In between dealing with various financial issues involving CIRCLE,
I wrote most of a proposal to the NSF
to support high school classes for the next two yearsincluding money
for curriculum development, assessment, and research. The specific activity
that we’ll ask NSF to fund is map-making. If funded, our kids would make
a whole variety of interactive maps of their community that they would
post on their website: asset
maps, network maps, environmental maps, problem-solving maps, and historical
maps of the County. My current dream is that we will get funding from
several specialized sources to suppport work in particular fields over
the next 2-3 years. One source might fund a journalism after-school program
on Tuesdays; another would fund map-making on Wednesdays; and still another
would support community history work on Thursdays. (Clearly, since I have
another full-time job, I would only be able to come to these classes occasionally.)
All the classes would produce material for the Website. Once the site
was full of valuable material, we would convene community leaders and
citizens and say (in effect): This is something that belongs to all of
us, because it reflects the richness of our community. Would you like
to join us in adding material? Would you like to run the site as a nonprofit
association? We’re at your service, and we’re willing to back away if
it’s time for someone else to manage things.
The idea, in short, is to strengthen the community by building a new
independent association connected to a Website. But to get people interested,
the site has to have content. And since no one wants to fund us to build
an association, we need to go after specialized funders in various content
areassuch as NSF for geography. We’ll see if it works.
Mike Weiksner and Archon Fung have contributed nice replies to my posting
blog.