Community Technology and Digital Stewardship form a principled approach to teaching and learning about technology to build relationship and heal communities.

Community Technology

Community technology is an alternative vision of technology in which communities and neighborhoods have direct control over their digital communications, allowing for greater self determination and power over our shared digital voices.

It is a method of teaching and learning about technology with the goal of restoring relationships and healing neighborhoods. Community technologists are those who have the desire to build, design, and facilitate a healthy integration of technology into people’s lives and communities, allowing them the fundamental human right to communicate. 

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Community Technology projects practice: 

  • Mutual learning that encourages practice and action, investigation and listening.

  • Participatory planning and collaborative design.

  • Collective self-governance.

Digital Stewardship

Digital Stewards build and maintain the network infrastructure, demystify technology for their communities and facilitate a healthy integration of technology into people’s lives and communities, allowing them the fundamental human right to communicate.

The Digital Stewardship curriculum focuses on the basics of how to organize, plan, build, and maintain wireless networks, transferring the skills for long-term sustainability to community residents. Our curriculum practices Community Technology pedagogy, facilitating ordinary people in rediscovering and validating their own capacity for becoming producers, creators, educators, and leaders, rather than relying on “experts” to pass on knowledge.

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Pedagogy

Developed from 2012 onward by the Detroit Community Technology Project in partnership with the Open Technology Institute and Community Tech New York, the Digital Stewardship training program uses a popular education approach grounded in the history of the Civil Rights-era Citizenship Schools and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Read: Community Networking for Healing and Power in Central Appalachia

Within the Digital Stewards model, collaborative media & hands-on technology education give people the opportunity to engage with learning on their own terms. We train all of our educators in our Community Technology pedagogy using the Teaching Community Technology Handbook, created in 2016 in an effort to scale the Digital Stewards program. The handbook is a collection of historical and academic educational practices that combine to create our community technology pedagogy.

“What [Digital Stewardship] means to me personally is transition, exploration and even personal discovery, because I entered into the world of technology a complete novice, not believing in myself or my abilities to transition over into such a technical aspect. When I say transition it’s because I was welcomed into that field and not treated like a novice and more treated like an explorer to help to identify and discover what can we do with technology … where do we fit in literally being a participant as opposed to an outside viewer. 

One of the things we focus on as Digital Stewards is taking key community leaders and breaking down technology in a way that makes it easy to understand so you can participate in what’s essential today... If you can identify what the resources are you can say ‘I can create my own solutions because I’m grounded in this community.’ We are able to be our own problem solvers.”

— Monique Tate