Name: Alejandro Camargo Ruiz
ID# 9540803.
Professor: Gunter Krumme
The objective of this web page is to give a report on the progress on my internship with Seattle Community Network and The Service Learning Project at The University of Washington.
The title of my position is Website Analyst and Designer. The objective of the internship is to research and create a coordinated web-site for nonprofit human service organizations.
My supervisor is Wayne Brewer
The first part of the internship was mainly directed to define the logistics of the internship. We decided to communicate mostly through e-mail. Also, we reduced the direct person-to-person meetings to a minimum.
The second part has been mainly concentrated in collecting information, from the agencies interested in putting their home pages on the Web. The information that we are going to collect is going to be obtained mostly through the message.
Currently I am the contact person with the King_SocServ mailing list.I recive their e-mail messages, forward them and answer them as needed. Through the mailing list we have gotten information from the following agencies:
The index page is a directory of the the Social service agencies that want us to built their home pages or want us to put links to their already existing WWW pages. Internet non-profit center. In this there is a big list of links to non-profit and charity organization, in the United States.
I also found a good article about the advantages and disadvantages of the use of new communication technologies in the Social service sector The article is: Use of Communication Resources in a Network Collaborative Design Environment . This article examines the communication resource use of students engaged in a collaborative design activity. The collaborative design activity was an engineering project, in which three groups of students, located in three different geographical locations, developed the project by communicating through modern computer communication resources.
The article is very interesting since it shows some of the common problems and advantages of using modern communication media (e-mail, teleconferencing etc..). The article analyses the way the students used the different communication tools that they had available. It also gives an summary of the multiple constraints that each type of communication might have.
Seven media and their associated constraints. (Clark and Brennan, 1991).
The usage of Web pages for activities like social service agencies is an example of the advantages of agglomeration. By locating themselves in one specific place (WWW page Index), the Social service agencies can, in one hand share resources, and on the other hand, they can access a wider group of costumers, than they could if they were standing by themselves. In many occasions is not viable or convenient for the agencies, to have their actual "real" geographical sites in one place. The WWW gives the opportunity to agglomerate in a "virtual" place. In a way the creation of "virtual" agglomeration reduce the need for "real" agglomeration.
The World Wide Web has a special effect in the spatial interrelation between people. The interaction between humans, that was mostly constrained by geographical conditions, is becoming less dependent in the ability of the people to physically overcome distances. Technologies like Television, telephone etc.. started the process of shortening the distances between people. The Internet adds a degree of interaction and freedom that other communication media do not offer.
As communications techniques become more and more common place, and their importance and influence grow bigger, projects like Seattle Community Network play an important role in reducing the gaps between the "information rich" and the "information poor", between the people who have the opportunities an means to use the new technologies, and the people who do not have such opportunities.
Alejandro Camargo-Ruiz