The Digital Inclusion Corps met in person for the second time at the 2017 International Conference of Indigenous Archives, Libraries, and Museums. (Left to right: Jeff Garcie, Sandy Tharp-Thee, Drew Lauderdale, Nicole Umayam, Emily Kissane)
All five of us were able to make it to New Mexico for the 2017 International Conference of Indigenous Archives, Libraries, and Museums to speak about our digital inclusion projects. Our presentation was an open forum titled New Directions in Digital Inclusion. We’re now over halfway done with the pilot project, and it was a great honor to stand alongside my colleagues and share our experiences with the ATALM community.
We opened with some definitions of the digital divide and of digital inclusion, then went into an overview of the digital inclusion corps pilot project and each shared briefly about our respective host institutions and the diverse projects we’ve been working on. I noted that participation in this project has been transformational for all of our host institutions as it has lead to partnerships and outreach to other agencies as well as to codify digital inclusion priorities.
The emphasis of the forum was the open discussion portion. I had prepared some questions ahead of time to get us started, and soon the hands shot up with questions from the audience. Some of the questions included:
- What do our conversations with stakeholders look like? Who is participating in these conversations and what are some of the things that we’ve been hearing? (prepared question)
- How do people respond to using LINUX computers and OpenOffice?
- With such diverse projects, how do you measure success and document your efforts?
- What happens at the end of the project?
After the forum, we participated in a networking roundtable lunch where we talked with a number of conference attendees about the project.