ALL IN THE TIMING

    It is a mild Saturday morning in February; flood and tornado warnings were in effect for my two destinations in rural Mississippi. This MIRA cluster came about in record time. The Kellogg Foundation had a large initiative in the Mississippi Delta and several non-profits in Jackson, Washington, DC, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, assembled a proposal in 24 hours to submit to the MIRA program. Robert Moses, an author, civil rights activist who did not live in the state, had his Algebra Project offices in New England but still had many ties to Mississippi. The groups in Jackson included the regional office of the Children's Defense Fund, the Mississippi Low Income Child Care Initiative (LICI), and the Political Education and Economic Development Foundation.

Warren Yoder, an activist who has been working in Mississippi for twenty-five years was acting director of LICI. "I had just stepped into the job, but I had been using networked computers for a long time. The groups wanted to get away from just using snail mail and the telephone, so, with the Kellogg funding, I got everyone on email." Besides working with each other they also had a wide range of constituents with which they had to communicate. This need was the driving force behind the development of a joint web site which was under construction at the time of my visit. When Kellogg invited the CSOs to the digital storytelling workshop in California, Yoder, Taylor, and a couple of others went to work on a story that would work for all their parent organizations. Yoder just fetched some image files from the Internet while the others used Photoshop and Premiere. Yoder said the project was only moderately successful because there was no strong web design expertise in the group. "Our common need did not turn out to be strong enough to make the MIRA project really effective."

Rachael Taylor of CDF, and several colleagues had assembled a narrative about their organizations using Adobe Premiere. While it was effective if you viewed it locally, it was too large to post on a web site because very few Internet users had the connection speed to view a file that large. We looked as some web tools that would allow them to convert the substance of their presentation into a format that could be used by people with dialup connections.