Equitable Internet Initiative Community Technology Platform

In Detroit, 40% of the general population and 70% of school-aged children lack Internet access at home. In this context, affordable, resilient, community-controlled, Internet infrastructure is critically important.  

In 2016 the Detroit Community Technology Project (DCTP) launched the Equitable Internet Initiative (EII), with the goal of fostering neighborhood-based communications infrastructure and digital literacy. Since then, the EII has been training Digital Stewards to build solarized, off-grid community wireless networks in marginalized Detroit neighborhoods, bringing more than 200 homes online to date. 

The EII offers a unique model for community wireless, alternative Internet service and digital stewardship that can be replicated nationally and globally. Our solution will make the curricula, principles, and resources of EII available to communities worldwide, giving millions of people marginalized from political and economic power the ability to leverage Internet technologies to shape the future of their neighborhoods and regions.

Digital access is a social justice issue. In Detroit, 40% of the general population lacks internet access, while an estimated 44% of the world's population remains offline—a form of digital inequity that disproportionately affects low-income people of color. It is no accident that Detroit, as the least-connected major city in the U.S, is also one of the Blackest and poorest cities in the country while in bordering suburb Warren, 70% of residents are white and over 80% of residents are connected to the internet. This inequity is exacerbated by climate change; a lack of reliable communications infrastructure compounds the destructive effects of climate-related natural disasters. The least connected countries— including Somalia, Madagascar, and Haiti— are most vulnerable to severe storms, floods, typhoons, and extreme temperatures. Community-controlled wireless networks that are resilient to power outages and broadcast crucial information about emergency services can put those with the least resources in the strongest position for surviving disasters, whether natural or manmade. For example, the Red Hook Network (a sister network built through the same community technology methodology as EII) was the only network to remain up and running during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and was used by FEMA to distribute resources.

The EII serves residents in Detroit’s Southeast, Southwest, and North End neighborhoods, with plans to establish networks in Idlewild, MI, Kingston, NY, and New Market, TN this year. Digital Stewards in these neighborhoods use the EII’s community-controlled networks to transform inequitable conditions in Detroit.  

The EII prioritizes: 

• Households with low or no Internet connections (10mps or less) 

• Households with children or adults participating in educational programs

• Households with senior citizens

• Households participating in government assistance programs

• Households located in vulnerable areas (flood zones, high numbers of water shut offs, etc.)

Beyond Detroit, we anticipate that fully solarized and off-grid community wireless networks will be useful in coastal and island communities at high risk of environmental and economic disaster. Because EII digital stewards are trained to build their networks, intranet applications, and teaching curricula based on community input, EII solutions are highly tailored to the needs of the immediate community. Our Community Technology platform brings this neighborhood-based popular education and organizing model online, ensuring that impacted communities everywhere can effectively replicate and adapt EII. Current digital stewards are now engaged in participatory design of the platform based on their stated needs of positive & supportive teaching that yields interpersonal connection and co-learning.

EII works to demystify technology and show how media and technology play critical roles in restoring and healing communities. Through our principled approach to popular education, our networks are creating a healthy digital ecosystem that takes into account all the ways we interact with the systems of education, governance, the economy, infrastructure and communications through technology, and why placing those most marginalized by the digital divide at the forefront of generating the solutions creates producers of technology.  

EII’s approach to creating a healthy digital ecosystem includes: 1) Teaching technology in a way that meets learners where they are and accounts for all the ways in which they learn information.  2) Regularly engaging the community in information gathering and decision making. 3) Providing trainings on digital security, privacy and consent to those who build the internet infrastructure and those who use the Internet.  4) Creating customer agreements that honor privacy, data and net neutrality. 5) Intentionally engaging partners that align with the EII principles in ways that scale the Digital Stewards program, enhance steward’s skills and create career pathways. 6) Redefining what and who a technologist is.

