Breaking Vancity's Digital Divide
Vancouver's creative economy is good for business, for start-ups, and for marginalized residents of Vancouver's inner-city. Discover how cultural creatives and technologists can make alliances towards economic and social development of the Downtown Eastside (DTES). Learn how a creative technology incubator works for entrepreneurs, CEOs, and the community in one of Canada's poorest neighbourhoods.
Access to broadband and creative clustering enables both a technology community to solve community problems, while breaking the digital divide. The DTES is a neighbourhood in transition, and new alliances are creating “revitalization 2.0” to support an integrated approach to economic development by using technology and community building tools. Access to web 2.0 tactics, equitable broadband distribution, and redistributing technology is changing lives while supporting research, and creating new training and employment opportunities.
For ICT and web 2.0 businesses a triple-bottom approach can be good for profits and good for community change. Check out how tech sectors help themselves while building local creative economies. Hear lessons from Vancity's inner-city clusters and other successful models worldwide.
Irwin is a Dutch/Canadian artist and administrator doing cultural planning, cultural infrastructure development, and support for a media arts cluster in Vancouver's inner-city. W2 is a 16,000 square foot media arts centre being developed within the Woodward's redevelopment that opens before the 2010 Winter Olympics. Irwin works with Fearless City Mobile as well as an ICT Cluster, a unique grouping of tech companies, open source activists, low income residents and artists codesigning communications systems for this area—one of Canada's poorest neighbourhoods. Fearless City is developing infrastructure for urban poor/artists to access an open mesh network, recycled mobile devices, two-way rich media file sharing, and interactive live screens in public spaces. Irwin is also a parent, media artist, and curator interested in social inclusion and redress. He has an Honour's Post-Graduate Certificate in Media Arts from Capilano University.
