‘Circuit Riders’ Travel to Spread the Gospel of Technology and Training

By STEPHEN G. GREENE

Rosa María Ruiz spends much of her time in remote reaches of Bolivia’s

lowland tropical rain forest, monitoring poaching and illegal logging for the EcoBolivia Foundation while helping local residents protect the area’s rich biological resources.

Living in Madidi National Park near the headwaters of the Amazon River, a full day’s journey north of La Paz, the capital, and two hours upriver from the nearest village, Ms. Ruiz, the charity’s director, formerly had no quick way of reaching the outside world when she came across poachers or faced a medical emergency.

These days, she tramps through the forest toting a mobile communications station in her backpack. When she wants to update EcoBolivia’s Web site (http://www.ecobolivia.org) with fresh photographs, for example, she simply downloads the pictures from her digital camera into her waterproof laptop computer, which is kept charged using portable solar panels, and then sends the images by satellite-phone modem to the charity’s office in La Paz.

“She’s now able to make phone calls and send faxes from the middle of the jungle,” says Sean T. O’Brien of the W. Alton Jones Foundation, which picked up the $33,000 tab for the charity’s state-of-the-art technological makeover.

The pride in his voice as he describes that transformation owes much to the fact that he was the person who flew down to Bolivia with the equipment and spent two weeks in the field setting it up, testing it, and training Ms. Ruiz and other staff members how to use it. As one of the grant maker’s two full-time “circuit riders” — technology evangelists and technicians who roam the globe spreading the silicon gospel — Mr. O’Brien is part of the foundation’s systematic attempt to upgrade the technological capabilities of its grantees, whether they be in Bolivia’s rain forest or an office building in Madison, Wis.

“The key phrase is ‘appropriate technology,’” Mr. O’Brien says. “We want to give people tools that are suitable for their mission, their geographical location, and their financial condition.”

The other key is the training. “Throwing money and equipment and software at people without training them how to use it effectively is a mistake,” he adds.

Mr. O’Brien may spend as little as a single afternoon with an organization, helping it assess its need for hardware, software, and training and then drafting a plan for how to proceed. Other times, as in Bolivia, he may spend a couple of weeks with a group. And many grantees consult him frequently on technological matters of all kinds.

Growing Movement

Such one-on-one attention has become a favored strategy for many foundations and other nonprofit groups that are determined to increase the technological capacity of groups that may be too poor or too isolated to obtain such help on their own. The number of circuit riders employed nationally has climbed steadily from some two dozen a couple of years ago. About 100 people attended last year’s annual Circuit Riders Roundup, for example, and more than twice that number are expected to attend this summer’s convention.

“The movement is definitely growing,” Mr. O’Brien observes. “The number of groups that recognize a need for it is increasing. It’s a snowball.” The W. Alton Jones Foundation, one of the pioneers of the practice, has a Web site (http://www.circuitrider.net) that describes its program and lists best practices to guide groups in their thinking.

Other groups that employ circuit riders include ONE/Northwest, which promotes electronic networking among environmental groups and activists in Alaska, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington; NetCorps, which helps progressive grassroots organizations use communication and information technology; and the Low Income Networking and Communications (LINC) Project, which assists welfare-rights groups.

The LINC Project’s director, Dirk Slater, has been riding the circuit for the past two and a half years, trying to convince skeptical welfare-rights activists that they should go online. It’s been an uphill battle, he says, but there has been considerable progress.

When LINC started in 1998 as a project of the Welfare Law Center, in New York, only about one-quarter of the welfare-rights organizations it identified nationwide had an e-mail address. Since then, the project’s Low-Income Directory of such organizations has grown to include 180 groups, of which 150 have e-mail addresses.

Some of the organizations sought help from Mr. Slater primarily so they could exchange information with fellow organizers around the country — the most concrete benefit they could identify with the new technology.

“That gave us a foot in the door,” he says, “so we could then work on deeper technology issues” — like setting up a computer database, or wiring a printer to two computers so that staff members could stop passing a floppy disk back and forth between them whenever they wanted to print.

Another striking change since 1998 is a much greater willingness among foundations to support technological upgrades. Whereas many grant makers once said such spending fell outside their guidelines, Mr. Slater notes, “a lot of foundations have redefined what they’re willing to fund” as they come to understand how technology can improve their grantees’ programs — and how far behind many groups are still lagging.

Some grant makers employ circuit riders themselves, while others underwrite the activities of those working for other groups. But even charities that can afford to hire commercial consultants may be better off using circuit riders, contends Mr. O’Brien.

“In some cases,” he says, “regular technology consultants don’t work well for nonprofits because they don’t understand the nonprofit culture — the need to save money, for instance, or to pick a solution that’s more environmentally friendly.”

Mr. O’Brien, who combines a doctorate in tropical forest ecology from the University of Virginia with technology credentials as the foundation’s resident Webmaster, has no such problems when he visits foundation grantees. In the course of a year, he and his circuit-riding colleague, Todd Koym, provide extensive help to about 40 of the foundation’s 400 or so current grantees, and more limited help to another 40 or so organizations.

“We hope to provide grantees with an assessment of where they are, what they need, and what they can do to get it,” says Mr. O’Brien. They sometimes also try to hook the groups up with local consultants, since many technological problems are solved much more easily by someone working on-site. After an organization has upgraded the equipment it needs to carry out its basic management and program functions, the next step is to suggest how it might use technology to mobilize its members or other activists, to analyze issues more effectively, or to get the word out to the public.

A Global Role

Thanks to the Internet, that public increasingly is a global one. And whereas most circuit riders operate within the United States, Mr. O’Brien notes that their services can be even more important in less developed parts of the world.

Computer technology tends to be of older vintage in places like Bolivia, where lots of organizations are still using pre-Pentium hardware, and where people hold their computers together with duct tape and upgrade them again and again because they can’t afford to replace them

“It’s important to get them up to speed,” Mr. O’Brien says. Cell phones, e-mail, video cameras, and other high-tech equipment can be vitally important tools for groups that are trying to report and document environmental destruction or human-rights abuses. At the same time, such groups are often fewer and more fragile than their American counterparts.

Says Mr. O’Brien: “Having them behind the curve is more dangerous than in the U.S., where you can always pick up the phone and find somebody to help you.”