dose

Please pop in if you are nearby, I’ll be there:

News Conference at Atwater Library and Computer Centre
1200 Atwater Avenue (at Tupper)
Thursday, November 30th at 4:00 PM

Senator Andrée Champagne
to Speak about Digital Literacy Project Serving Youth and Community Organizations

24 November 2006 – Conservative Senator Andrée Champagne, the Quebec caucus representative for cultural issues, along with Atwater Library and Computer Centre (ALCC) Board members will hold a news conference at the ALCC at 1200 Atwater Avenue (corner of Tupper) on Thursday, November 30th at 4:00 pm.

Senator Champagne will make a presentation about a Department of Canadian Heritage contribution to an exciting new ALCC initiative called the Atwater Digital Literacy Project. The goal of the project is to develop and support creative new media learning programs for Anglophone youth and community organizations. New media include audio, video animation and text publishing done through the internet.

more info about the project.

Ages ago (2 years, 3 years?) I had this dream that in my role as board member at the Atwater Library and Computer Centre, I would help turn it into a really cool centre for open source and digital media for the community. I got Sylvain and Mike L involved, and we tried to get going a project called Projecting Voices, with the idea of teaching kids how to blog, podcast, vidcast … mainly due to lack of resources at Atwater (chronic underfunding) it never really got off the ground.

We recently got a $25k grant from Heritage Canada to build a similar project. $25k is small peanuts, but the idea was to hire someone to build the program with a view to long-term sustainability.

Last night, we had the first meeting of the (informal, so far) Advisory Committee at my house: Miriam, who has been hired by Atwater as the Project Developer, has some really exciting ideas, and the rest of the crew was great: Julien, the voice behind canada’s longest-running podcast; Sylvain, Montreal’s godfather of open source; Paul from gnn.tv and apathyisboring.com; Brett, creative commons film-maker, and shaker at Homeless Nation; and Lynn, the Executive Director of Atwater.

It was a great meeting. Mir has some great ideas (and vision) and the group was a really good mix of backgrounds & ideas. More news later I guess, but I am pretty excited by the direction.