Short Paper #4

The House is a non-profit organization focused on at-risk and disadvantaged youth. Situated in Woodbridge Virginia, The House hosts hundreds of students after school between 3-6 pm. Students are encouraged to share and utilize such resources as a computer lab, an in-house gym, tutoring, meals, drug prevention and mentoring.

My main task for the organization revolved around the creation and maintenance of their computer lab, but also included a review of their overall IT structure in relationship to their business model.

If anyone had any doubts that there was a digital divide that still exists, then The House is the final answer. Lacking financial resources, they were completely stuck - no computers, no software, no publicly available link to the internet, or any virtual realm. It is as if the clock stopped in 1989 and never moved forward.

After a generous donation from the Department of Defense, the house was outfitted with a collection of desktop PCs and several servers. Although the hardware was available - there was no software and no expertise to use any of the equipment, so it was largely useless.

My analysis of their needs began in earnest at the beginning of the Spring 09 semester, and I had to quickly overcome the following hurdles:

1. Locate Operating System software and Productivity software that could be obtained at low or no cost to get the computers up and running.
2. Integrate the new equipment into the existing internet infrastructure of the building

Software Hunt
In order to make the computers useful, they would need software. Unfortunately the average cost per computer was between $500 and $750 to load Windows XP and all the various productivity programs that The House wanted to provide. With over 20 computers, this simply was too cost prohibitive for the business, and they needed a viable alternative.

As a non-profit entity, The House was eligible to get a great deal of software for free. Large software companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple all have philanthropic arms that assist organizations in helping out underprivileged children. The problem of having to contact each vendor independently and negotiate the interaction between the organization and the vendor was as a very time-consuming endeavor until I discovered Techsoup.

Techsoup is an online clearing house for non-profit organizations and charitable technology givers. This site acts as a middle man that handles all interactions between you and software vendors and provides a place for those with resources to post the availability of goods or services. This greatly increased the pace of our software acquisitions and allowed us to get the desktop PC's loaded with software. It was important that we not only load the computers with Windows, but also the various other productivity programs that make computers useful to users, i.e. Office 2007, Adobe CS suite, among others.

This served not only as a technological leap for the organization but also altered their service availability. Now, instead of just PC resources, they had the ability to plan workshops and classes around teaching the children how to use the programs loaded onto the computers. Soon, they plan to have children publishing multi-media and experiencing the virtual creation process for the first time.

Making it all work together
Integrating the equipment into the existing infrastructure was something that I was already intimately familiar with. I had the executive director contact his local provider and ensured that he would have sufficient resources to run this large bank of computers.
I sketched a brief network diagram and installed several network switches that fed back into a centralized router. From that point, we were able to quickly get each machine connected to the internet. Although I had the expertise to perform this task, the greatest difficulty in this task was its time consumption. Running wires and cables in a commercial space is a physically demanding job and I had only my two hands and whatever basic tools I could scrounge up.


Wrap Up
If I had to restart this task, I think I would have demanded more tools from the startup. It was probably ill-advised of me to take such a large task, with such a minimal time frame, and try and do it alone. The staff at The House was very helpful and very grateful – they could always use more help.

If I were to recommend ways to improve the service learning, I would recommend that tools and resources be available from the service learning office. If you need extra hands to complete a project for the community – the service learning department should really have those resources available to you because, ultimately, the goal to service the community and, by the virtue of that involvement, the student. The idea that “it is your assignment, so it is your problem” is rubbish – help us to help others.