Program Summary:

This program provides an intense, supportive mentored training program for activists of color to become professional-level, politically progressive and movement involved technologists. At the end of a 15 month program, the trainee will be able to perform all server administration functions as well as basic code writing and other skills needed to plan, maintain and upgrade any organization's technology.

No other program of this type exists in this country.

There is one weakness in this promising picture: techies, the Internet's leaders, are mainly white men. This means that, while people of color can do a lot on the Internet, the backbone (and the power to control and maintain the technology) is in the hands of white people.

The problems this creates threaten the movement's successful use of technology and the marrying of technology with the movement's organizing work.

To characterize and under the dimensions of the problem:

1 -- This lack of representation is actually a lack of empowerment and since white people control the technology, the important contributions people of color make in combatting racism, raising issues that are hidden by color, diversifying the "recipient" population and so much else simply doesn't get to the Internet's techie population.

2 -- Software development is never geared to people of color and techies do the software development

3 -- Far too little effort is made among techies in this country to combat technology barriers that keep people of color off-line, a situation that would definitely improve if there were more techies of color.

4 -- The necessary and politically powerful collaborations among techies from various countries and parts of the world are crippled by the lack of background diversity among US-based techies. It's difficult to truly develop a collaboration when the US techies are all white and, what's more, any collaboration devbeloped is crippled because, in the end, white culture is not the entire US culture.

The simple solution is to bring techies of color into the progressive movement's techie activities and that would be eminently possible if there were techies of color. But that is the second part of the problem.

Internet activists of color are traditionally mired in a disempowering situation when it comes to technology. Most activists who use the Internet are dependent on proprietary "social networking" software and websites built for them that they know how to use but don't know how to fix or expand. The activists whose skills go beyond that are sometimes familiar with "content creation" software like web creation packages (e.g. WordPress) but are completely ignorant of the software and processes that actually run a server.

In that state, organizations of color (and individual activists of color) are universally beholden to white technnologists to run their servers and other infra-structure and, while it's not immediately apparently, this puts the communications of all movements of color in the hands of people who are white. In the long term, this is extremely harmful to everyone, to all movements and to the ability of our movements to work with the Internet and with each other using its technology.

In the short term, it serves to exascerbate the feelings of powerlessness and dependence on the dominant "race" that are a significant part of racist ideology.

To address this problem, we need to consider the reasons for it

1 -- People of color are not given the same opportunities and access as white people. Since the technology is in white hands, it serves to reason that it will remain there as techies share tasks with people they know and trust.

2 -- We don't get training. Because no techie training program exists specifically for people of color.

3 -- The Internet has, in fact, been slower in introduction into Third World communities and this "digital divide" (as it was once called) is systemically linked to the absence of techies of color since the presence of the technology in his or her community is a techie's first encounter with it.

4 -- The "techie Culture" that has grown around technologists' functioning and interactions with each other. The technology and the Internet community itself reflects white culture in almost every way and because these interactions are so intense the cultural imprint is that much sharper and vivid. Techies of color would find self-introduction in that culture very difficult and intimidating.

4 -- The focus of political techie work is out of step with the usage patterns and identified needs of activists of color. For instance, the techie movement's stress on vfree and open source software contradicts the dependency by most activists of color on such social networking tools as Face Book. Such dependencies are, in fact, extremely damanging and dangerous and techies have been able to argue that successfully within much of the mass white movement. But the divide between techies and the movements are color make that argument must more difficult and even viewed with suspicion.

Goals

This program's primary goal is to turn the situation around by training a group of people of color to become proficient techies with skills in server administration, web and email administration and trouble-shooting and basic software development including the ability to construct basic scripts in Drupal and similar content management systems.

After a one year program of intense on the job training with constant support from a fully qualified "mentor", the trainee will be proficient enough to actually run Linux servers, perform installations, diagnostics and upgrades, maintain the server system and

The trainee will also have benefitted from a full year of intense discussion and reflection on the political significance of his/her work, the issues a progressive techie confronts and the problem of relating to ot5her ac5tivists and how to deal with those problems.