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LA MESA/EL CAJON
East County, San Diego Telecommunity Center
The site is managed by a private entrepreneur with support from the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), which owns and donates usage of the facility housing the telecenter. Additional support in developing the site, recruiting initial telecommuters, and providing marketing funds has been provided by Caltrans.
The telecenter is located in a strip development adjacent to a residential neighborhood. Restaurants, fast food, shopping, cleaners, grocery store, auto service station, and a coffee house are all within two blocks of the center. Grossmont Community College is approximately one mile away, a bus line runs within one block of the center, and there is a baseball park behind the facility.
The telecenter covers 1,550 square feet and offers a conference room, a multi-media lab, a telework room housing the workstations, a lounge area, and kitchen facilities. The center provides six workstations that are equipped with personal computers served by a Local Area Network (LAN). The conference room is equipped with a table wired with eight data jacks providing access to the LAN, allowing computer-assisted decision-making for groups. The center also offers dedicated cabinet space for user storage at each workstation. The multi-media lab is equipped with four monitors, two on each side of the room, as well as a pull-down projection screen and overhead RGB projector capable of projecting computer-generated images. The lab is capable of seating 35 people. Kitchen facilities include a refrigerator, microwave and sink.
Computers for the center are configured with different operating environments; users have a choice between Macintosh, OS/2, UNIX, or DOS/Windows. The LAN links the workstations to five different servers, each dedicated to a different function and interoperational with all the operating systems. There is a mail server; fax server; communication server; and file server, which is NETWARE-based. The communication server provides connectivity to ISDN, Internet and to employer-hosted computers. A typical workstation computer has 8 MB RAM, 200 MB hard drive, SVGA monitor, and at least an 80386 microprocessor. Because workstations are not reserved for specific users, user files are maintained on the file server. Each user is entitled to one megabyte of hard disk space on the file server.
The developer plans to offer the telecenter as a neighborhood resource which community groups can use for social, political or cultural events. For example, the local Parent-Teachers' Association can use the center free-of-charge for meetings, plans are being discussed to provide free software demonstrations on Saturday mornings, and local businesses can rent space for a nominal fee for meetings and presentations.
Plans to diversify revenue-generating operations center around providing services on a fee-for-service or -use basis. Services being planned are information management education, access to a CD ROM library through the LAN, and other network services such as faxing, printing, and access to the Internet. The LAN also supplies access to multi-media courseware as an aspect of distance learning.
The site is being marketed as a community information resource center. Because some people may be intimidated by the idea of a technology center, publicity has been designed to market the facility as a knowledge center that promotes person-to-person communication and collaboration, with technology available as a tool for that purpose. To carry that idea into their daily workplace, the site's administrators are in the process of defining the type of customer service their users want and need. They expect this to be an evolutionary process as they become better acquainted with each telecommuter at their facility.
Early publicity efforts for the telecenter focused on its grand opening on March 15, 1995. Recent efforts have centered around outreach to local residents, corporations and governmental agencies. Specific activities have included providing information to the Employee Transportation Coordinators at major employers in the region and scheduling tours for them, participating in the "Making Money in Multimedia" UC-San Diego CONNECT program in May, and including a section about telecommuting and the East County Telecommunity Center in a mailing sponsored by the East County Trip Reduction Coalition. Among the upcoming activities already scheduled are participation by the site administrator in a panel discussion titled Balancing "Family Need and Organizational Requirements Through Telecommuting" at the Groupware "95" National Conference in San Jose on August 16-18, 1995; jointly hosting a booth with the Chula Vista and Coronado telecenters at the California Computer Show in San Diego on August 19-20; and the center will be one of the sites for Telecommute America events in San Diego in September 1995. In addition to these efforts, a formal marketing plan is being designed that will contain a combination of broadcasting public service announcements on the local public television station, contacting local condominium associations to include articles/advertisements in their newsletters, contacting churches to list the telecenter's services in church bulletins, and contacting schools to include information about the center in packets sent home with schoolchildren. In addition, the site administrator at the East County Telecenter is working with administrators from the three other San Diego area telecenters to coordinate a joint marketing campaign.
Five telecommuters currently use the East County San Diego Telecommunity Center. Over the last several weeks, the center has been used an average of three person-days per week.
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