Technical Assistance

May 29, 1998, 116 pages, Theater By The Blind (TBTB), 306 West 18th Street, New York, New York 10011, 212-243-4337, ashiotis[at]panix.com

Do you have a favorite Web site that might be of interest to other arts grantmakers? Natasha Terk (William and Flora Hewlett Foundation) wrote about one that intrigues her. Let us know about your favorites.

Tired of one-sided dance criticism? A San Francisco-based Web site takes action. Check out Voice of Dance.

To Protect the Powerless in the Digital Age
An Open Letter to Foundations: To Protect the Interests of the Powerless in the Digital Age, Communications Researchers Need Your Support

The "open letter" has a number of signers.
August 12, 1998. 33 pages. The Civil Rights Forum on Communications Policy, 818 18th Street, N.W. Suite 810, Washington, D.C. 20006, 202-887-0301, forum[at]civilrightsforum.org.

2005, 65 pages. McKnight Foundation, 710 Second Street South, Suite 400, Minneapolis, MN 55401, 612-333-4220

Carolyn Bye, executive director of the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, writes in the introduction that You Are Here reports on the "small steps" taken by communities in the Twin Cities suburbs since the publication of A New Angle: Arts Development in the Suburbs in 2002. The report features profiles of twelve suburban art projects and a detailed pull-out map showing where to find them and many others.

Artists and arts institutions rely on the free flow of information to create and distribute their work. The converging digital environment presents many new options for the delivery of specialized information to targeted audiences, and the cultural community is becoming increasingly sophisticated in deploying these tools. However, the United States is only sixteenth in the world in broadband Internet penetration, and the growing digital divide presents a challenge to the vision of ubiquitous access to high-quality images, sound, and text.

The Southern California Tribal Chairmen's Association, using a three-year grant from Hewlett Packard in 2001, has created the Tribal Digital Village (TDV). Using a high-performance wireless backbone, the TDV project delivers wireless broadband to community centers, fire stations, sheriff substations, Tribal administration buildings, and Tribal libraries in-and-around eighteen tribal reservations. This long-distance, point-to-point, wireless system is ideally suited to the geographically diverse area that required coverage.

2005. Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, 65 Bleecker Street, 7th floor, New York, NY 10012-2420, 212-387-7555.

This book chronicles the Warhol Foundation's five-year initiative to build capacity of thirty-one small contemporary visual arts organizations located throughout the country. This ambitious program awarded $125,000 to each organization and provided additional technical assistance according to their needs. The challenging typography, layout, and binding of the book convey a strong sense of the organizations portrayed.

We live in a world of "widespread hostility toward the United States and its policies."1 This antipathy is not limited to the countries and peoples that are directly affected by the U.S. "war on terror" and its attendant pol-icies, but includes many of our former allies and fellow democracies. A friend who just returned from a year in Spain reports that she spent a significant amount of time and energy convincing people she met there that the U.S.

Early in 2004, the Graduate Center of the City of New York convened ten small to mid-sized arts organizations to talk about what had happened to them in an experimental, internet-based project funded by the Ford Foundation. The ten, from across the country, are community-based cultural organizations; they share a commitment to emerging and experimental artists and art forms, and a commitment—equally firm—to their local or nearby communities. Despite their similarities of mission, the ten were not familiar with each other's work.

2004, 9 pages. Published by the Council on Foundations, 1828 L Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20036, 202-466-6512, www.cof.org

This supplement to Foundation News and Commentary examines foundations' use of the Internet through case-studies of four foundations that employ varying degrees of sophistication in their use of online technologies to support their work.