With support from MIT Solve, DCTP will build an online learning platform for Community Technology to scale distribution of our learning and instructional materials. The platform is based on our existing Teaching Community Technology handbook and will make the full Digital Stewards curriculum available, including community organizing basics, data justice and consent, digital safety and security, and planning resilient communications infrastructure for emergency preparedness. The platform will also make available steward’s frequently-accessed planning tools and technical guides, creating streamlined avenues for continued education and on-boarding and mentoring of new stewards. The platform will be the starting block for prospective network partners to learn EII’s network principles, determine the tools and team they need to facilitate the creation of neighborhood network or ISP, and connect with trainers, mentors, and contractors necessary to build their networks. Funding will allow DCTP to hire a team of curriculum writers and app developers to implement the design, function and content of the learning platform visioned by existing Digital Stewards. The platform will be built for access via Intranet (wireless network that functions separately from the Internet) as well as conventional internet, meaning that with Portable Network Kits (PNKs), communities with low internet access nationwide will still be able to access the learning platform and build their own wireless networks.

The Equitable Internet Initiative Community Technology Platform transforms digital access into digital justice.  Our commitment to participatory design, both in the development of our learning platform and the curriculum hosted on it, is a testament to our platform’s capacity to help communities and individuals transition from consumers of technology to producers and decision makers. We aren’t submitting a perfect, polished prototype because we are most interested in community feedback and a shared design process, as reflected in our EII principle, “we are capable of  designing our own tech.” We are building a platform that prioritizes user consent and privacy over data mining and surveillance, and we are designing to meet as many accessibility needs as possible, even though tech is notoriously ableist.

We are building the online learning platform not only to share our actionable body of work, but to foster community-building, an uncommon focus for any educational space. Aside from interacting around best practices, network troubleshooting, and continued education in community technology, the online learning platform will also feature opportunities for EII Digital Stewards, trainers, and aligned contractors to advertise their services to new networks in a trusted, community-driven space. 

The platform will be built to remain accessible via Intranet (wireless network that functions separately from the Internet) as well as conventional internet, meaning that with Portable Network Kits (PNKs) provided by DCTP, communities with low internet access nationwide will still be able to access the learning platform and build their own wireless networks and community resiliency plans. 

Our community technology platform will integrate popular education, online learning, and community-building to create a space in which folks generally left out of the tech world will feel comfortable learning, doing, and connecting. There will be open-source digital library of zines we’ve created around wireless engineering, data, teaching technology, and consent. There will also be full, interactive online courses, starting with our Digital Stewards curriculum. Through mentorship and co-learning, it will be a space where people across the world can connect and share best practices for the proliferation of Equitable Internet Initiative community-governed wireless networks. 

Thinking of education as a technology, our system will challenge the status quo by paying particular attention to accessibility, consent, and inclusivity. It will be grounded in the proven success of our take on popular education in the realm of community technology. Many existing online learning platforms carry over the same structures present in the offline academic world. These academic institutions are not created for the success of people of color, who comprise most of our organization's extended family. Grounded in our organizational principle that we can build the tech we need, we want to create a new platform that is for us and by us.

Specifically, this application will be built with the full-stack development framework Ruby on Rails. We have completed a prototype through our collaborative design process and are ready to begin build-out. We hope to integrate existing libraries and hire a developer to scaffold this process and provide expertise. 

The community technology learning platform represents our EII values of participatory design and community leadership in action. Our process begins by listening to a community in order to investigate the problems that shape their realities, imagine other realities, and then work together to make them real.  When we use technology through this community-first model, we build new kinds of relationships internally, interpersonally and within our communities.  We transform ourselves from consumers of information to producers, from objects within dominant narratives to authors of the transformation of the world.  This theory of change is the shared DNA between DCTP’s local programs and our trans-local network. It is most succinctly expressed through the verbs: CREATE, CONNECT, TRANSFORM.

In student satisfaction surveys completed after 20 weeks of in person trainings on community organizing and wireless engineering skills, 76% of Digital Stewards agreed the classes were participatory and not top down.  Participants shared that the Digital Stewards curriculum training allowed them to investigate problems and questions around engaging the community, using technology to build better communities, what issues are affecting their neighborhood, how the internet works and making technology accessible. Participants also shared that the trainings allowed them to explore solutions that included emergency preparedness strategies, a “more well rounded approach from different perspectives of the issues affecting our communities”, resource availability, networking, and creative strategies to engage the community.  Of the students that participated, 88.9% stated that the training helped clarify their vision for a resilient neighborhood.

We are currently serving 360 people.  This includes Digital Stewards, residents on the network and members of the Neighborhood Advisory Council. In one year, once the platform is fully functioning, we expect to serve 3,000 locally, nationally and internationally.  This includes expansion by the current anchor organizations into three additional neighborhoods. In five years, we expect to serve 7,000 people locally, nationally and internationally.  This includes expansion into at least three neighborhoods each year for 5 years and a growing Digital Steward base.  

