From: Sam Damon Date: Sat, 2 Apr 1994 04:48:51 -0500 (EST) CENTER GOES ONLINE WITH DIGITAL QUEERS (Center Voice, The NYC LesBiGay Community Center, 3/94) The Center has been selected as one of a half-dozen lesbian and gay organizations across the country to participate in a pilot project linking gay and lesbian liberation organizations electronically into computer online services. The program was conceived by Tom Rielly, co-chair of Digital Queers, the three-year-old organization for lesbian and gay high-tech professionals, and funded by Tim Gill, Chief Executive Officer and Senior Vice President of Research and Development of QuarkXPress, the Denver-based software company. The project donates personal computers, software and training to selected system users, providing them access to America Online, other computer bulletin boards, and the Internet. Former Center Controller Donald Huppert, who designed the Center's computer system, will serve as the Center's Digital Queers training consultant on the DQ project. Once the system is up and running, anyone with access to Internet e-mail will be able to communicate with the Center, and vice versa. According to Quark's Mr. Gill, the idea for the project was generated at President Clinton's inaugural. "I was sitting in a room with a lot of NGLTF (National Gay and Lesbian Task Force) people," he said. "Tom Rielly was there, and he came up with the idea. And I said,'Okay, I can give you $25,000.'" Through e-mail and America Online's Gay and Lesbian Forum, the distribution of informational bulletins, notices of coming events, listings of services, and urgent messages that require action by the lesbian and gay community is almost instantaneous. "The radical right uses sophisticated computer communications technology extensively and brilliantly to fight against us," said Richard Burns, the Center's Executive Director. "A primary goal of the DQ project is to begin to use similar tools to organize our community, to make contacts, and disseminate information to generate rapid response when threats to our civil rights arise." The system will also facilitate the world-wide organizing work of the International Lesbian and Gay Association, providing international e-mail access for Center ILGA (the Center's international rights project and the local world ILGA chapter), which runs the ILGA United Nations project and will host the ILGA world conference in New York in June. "We intend to use email as a technological extension of the grassroots community organizing function we currently accomplish with our monthly mailings," said Mr. Burns. "With regular mail we reach 35,000 households every month with our calendar of activities and meetings held here at the Center. Now, with this electronic tool, we'll be able to reach a much broader audience more quickly with our monthly and daily calendars, our newsletter, and other information." Scott Mindeaux, MIS Director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, another DQ project participant, said, "The purpose of the project is to get organizations online and show how computer technology can work in our community, how to use it to our advantage. It becomes another outlet, another way to reach out to constituents. Now NGLTF can reach out directly to our many of our members with our action alerts." Mr. Gill said the pilot project assumes that linking the lesbian and gay community electronically will "make us better, stronger, and more coordinated." If it succeeds, the project will be expanded to include other gay and lesbian advocacy organizations.