The Land Grant promise to rural communities.

The people of the State of Kansas gave Kansas State University the land it now resides upon, the promise was we, as an acdemic community, would give back to the people our help and assistance. This, and all my work with communities, is part of my effort to meet my obligation. I want, more than anything else, to help rural communities, like Junction City, Plainville, Phillipsburg and Liberal to cross the technology bridge by working with them in constructing and maintain web sites. The key, for me, at least, is that these sites can be self-sustained by the community without the use of some special proprietary (and expensive!) software that ties the community into a never-ending fee-for-service arrangement. These sites should be theirs to own, change, and update.

As part of that, I work with students and community leaders in getting sites up and running and then training the "local experts" to use these non-database sites to promote, highlight, and serve their communities. It's a simple idea, just as HTML is a simple idea. We make these things complicated, perhaps, when a simple, less-expensive solution is at hand.