We must immediately prepare our communities and their communications infrastructure for increasingly volatile climates, both environmental and political. Building an online learning platform allows us to bolster efficiency and capacity of Detroit’s expanding Equitable Internet Initiative community wireless networks, while responding to requests from communities across the country for access to our pop-ed pedagogy, principles, and adaptable processes. Though the technology may differ, replicating the digital stewards program in rural or urban zones, vulnerable coastal communities, and areas of political unrest becomes possible. 

One of our first goals is to streamline our data and file management within the year. The learning platform will support individualized learning pathways for new and existing digital stewards, while reducing administrative costs of manually disseminating curricula or holding costly in-person trainings.

All community wireless networks must be self-determined, safe, and resilient, especially in the midst of a natural or political disaster. In this context, another goal that emerges is accessible resources for community preparedness planning, including affordable solar-powered communications infrastructure and a proven train-the-trainer model for mentorship and locally-informed organizing. 

As a result of lowered barriers to replicating EII and Data Justice curricula, the online learning platform will help EII scale toward worker-owned, community-governed, consent-based neighborhood ISP’s across the US and Puerto Rico: The EII Collective. Within five years, we envision that a digital home-base for mentorship, collaborative problem solving, contractor directories, and intermovement relationship building will allow the EII Collective to help neighbors near and far nurture a healthy digital ecosystem.

Upfront costs of platform development are completely absorbed by DCTP, and we must employ a contractor to build the platform to our specifications.

We are dependent on Google Drive for file storage and distribution. In addition to lacking strong version control and real-time editability across networks, Google Drive presents a security concern for vulnerable communities. Lacking a secure digital file repository and meeting place, we are restricted to in-person trainings only, which makes training fees inaccessible to the marginalized communities we support. 

An ongoing technical challenge is the cost of maintenance or replacement for deployed network equipment. We are constantly learning what types of equipment serve the needs of different topologies and communities.

The legal processes of formulating Terms of Use for the platform, including a security policy to protect users, and obtaining intellectual property rights are unfamiliar to our team, but important to gaining trust.

We design to meet accessibility standards, but cannot translate full curricula into multiple languages. The popular trust in problematic technology or an overall distrust of any technology sets back scaling efforts when relevancy cannot be conveyed.

Most attention is currently focused on the rushed deployment of 5g as municipalities pursue “Smart City” status. Smart City-dom pits many aligned technologists and organizations against impending surveillance states that disproportionately affect the same marginalized communities we are hoping to engage as digital stewards, trainers, and customers. Though we serve the customers Big ISP’s have deemed unprofitable, a threat of intensive lobbying against community wireless networks persists.

By lowering administrative costs from storing, distributing, and facilitating  learning resources via the platform, we create cost savings for DCTP and our partners. In-kind donations of Gigabit connections (in MI only) and donated equipment also help us to decrease costs and manage obsolescence. We are incorporating PNK’s and trainings where fixed wireless deployments are not possible. 

Commitments of pro-bono legal assistance and continued fiscal sponsorship from Allied Media Projects and associated technologists will help us to address legal barriers.

Nurturing accountable relationship-building and co-learning will build trust and relevance within partner communities, as well as source reliable translation talent and effective community organizers. We will host neighborhood Discovering Technology events, Discotechs for short, and participatory participatory design and user testing as well. Our library of zines, handbooks will grow to house video lessons to address different learning styles.

We are pursuing state-wide moratoriums on police use of facial recognition technology and other protective legislation, as well as pursuing statewide grants for connecting unserved census blocks to affordable broadband. We employ advocacy and narrative shifting campaigns and continue to build our niche as a network of neighborhood ISP’s, the moss that grows where other plants won’t. We continue to develop our partnerships with 123Net and our sister organization, Community Technology New York, a technical and research partner and founding member of the EII Collective.

The Detroit Community Technology Project is a sponsored project of Allied Media Projects, a Detroit-based nonprofit that supports art, media, and technology projects working for social change. As a part of the fiscal sponsorship, AMP provides development, communications, and administrative support in the form of fundraising, accounting, consulting, web support, and more. 

