KnowledgeBase Consulting Services

Founded as an informal BGSA community outreach project in 1995, KnowledgeBase is now a Georgia nonprofit corporation (since April 1998) with pending 501(c)3 tax-exempt status (our IRS Form 1023 has been completed, but has not yet been filed). We have developed a twelve-hour introductory computer curriculum called The Computer Academy, and have designed a low-cost Internet-accessible computer lab using quality donated computers that we refurbish and configure ourselves. The curriculum and computer lab function as a model community technology center, which we built in Georgia Tech’s Student Center to host our camps and seminars. Our goal is to establish our curriculum and these technology centers in community centers, churches, and schools.

The Computer Academy, developed during the Summer of 1997, has been refined over the past two summers by using it as the basis for a series of one-week camps that have introduced over one hundred people – the majority of whom are African-American residents of low-to-moderate income urban communities – to computers and the Internet since June 1998. The Computer Academy has also been licensed to Atlanta Public Schools (through Beecher Hills Elementary School), Fort Valley State University Agricultural Extension, and the Georgia Tech School of Biology.

Our experiences have taught us that any successful literacy effort must be based on reinforcing the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Successful efforts must also work to eliminate some people's inherent fear of computers by engaging their entrepreneurial interest (i.e., showing them how computers and the Internet can help them learn about and start their own businesses), and by encouraging "each one, teach one" mentoring strategies among our students.

Executive Director Derrick Brown has an extensive technical and entrepreneurial background. Derrick graduated from Georgia Tech with a master's degree in electrical engineering, and started a Web site publishing company prior to joining KnowledgeBase. A more critical factor in his work, though, is his perspective and awareness, which give him the capacity to teach technology to uninitiated audiences in a manner that connects with their interests.

Derrick has also developed relationships with several Atlanta-based Community Development Corporations (CDCs) while serving as a 1999 Technology Fellow with the Enterprise Foundation (http://www.enterprisefoundation.org). As a technology fellow, his duties were to use information technology tools and training methods to improve day-to-day CDC operations. Establishing these relationships has allowed KnowledgeBase to continue working with several of these organizations after the conclusion of Derrick’s fellowship tenure to help these CDCs establish community technology centers.

KnowledgeBase’s work received special recognition in September 1999, when Derrick was invited to a two-day White House briefing of the African-American Internet Constituency. Organized in the midst of growing public concern over the Digital Divide, the group invited to the briefing represents the vanguard that has already been working for several years to conquer this problem by creating compelling Internet content and by organizing substantive infrastructure-building and training efforts targeted at African-Americans.

Derrick Brown at September 8-9, 1999 White House Briefing of the African-American Constituency