'We Want to Link the Net to Real Places and Improve Communities'

"Mary has a high level of convening power," says Vincent McGee, vice president of the Irene Diamond Fund. "If Mary calls, people will respond, and they will bite their tongues and sit down to try to work together. That's rare in New York. Mary is quiet and thoughtful, and she doesn't let her ego get in the way."

Following the meeting about E-CommunityConnect, McCormick switches conference rooms for a lunch gathering with a delegation from the New York City Board of Education. In 1995, the Fund and the Office of Pupil Transportation won an award from Microsoft for a bus-routing application that FCNY created to help reduce the amount of time special-education students spent traveling to and from school. Since then, the Fund has worked with Kevin F. Gill, head of the school system's Division of Food Services and Transportation, to build a public Web site that offers information about school menus, classroom facilities, and bus routes -- down to the time and the location of each stop. Since the site has the best database available for tracking which classrooms are air-conditioned and which aren't, the tool is already being used by administrators to help allocate classrooms for summer school. (Air-conditioning dramatically reduces the no-show rate for kids attending summer school.)

McCormick sees the work on bus routes and on school-lunch menus as a first step in providing parents with more information about -- and more control over -- their children's education. Right now, because FCNY is only doing development for one arm of the Board of Education, the site contains a comprehensive list of the cafeteria staff members but has nothing on teachers or on curricula. "Go into the future," McCormick implores. "If I'm a parent and I have any question about the school, I can just log on. What classroom is my child in? Who is the teacher? What textbooks are the students using? What's the homework? The Web can open up this system in a way that is unprecedented."

Opening up the system -- increasing its transparency and its accountability -- has been a central theme of McCormick's tenure at FCNY. McCormick has attracted programmers and designers from NYU's highly regarded Interactive Telecommunications Program and Panix Corp., one of the first commercial ISPs in New York. And she has given former government officials like Barbara Cohn, who is the former deputy commissioner of rent control under Mayor Koch, a chance to experiment with technology.

Cohn's current pet project is "ComNet," the handheld computer-based system for evaluating streetscapes. (The acronym stands for Computerized Neighborhood Environment Tracking.) "Mary is a 'yes person' in a positive sense. She is always pushing us not just to see problems but to see solutions, to try new approaches, and to 'make it work, make it work,' " Cohn says. "For me, that is a very compelling mantra."

ComNet was created when Cohn realized that city government had no way of gauging how citizens perceived quality of life on the street. She set out to create a universal measure that would get various city agencies to work together to improve that quality of life. The result? Community and business groups can now compile a complete list of things that mar their environment, using Casio's Cassiopeia handheld computers. Each item gets an automatic date-and-time stamp, and the user can also take color photographs using a tiny digital camera that plugs into the Cassiopeia. Once the assessment is complete, the group can easily see which agency is responsible for which problem. "Then the groups can prioritize what's important and what's not," Cohn says. "We can't send the data directly to the city yet, but even if we could, that would be a rather cold relationship. This way, people and government get together. You have human contact -- and that gets better results."

FCNY's intention is to have neighborhood groups do regular assays, so that, ideally, they can follow improvements over time. To support that plan, McCormick talks about providing an easy way to publish the status of various issues, along with pictures, on the Internet. "It's a way of publicly holding government accountable," she says, "but also giving it credit for the work that it does that benefits neighborhoods." ComNet is already being used by neighborhood organizations in other cities, including Austin, Texas. And several cities in Connecticut and in California are considering it. Indeed, other Fund initiatives are growing so fast and are taking root outside the city so often that McCormick is considering changing the organization's name to be less geographically specific.

FCNY's Internet Academy, along with its companion training program, the Nonprofit Computer Exchange, are expanding their course offerings to cover everything from Microsoft Word to Adobe PageMaker to advanced JavaScript. Classes are offered in English, Spanish, and Creole. The poster-sized course list seems in imminent danger of turning into a full-fledged catalog.