The need for an "urban rebirth" was underscored in welcoming remarks to Summit participants by Ed Skloot (photo), Executive Director of the Surdna Foundation. Listen to an excerpt. As the Summit progressed, participants reached a shared understanding of the community development environment as it is currently evolving. In the view of Summit participants, that environment ten years hence will be characterized by:

• Larger, stronger CDCs that use technology extensively and deliver services to diverse clients, including homeowners, business people, renters and representatives of other neighborhood-based institutions.
• An increasing amount of trend information about neighborhoods, made available in comprehensible ways, which will help to raise general awareness of how urban systems work.
• Greater ease in identifying high-performing CDCs, but also poor performance.

With the agenda's seven key themes, the Summit achieved its expressed purpose of shaping a collective vision for a technology-enhanced community development sector. The need for such a vision was articulated in the welcoming remarks of Gordon Conway (photo), President of the Rockefeller Foundation and Co-Chair of the Living Cities Executive Committee. Listen to an excerpt.

In addition to the seven priority areas, the Summit strategy incorporates ideas for reshaping relations with residents of the communities served by CDCs. Toward this end, Summit participants intend to encourage all developers of affordable housing, including CDCs receiving assistance from Living Cities, to pledge that all affordable housing will have Internet access by a specified date.

Three volunteer working groups, made up of individuals from Living Cities, CDCs, the sector's intermediaries, and technical assistance providers, agreed to work on aspects of the Summit agenda:

One group intends to scale up from GIS currently in use in Los Angeles and elsewhere to create an IT infrastructure. With customization, the infrastructure will display key indicators, such as new housing, population change, income, crime, and environmental conditions. The working group will also explore ways to integrate success measures for local programs.

A second group will develop a model of how an efficient CDC can achieve peak performance with cost-effective operating systems. In particular, the group will pinpoint opportunities to automate business processes using Application Service Providers (ASPs) as well as existing software. It will also explore the potential for aggregating certain common "back office" functions.

A third working group will build on Living Cities' draft technology capacity standards for grantee CDCs to identify functionality (e.g., full Internet connectivity, networking) to be regarded as minimum capacity throughout the community development sector. The group will promote standards and their underlying business rationale, as a step towards "next generation" innovations for transforming services to neighborhood residents.

Participants across the board expressed interest in maintaining the Summit's momentum and continuing to network as technology innovators. Those who volunteered for the three working groups or agreed to further the agenda in other ways are identified in Appendix A.

Left: Daniel Ben-Horin of CompuMentor (left) and Randal Pinkett of BCT Partners at a Summit session in which participants demonstrated innovative technology applications. Center: Loren Blackford (left) of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and Dorothy Lengyel of Homesight, a CDC in Washington state. Right: Living Cities consultant Richard Zorza.

Deliberations Behind the Strategy Agenda The agenda that emerged from the Summit was a result of almost two days of intensive conversation. The event started with introductory remarks from Living Cities leadership, including a discussion of overall goals. Summit participants then reviewed a number of technology-related innovations that have affected the community development field - or have the potential for significant impact. To enable an integrated look at how these innovations might impact the work of the institutions within the field, the Summit then broke into small groups to enable participants to discuss visions for how technology can change the work of CDCs, funders, intermediaries, and technical assistance providers.

Before the Summit, participants engaged in a cooperative project to prepare papers that would help to shape the discussions. These papers, available on this web site, are cited throughout the notes. Authors' institutional affiliations appear in Appendix B, Participant List, unless otherwise noted.

The links below review each of these discussions:

Developing an Integrated Vision for Transforming the Field

• Presentations on Technology Innovations with Potential for Transforming Community Development

Key Themes:

• Use technology to characterize communities and reveal the dynamics of local change.
• Support policy advocacy with "storytelling" and data.

Key Themes:

• Improve efficiency within all CDCs.
• Raise expectations for the use of technology.

Key Themes:

• Encourage more fruitful collaboration among community development organizations.
• Build networks that include providers in complementary fields.
• Reinvigorate community development institutions.

Appendix A, Volunteer Working Groups Appendix B, Participant List

1.The Summit was sponsored by Living Cities with additional generous support from the Fannie Mae Foundation and the Surdna Foundation.