Full-time staff: 5

Part-time staff: 1

Contractors: 1

When DCTP began its work, civic technology was rooted in a savior mentality that empowered technologists and disempowered communities. We saw this problem and articulated the theory and practice of community technology as an alternative approach, one in which neighborhoods have direct control over their shared digital communications. 

Our staff brings experience in UX research and design, information technology, hardware and software development, as well as a proven record of organizing communities around issues like digital equity and consentful tech. Through a combination of technical skill and grassroots organizing experience, our team is best-placed to support marginalized communities get online.

• Detroit’s Church of the Messiah, Grace in Action Collectives, and North End Woodward Corridor Coalition (NEWCC) are anchor organizations for each of our EII Community Wireless Networks. Beyond managing Digital Stewards on staff, they are strategic partners in formulating expansion plans and fundraising goals, in addition to participating in the development of the EII Collective.

• Community Technology New York, our sister organization, are close allies in helping DCTP to deepen resiliency offerings, in addition to catalyzing EII networks in communities in Tennessee, New York, and Puerto Rico. CTNY is active in the development of the EII Collective.

• 123Net is an aligned Internet Provider and Internet Exchange Point, able to offer us free and wholesale Gigabit connections from any location in the State of Michigan where they have a fiber or wireless point of presence. They are also partners in the development of a job apprenticeship program for former Digital Stewards and professional development series for existing stewards. 

• Allied Media Projects (AMP) is our fiscal sponsor, as well as the organization DCTP was born from. As we develop our own organizational capacity, AMP provides administrative capacity, strategic support for leadership, and access to a network of community technologists and allies.

Our online learning platform is based on tiered membership levels to control access to some DCTP materials while sharing others as open source “commons.” Membership fees increase with the level of access to our Digital Stewards curriculum and personal mentorship from existing Digital Stewards and/or EII staff. A member joining at the full membership level is prepared to license the EII brandmark, adopt EII and DDJC Principles, fundraise or initial stewards training and equipment deployment, and organize their neighbors in designing, building, and maintaining an EII Community Wireless Network that meets their unique needs as a community. 

The learning platform makes available EII’s Digital Stewards curriculum and learning resources, DCTP zines and handbooks, the EII Commons of Community Technology resources, Consentful Tech’s Consent Curriculum, technical how-to guides for commonly used equipment and processes, budgeting and planning tools, resiliency strategy guides with PNK resources, and a suite of mentorship, professional development, and community-building opportunities. 

Primary audiences of our platform include:

• Existing EII networks and their Digital Stewards

• New Digital Steward hires that existing networks are on-boarding

• Community-accountable organizers with a foundation to start an EII network with their neighbors

• Technologists seeking community organizing resources and community-rooted operating principles

• Rural, mountain, or otherwise unserved communities traditionally ignored by big ISP’s

• Coastal or otherwise vulnerable communities seeking resilient, adaptive communications infrastructure

• Off-the-grid communities seeking solar powered or community-governed communications infrastructure

• Vetted contractors, like RF Engineers, cable technicians, and Community Technology trainers available for hire by new or expanding EII networks

DCTP is currently receiving funding support from the NoVo Foundation, the Media Democracy Fund, and the Open Society Foundation that will continue beyond 2020. While we pursue other foundational grants, we are adding communications capacity to implement annual giving campaigns and individual donor management. 

DCTP also employs multiple traditional revenue models due to our varied partners and clients. The Online Learning Platform, based on tiered membership levels, will itself become a cooperative revenue model. In exchange for resources and courses, membership fees will support maintenance, updates and scaling of the online learning platform. Licensing of the EII trademark for new EII community wireless networks spawned and supported via the learning platform will also directly impact sustainability, as EII networks practice their own low-income revenue models.

DCTP’s fee-for-service relationship with Community Technology New York (CTNY) will also garner paid contracts for specialty services that CTNY is not equipped to conduct, including Teaching Community Technology trainings, Digital Consent workshops, and other community organizing methods. DCTP also generates revenue from  “a la carte” consulting services to non-EII networks and presentations, workshops, and trainings for municipal and educational institutions. Original DCTP publications such as zines, handbooks, and other merchandise is also a burgeoning stream of revenue. As we continue to unearth the power of community technology, digital stewardship, consent and security and beyond, we will continue to publish our findings in our signature pop-ed style. 

