InformationWeek

March 26, 2001

Reporter's Notebook: Musings From East Palo Alto

By Diane Rezendes Khirallah (drezende@cmp.com)

his is the kind of story I really like. I get the chance to talk to people who normally would never be interviewed for an InformationWeek article--such as school principals and high-school students.

In some ways, it's a lot easier to do a sit-down with a CIO of a major company. The routine is well-established: The helpful PR person asks how the drive (or flight) was, offers tea or bottled water, and we settle into a conference room for the business-card exchange that officially marks the opening of the meeting.

Not so, East Palo Alto. As I ease the car into the parking lot of Plugged-in, a community technology center funded by Hewlett-Packard here, I take in the building I'm about to enter. It's a large trailer with a brilliantly colored mural. A man leans out the window of a family minivan, talking to a 30-something Mom who's leaning over a barely-there wooden railing by the building. I catch a snippet of their conversation as we smile hello to each other "...Mine's in Web design..." "Mine's coming out of graphic design in a few minutes..."

Step inside, and it's noise all around--the good kind of noise, where kids are having fun and learning something in the process. A group of girls paints in one corner. Two boys in a class on digital moviemaking have just completed the storyboard for their own movie. One is lying on his back, arm behind his head, looking at a script. His friend is sitting next to him, cross-legged. In unison, they read aloud, "Fade to black." My husband produces TV commercials, and I've seen him do much the same in his brainstorming sessions with Fortune 500 clients.

This is going to be good, I think to myself.

But being shy, I'm at least as nervous as the teens I'm about to interview. Larry and David seem quiet and friendly as I ask them about their work designing Web sites. I remember age 13; I could barely speak up in class, much less take a meeting at the corporate headquarters of one of the biggest employers in the country--something these two teens had recently done at HP. They're polite, and as they show their designs, they warm up to their subject. I wonder what they think of all this digital divide stuff.

The visit, and the entire newsgathering process, seems to bring up more questions than answers. The deeper I get into my story on the digital divide, the more complex I think the issue is. For example, we assume race as a marker; all the surveys point to it. But some experts raise a thought-provoking question: Is race just a false marker for economic status?

And I keep coming back to the idea that the biggest divide is the one between the culture of business, which has tons of technology, and that of schools and community groups, which don't. For some companies, it's about altruism. For many more, it's survival--planting the seeds of tomorrow's IT workforce.

Does it really matter? In the end, it serves both.

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