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Using the Internet to promote activism in neighborhoods Ed Schwartz wrote the book on community organizing through e-mail and the Web.

By Martha Woodall INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

Some experts worry that the digital revolution could wind up fostering isolation and weakening the social fabric as people spend more time with their computers, instead of with each other.

Not Ed Schwartz.

The former city councilman and longtime community advocate believes that a computer tied to the Internet can empower ordinary citizens, re-invigorate democracy, and connect people with their communities.

``The revolution we are experiencing here is in communications,'' Schwartz said last week. ``I think the returns are hardly in, in terms of what the long-range impact of this will be . . . but there is no question in my mind that if we want this to strengthen communication, it can.''

Since his days in city government, Schwartz, 53, who lives in Mount Airy, has returned to preside over the Institute for the Study of Civic Values, a small Philadelphia organization he founded in 1973 to study and promote community organizing.

Now, he has distilled his experience -- a lifetime of activism and at least 15 years of computer know-how -- into a new book, NetActivism: How Citizens Use the Internet. It's a 175-page primer on cyber-democracy, published by O'Reilly & Associates, a California firm specializing in Internet works.

NetActivism made its Philadelphia debut last week in the democratic environs of the Reading Terminal Market. There, the ebullient Schwartz signed copies and entertained the lunchtime crowd from his customary perch at the piano with the Reading Terminals, a musical group.

Even though the media have focused attention this campaign season on colorful political sites sprouting on the World Wide Web, Schwartz believes simple e-mail holds the greatest potential for effective online politicking and community organizing.

``Anything that puts technological power in the hands of people who would not have ordinarily have it, can be an equalizer -- again if we choose to use it that way,'' he said.

``I think the interesting insight is, you know everybody points to the fact that it was the extreme groups, terrorist organizations, fringe groups that started using [ the Internet ] first,'' Schwartz said. ``That is a commentary on how cheap and easy it is.''

All it takes is access to a computer, a modem and an online service provider.

``To me, e-mail seems to be the one thing that is really exciting here that permits people simultaneously to have a dialogue with each other on their own time and terms,'' Schwartz said.

Specifically, he said, online chats, and e-mail subscription lists -- or listservs -- permit the views of one person, or one group, to ripple to a wide audience around the globe through cyberspace.

``No pre-existing technology has ever permitted this sort of interchange among large groups of people, let alone made it easy and inexpensive to use,'' he wrote in the introduction to NetActivism.

Schwartz points to several political groups that already have successfully tapped the power of the Internet. It worked back in 1989 for Chinese students living in the United States. They used e-mail to organize themselves and to lobby Congress for legislation granting them safe haven in this country in the aftermath of the violent crackdown on the student-led pro-democracy movement in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

It worked, too, for Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, which turned to the Net to distribute information during the 1994 Congressional elections to help defeat Democratic incumbents in several districts.

But one of Schwartz's favorite examples of Internet activism is EnviroLink, a Website (http://www. envirolink.org) overflowing with advice, news and statistics on an array of environmental issues. It provides links to more than 350 environmental groups and 25 federal regulatory agencies.

What makes the site singularly appealing to him, though, is its origins: EnviroLink was created in 1991 by a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University named Josh Knauer. This site, he says, illustrates the clout a single individual can wield in cyberspace.

Schwartz is no recent convert to computers. He got his first one nearly 15 years ago after leading a group of neighborhood activists to a meeting with then-city Managing Director W. Wilson Goode. Goode had printouts showing the city projects being done in the neighborhoods across the city.

``I thought, `That's it,' '' Schwartz recalled. ``If they are going to start playing with printouts, then we've got to learn how to do that.''

He got a computer that enabled him to develop spreadsheets, and soon he was creating profiles of neighborhoods across the city.

That was only the beginning. Schwartz decided to run for an at-large seat on City Council in 1983 on the basis of an analysis he did of the prior election. He also used his computer to turn out personalized letters to his campaign volunteers who helped him win the race.

Schwartz was the first person on Council to bring a computer to City Hall. Although there was money in the Council budget for computers, his colleagues initially were cool. Then Schwartz developed a constituent services form. Every time a citizen called his office for help or information, it was logged into a database showing the nature of the call, how it was handled, and the ward and division where the caller lived.

``Well, after two months, I sent a report out to every ward leader in the city as to what we had done in their ward,'' Schwartz said. ``After that, every member of Council absolutely wanted a computer of their own.''

On Council, Schwartz gained the reputation as the resident techie, and got his first taste of a computer as communications medium. The city's energy activists had created an online bulletin board in the early 1980s called the Philadelphia Energy Network. On that bulletin board, Schwartz posted what he called the City Council Forum.

``It was me,'' he said. ``I didn't use it to hold forth. I used it really as a basis to solicit the opinions of the talented energy activists in the city on bills that I had to face that related to energy usage.''

When Council was tackling projects such as a trash-to-steam plant, Schwartz signed on to seek activists' views and input on technical questions.

``It was invaluable to me,'' he said. ``Could I have met with them all? Of course, but I didn't need to. They had a kind of access to me that was thoughtful because they would write something online, and I would be able to answer it. . . .

``I never talked about it,'' Schwartz said. ``I just did it.''

He left Council after losing a re-election bid in 1987. He took his computer skills to the city's Office of Housing and Community Development, where he spent more than four years overseeing federal block grant projects.

He returned to the Institute for the Study of Civic Values in 1992, and quickly plunged into several computer projects. With the help of LibertyNet and grants from the William Penn Foundation and others, he has put up several Websites, including one for the institute (http://libertynet.org/~edcivic/iscvhome.html) and Neighborhoods Online (http://libertynet.org/community/phila/nol.html), which has resources for community organizing. He also manages a related e-mail list that has 150 subscribers across the country.

While his enthusiasm for all of the projects can seem boundless, Schwartz is concerned about the future of cyberspace. His major fear is not that the government will succeed in curbing free speech but that advancing technology itself will undermine prospects for activism.

``I am concerned about making Web sites so complicated that ordinary citizens will feel reluctant to do what I am doing,'' Schwartz said. ``The virtue of this medium for politics and citizenship now is that it is democratic.'' ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- tech.life