Welcome to Telecommunities Canada 1997 Conference

"Partnerships"

August 15-18, 1997 Halifax, Nova Scotia

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NOTES ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Ed Schwartz

Ed Schwartz has been organizing for a lifetime, starting with "student power" as president of the National Students Association in 1967. In the 70s and 80s he became a leading neighborhood activist, Philadelphia City Counciler and housing commissioner. For the last few years Schwartz has been exploring ways community groups can use the Internet, especially its interactive forums and information resources to execute a clever end run around the traditional one-way media such as newspapers and television.

Schwartz's most recent book, "Net Activism: How Citizens Use the Internet" focuses on how the Internet can be used to enrich community life and promote citizen activism.

Ed Schwartz is the founder of the Institute for the Study of Civic Values. He has also established an especially rich Neighborhoods On-line web page and discussion forum intended to support neighborhood activism in Philadelphia and throughout the United States.

Doug Schuler

Douglas Schuler is a software professional and an information and communications activist. As an activist with Computer Professionals for Social Responsibiliy (CPSR) he has been writing and speaking about social issues and computing for over ten years. One of his primary goals has been bringing issues into public prominence and discussion. In 1987 he instituted the Directions and Implications of Advanced Symposium, a biannual conference devoted to computing and society. Schuler is recognized as a pioneer and important proponent of the community networking movement. He is one of the founders of the Seattle Community Network (SCN) which after two years, has nearly 10,000 users. His book New Community Networks: Wired For Change, published in 1996 by Addison Wesley, is a unique combination of social activism and technology development. In the book, Schuler analyses why the geographical community is important and endangered, and systematically discusses how community networks can help.

For over 15 years, Schuler was with the Boeing Company. For the last 10 years, he was an advanced computing technologist with the Research and Development Centre at Boeing Computer Services. There he concentrated on groupware, hypermedia and CGI/Web programming among many projects. Schuler has a Masters degree in Software Engineering and Computer Science and is now an independent consultant on civic and community computing.

Schuler has worked with a number of community organizations and institutions including the League of Women Voters, the Seattle Public Library, and the City of Seattle. Schuler is the national chair of CPSR and serves on the Board of Loka Institute, an organization working to democratize technology.

Cynthia Alexander

Dr. Cynthia Alexander is a professor of political science at Acadia. For some time she has been doing research on the implications of electronic communications for the political process. She has written numerous articles and is a frequent guest on local and national television. She was recently a guest on Peter Gzowski's Morningside. At present she is co-editing a book dealing with electronic communications and the political process.