The Fund's Incubator Program supports several high-profile, high-tech endeavors. One project, called "Music Places," which is run by the nonprofit Exploring the Metropolis Inc., has just created a database of every rehearsal and performance space in the city. The database will be a valuable resource for the city's nomadic music groups, which constantly seek places to practice and perform. The Fund supplied the project with office space, PCs, phones, and Web servers. "If there's another place in the city that brings together this many nonprofits under one roof, I don't know about it," says Eugenie Cowan, director of Music Places and of Exploring the Metropolis.

NYtrain.org, an FCNY-developed database of 4,350 listings of vocational courses, child-care programs, and alcohol- and substance-abuse clinics, is used at 250 sites around the city, including the Department of Employment, the Department of Probation, and the Literacy Assistance Center. Users can conduct searches by program location, by language, or by income restriction, among other criteria. The Domestic Violence Court System is expected to be widely adopted by such organizations as Safe Horizons at the Brooklyn Family Court and Jacobi Medical Center in Bronx, NY. Even in Georgia -- where the domestic-violence app offers videos on how to plan for personal safety after an order of protection is issued -- the system is expected to be used in every county. Both projects are part of the Fund's Center for Internet Innovation, which was started in 1994 -- before there was a Netscape.

McCormick wants E-CommunityConnect to be a model of how to wire poor communities around the country -- and how to help them develop what she calls "transformative content" too. It seems as if McCormick has just recently hit her stride in the campaign to use technology to bring citizens, nonprofits, and government agencies closer together. The legacy of the Internet, from her perspective, won't be about moving commerce online but about strengthening our social fabric. In five years, people won't rave about how the Net transports them to virtual communities. They'll talk about how it roots them to their real-world community.

"We want to link the Net to real places and improve communities," McCormick says. "I get to be part of a group that is working on long-term strategies for using the Internet to improve the quality of our lives and to enhance the vitality of our connections -- with each other and with our government.

"It's not our nature to showboat or to take credit," she continues. "Everything we do is a partnership. But it's just a real thrill to be able to do this kind of work."

Scott Kirsner (kirsner@worldnet.att.net), a Fast Company contributing editor, is based in Boston. Contact Mary McCormick by email (mmccormick@fcny.org) or learn more about the Fund for the City of New York on the Web (www.fcny.org).

Sidebar: What's Fast

One of the themes of Mary McCormick's career has been, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." In trying to cross-pollinate successful management techniques among the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, McCormick, 54, president of the Fund for the City of New York (FCNY), has found that focusing on concrete metrics has helped her steer around political quicksand. "When you use anecdote or emotion to talk about what's wrong with a situation, you get bogged down," says McCormick. "When you measure things, it makes the process more objective and less political."

Many recent FCNY projects aim to create metrics that will help city government better track improvements in service -- based on citizens' perceptions. Beginning in the 1970s, the Fund created a series of scorecards for such agencies as the Department of Sanitation and the Department of Parks and Recreation to give city managers a way to gauge progress.

The Fund's latest scorecard (dubbed "How Smooth Are New York City's Streets?") may sound trifling at first, but when the Fund convened a series of focus groups in 1995, supervised by FCNY board member and renowned public-opinion researcher Daniel Yankelovich, a huge 65% of participants griped about potholes, broken axles, and lost hubcaps.

No one had yet developed a measure for the smoothness of city streets, so Barbara Cohn, the Fund's "road worrier" and director of the Center on Municipal Government Performance, outfitted a test car with a laser-scanning profilometer -- a device that could measure the severity of jolts related to the road surface. Cohn then drafted a crew of professional drivers who covered 676 miles of city streets. Previously, the city had used only inspectors and engineers to inspect the streets visually -- a technique that was far less accurate.

The result was a neighborhood-by-neighborhood report, complete with color maps, on the condition of the city's streets: 60% of city blocks were rated acceptable, and 40% were rated poor or terrible. Manhattan had the highest number of "significant jolts" per mile (14.2), and Staten Island had the lowest (7.5). The study also found that there was no correlation between high-income neighborhoods and good road quality, contrary to what some of the researchers had expected. The Fund completed its second survey of the mean streets in the fall of 1999.

"If you don't have clear objectives and good outcomes, how will you know what you've accomplished?" McCormick asks. "Without the measures, you fall back to being purely political -- and that gets you nowhere."