer wire brigade: "It is fun," says Mark Root. "It is so much fun."

Photography by the author.