CREATING RELATIONSHIPS
MIRA team involvement strengthened relationships among organizations within several participating communities, but it also strained relationships across community boundaries when the entire Cluster nearly disintegrated about halfway through the workshop schedule.
Infra-community collaboration is most obvious in the structure of team projects. Benkelman is cooperating with a community library and the local telephone company to establish a permanent home for its community computer work station and to secure a sustainable Internet connection. Wray is collaborating with a popular community gathering place, the WRAC center, as a location for its multimedia work station. Grant outpaced others' ambitions by developing a project that will depend on collaboration with a large regional medical center, an area education agency, the Nebraska Educational Telecommunications Center, home of the state's ETV and public radio networks, and the local Chamber of Commerce.
At the other end of the scale, hard feelings undoubtedly continue across some community boundaries, especially over the misunderstandings surrounding the ineligibility of six of the ten teams based on attendance. The Steering Committee had struggled with this issue over several meetings, and, it appeared, hoped against reality that somehow a solution could be found. This was true even though the evaluator and the program officer both had made it clear that the attendance rules had to be followed.
Yet, when it became clear that the three to four eligible teams would continue, the Steering Committee pulled together and got things done. It was a learning point for many people who were either participating or, by this time, looking in from the "outside," that is, from a position of non-participation at their own choosing.
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