{"id":203,"date":"2018-10-13T11:08:33","date_gmt":"2018-10-13T18:08:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/experience\/?p=203"},"modified":"2019-11-18T19:27:53","modified_gmt":"2019-11-19T02:27:53","slug":"inside-the-dtes-tech-cafe-a-blog-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/experience\/2018\/10\/13\/inside-the-dtes-tech-cafe-a-blog-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside The Tech Cafe, Part 2:"},"content":{"rendered":"

Part 2 of 4. From App to Oppenheimer<\/em><\/h3>\n

By Robyn Taylor-Neu<\/p>\n

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What does a “neighbourhood” look like to you?<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Coming up along Jackson from East Hastings, you\u2019ll enter Oppenheimer Park from the\u00a0southeast corner, pass clusters of people, sitting, standing, and milling around, before\u00a0reaching the egg-shaped, glass and aluminum field house. When I arrived, the first time I\u00a0visited the Tech Caf\u00e9, I found myself immediately hailed: \u201cHey, can I get you a coffee?\u201d\u00a0Just in front of the building stood a folding table laden with trays of muffins and cambros
\nof coffee.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, thank you,\u201d I declined, smiling at the man\u2014perhaps a volunteer, perhaps a DTES\u00a0community member, or perhaps both\u2014as I passed into the field house, into the\u00a0Oppenheimer Park Tech Caf\u00e9.<\/p>\n

Upon reflection, several things about this scene stand out. Most striking, is the\u00a0impression of entering a social world, a community. People here seem to know each\u00a0other. They nod and exchange greetings, pause to chat\u2026 I\u2019ve been told that\u00a0Oppenheimer represents something special in the Downtown Eastside (DTES)\u00a0neighbourhood; once here, I begin to see why. I also begin to see why, when choosing a\u00a0site for the initial Tech Caf\u00e9, William and Dionne picked the park.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were a lot of folks\u2026that didn’t have any tech skills but were not interested in\u00a0going into a particular community organization,\u201d Dionne clarifies, \u201c\u2026maybe they weren’t\u00a0allowed in Carnegie anymore and they didn’t want to come to the learning exchange\u00a0because it’s the university.\u201d Many community members, we learn, have had negative\u00a0experiences that have left them wary of educational institutions in general. \u201cSome of our\u00a0folks dropped out of school in grade five because, you know, either they were going to\u00a0residential schools and they ran away, or they had a teacher who kept telling them they\u00a0were dumb and stupid,\u201d Dionne recounts.<\/p>\n

In short, a combination of barriers prevented many DTES community members from accessing technology training\u2014and without this tech know-how, they couldn\u2019t benefit\u00a0from the LinkVan app\u2019s resource directory. When William and Dionne came up with the\u00a0idea for the Tech Caf\u00e9, it seemed to solve two problems in a single stroke. Dionne\u00a0explains: \u201cWe thought that we could marry the[m] together: introducing the app to the\u00a0community via Tech Caf\u00e9.\u201d The idea, William says, was to \u201cbring education to the\u00a0community.\u201d<\/p>\n

To address the community\u2019s need for informal tech help, though, William and Dionne\u00a0first needed to find funding. They applied for a grant and with support from UBC\u2019s\u00a0Learning Exchange, the DTES roundtable, and the Carnegie Center, began setting up\u00a0the initial Tech Caf\u00e9 in Oppenheimer Park. As William and Dionne describe this process,\u00a0I slowly realise that both initiatives revolve around the idea of conversation. But what\u00a0does this \u201cconversation\u201d constitute? Let\u2019s take a moment to tease out some of its\u00a0attributes, to try to get at the grounds of the Tech Caf\u00e9\u2019s success.<\/p>\n

For starters, conversations are defined by turn-taking. If there\u2019s no back-and-forth, no\u00a0exchange of remarks, it can\u2019t be called a conversation. Further, this turn-taking is also a\u00a0give-and-take: the interaction is more or less reciprocal. Your employer\u2019s sermon on the\u00a0value of punctuality, for instance, doesn\u2019t constitute a conversation, even if punctuated\u00a0by your defensive or submissive replies. In addition, conversations have duration\u2014a\u00a0conversation takes place over a period of time, and so an exchanged comment or two\u00a0hardly counts as a conversation (except, perhaps, when described sarcastically). Finally,\u00a0conversations are non-linear, flexible and, to some degree, improvised. A scripted\u00a0dramatic interchange may be a dialogue but it\u2019s not a conversation.<\/p>\n

All of these attributes of conversation\u2014turn-taking, reciprocity, duration,\u00a0flexibility\u2014characterize the LinkVab app development process as well as the Tech Caf\u00e9\u00a0initiative. As Dionne explains, \u201cIt’s a constant conversation back and forth with the
\nagencies and with the community who are coming to the Tech Caf\u00e9s to see\u2014is it\u00a0working? What can we do differently?\u201d It also becomes apparent that conversations are\u00a0not just about the exchange of information. They\u2019re also about relationships:
\n\u201cConversations are important because people at organizations, they’ll come and go. So\u00a0you need to kind of build that relationship [and make it] ongoing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ongoing relationships grow out of ongoing conversations\u2014and, accordingly, William and\u00a0Dionne\u2019s commitment to ongoing conversation is a commitment to relationships going\u00a0forward. This commitment, it becomes increasingly clear, is essential to the success of\u00a0the LinkVan and Tech Caf\u00e9 initiatives. A second, critical component is the commitment\u00a0to \u201cmeet people where they\u2019re at.\u201d In the course of our interview, the phrase kept coming\u00a0up: the app was about \u201cmeeting people where they\u2019re at,\u201d the Oppenheimer Tech Caf\u00e9\u00a0pilot was motivated by a desire to \u201cmeet people where they\u2019re at,\u201d the expansion of the\u00a0Tech Caf\u00e9 into other community organizations and venues is another means of \u201cmeeting\u00a0people where they\u2019re at.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"=
Ongoing relationships grow out of ongoing conversations<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For William and Dionne, recruiting community members to be \u201cpeer educators\u201d and\u00a0\u201ccommunity ambassadors\u201d was key: in the case of LinkVan, these educator-ambassadors took the app out into community spaces like shelters, community centers,\u00a0and parks (like Oppenheimer), to quite literally \u201cmeet people where they\u2019re at.\u201d In the\u00a0case of the Caf\u00e9s, the educator-ambassadors \u201cmeet people where they\u2019re at\u201d in a more\u00a0figurative sense\u2014since there\u2019s no fixed or formal rubric for the Caf\u00e9s, people can\u00a0participate to the extent that they\u2019re comfortable with. In fact, William remarks, \u201cSome of\u00a0the people that you’ve met\u2026are people who originally came to the Tech Caf\u00e9 and were\u00a0not necessarily engaged. They were watching what was going on at first\u2026\u201d \u201cMeeting\u00a0people where they\u2019re at,\u201d then, means taking cues from the community. It means letting\u00a0community members set the pace. And above all, not to harp on an earlier theme, it\u00a0means being attentive.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

******<\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Part 2 of 4. From App to Oppenheimer By Robyn Taylor-Neu Coming up along Jackson from East Hastings, you\u2019ll enter…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61442,"featured_media":764,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[468221,3704299,3704289],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-posts","category-robyn-taylor-neu","category-tech-cafe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61442"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":411,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions\/411"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}