Digital Diversity
Techie with a Cause

Tina Krauss has a dream, and it's nonprofit.

MEET TINA KRAUSS, the first student at Washington State University to enroll in the new American studies master’s program digital diversity option.

A 1998 WSU graduate with a degree in advertising and a minor in philosophy, Krauss moved to the San Francisco Bay area after graduation and worked with AmeriCorps. Her assignments were nonprofits with hard-core needs in low-income areas. “There is an incredible sense of satisfaction when you are able to help an office set up an e-mail account or help them find donated equipment.”

“The digital diversity emphasis is unique in the country,” says T.V. Reed, director of the American Studies Program. “We believe it is the first to combine multicultural studies with multimedia studies. Our goal is to help make the Internet more user friendly for low income people, rural people, people of color, basically people in many diverse communities.”

Reed says because computer technology is unavailable to certain population segments, it stands to reason these groups are underrepresented on the Web. “Truly relevant information for these groups is tough to find.” But in the new digital diversity option, which includes a two-semester internship, students will be trained to build these now missing Web sites and help nonprofits build Web sites to serve real community needs. For example, a student who will begin the digital diversity emphasis next year is interested in serving her tribe (Colville) by building a Web site for the study of Salish languages. She believes the site must be designed in a particular way to be attuned to the actual ways Indian students would use it.

Reed and others at Washington State are hoping to spin their “Project for Digital Diversity” into a larger debate about public policy issues around the digital divide and discussions about content and media production, rather than just hardware and access.

Krauss does not have a pat answer to the question about why she shares Reed’s vision of helping disenfranchised, underserved groups. Why not take her technical and Web-building skills to Seattle or the Silicon Valley and get a fat paycheck? “Actually, that was my original plan,” she says, but adds that she developed a distaste for extravagance while dealing with corporate America during her AmeriCorps service. “It was hard to walk into the plush offices with state-of-the-art laptops every 10 feet and free snack bars when you’ve been working with struggling nonprofits that can’t afford to pay anyone a salary.” Meantime, her exposure to nonprofit groups lit a fire of compassion and hope. As part of her degree work, Krauss plans to build a Web site to help meet the needs of transgendered individuals. “Transgender groups have few resources,” she says. “As a group, they seem to be increasingly marginalized by mainstream gay and lesbian groups.” While starting with a Web site and relevant content for her degree, Krauss’s long-range goal is to establish and operate a nonprofit group to serve the needs of the transgendered community.