While we are indeed looking for exposure to proliferate our work and market the availability of our resources, it is the potential relationship-building, collaboration, and learning exchange that attracted us to MIT Solve. We believe Solve’s network of social enterprise practitioners can shepherd DCTP through the growing pains of scaling a community-accountable solution in the face of profit-driven technologies and increasing risk of climate catastrophe. Solve can significantly advance our work by connecting us to Think Tanks or Brain Trusts to further our pathway to sustainable alternatives to big ISP’s, while helping us to identify methods of scale that support other alternative utilities and economies. Solve can potentially introduce us to projects like Green Stream Technologies and ColdHubs, or Solar Freeze, an MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge winner, which would help to inform our solution’s role in local collaboration for Detroiters’ food, water, energy, and communications sovereignty. 

As an emerging solution, introductions to community and climate minded technology investors would also be a vital resource gained from Solve as we seek to phase in functionality updates throughout the course of the learning platform's development. 

DCTP is also seeking mentorship from a variety of perspectives. Despite being a small team, our community technology pedagogy and Digital Stewards model have galvanized tangible successes and opened many doors to impactful practice. Our team and our solution will without a doubt benefit from the visionary mentorship we believe the MIT Solve network can provide. 

People in Education are ideal advisors in adapting our Digital Stewards curriculum for an online setting, and the Consentful Tech Project will be instrumental in evaluating our inclusion and propagation of digital consent practices. 

Collaborations with Detroit and Highland Park-based organizations, including Soulardarity, We the People Detroit, and Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, and Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition will allow us to deploy our online learning platform and other critical digital resources via solar powered wifi hotspots in publicly accessible community resource centers. Connecting with MIT Solver winners Green Stream Technologies and ColdHubs would further this vision.

Partnerships with Libraries Without Borders opens possibilities of extending community technology to programming within laundromats, further meeting people where they are. 

Partnering with Detroit Community Wealth Fund will help EII Digital Stewards to transform their neighborhood ISP’s into worker-owned co-ops, and will advise on the EII Collective’s formation.  

Partnering with the University of Michigan’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion department will also provide Digital Stewards new and existing networks to access professional development and certificate programs.

Guifi.net and LibreMesh networks can provide valuable guidance in building cohesive, values-based wireless networks across geographies, in addition to providing access to open-source hardware and software, including the LibreRouter.

Resilient Just Technology provides opportunities to deepen our impact in Puerto Rico using train the trainer models for building and deploying PNKs and the story circles that help to both build trust, direct collective action, and shift historical narratives within local and diaspora communities.

The Digital Stewards curriculum and continued community technology education, paired with professional development and mentorship opportunities, prepare communities frequently marginalized from the creation, deployment, and governance of technology with the tangible skills to work at a small ISP. The community organizing component of the program helps to foster civic and neighborhood-level engagement in the individual, while making an affordable, reliable wireless network available and relevant to the community at large. Prize money would advance our solution by ensuring we are able to build-out a thoughtful “marketplace” of EII-trained and approved contractors, such as trainers for train-the-trainer curricula or experienced cable runners for community wireless networks adopted by apartment buildings. Networks can share their support needs directly to a group of mission-aligned workers that can keep network development on track while neighborhood ISP’s take shape. 

In a Detroit that has been a poster child for municipal bankruptcy, gentrification, digital redlining, food insecurity, and water shutoffs, EII is one of many community-driven solutions to emerge to fill a void. Working to ensure that more residents have the ability to leverage online access and digital technology for social and economic development, our Digital Stewards model is built to up-end the stereotype that only white men move technology, and that marginalized communities don’t know enough about it to care. In the context of increasingly volatile climate and political chaos, the only infrastructure that will be truly resilient is the infrastructure that is community designed and operated. 

As Gigabit Internet and 5g shape already affluent enclaves, our online learning platform provides pathways to connectivity for those left on the other side of the Digital Divide, in the path of hurricane season, or in the thick haze of corporate polluters. Morgridge Family Foundation funds would allow us to build our online learning platform and resource library to full capacity. Accessible by internet and intranet, the platform will help communities anywhere organize Digital Stewards and deploy a community wireless network that creates jobs, fosters neighbor-to-neighbor connection, and provides an affordable, reliable alternative to big telecom. More than just teaching people how to get online, the platform empowers communities to transform the conditions of inequality that create digital inaccessibility in the first place.