Changing With the Internet

DCN is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit education and community service organization. Founded in 1993, it is one of the nation’s oldest community networks. It was the region’s first non-governmental Internet access provider, reaching 500 subscribers in its first year. Now, DCN’s primary mission is providing community-oriented web and e-mail list services.

Community Projects

One of DCN’s major activities is providing local non-profit organizations with e-mail lists, technical assistance, and easy-to-maintain web sites and web calendars.

From 1995 through 2006, DCN’s Resource Allocation Committee has granted resources for 234 projects, including 189 e-mail lists, 71 Simple Sites (web sites that can be maintained easily via the web) and 69 web calendars.

The Davis-Wide Web

DCN’s community web site provides categorized links to around 800 local and regional web resources, including businesses, governmental sites and non-profits.

WWW2.dcn.org, which serves the community directory and roughly 40 community organization sites receives 10,000 visits on an average day. Many organizations, like the Davis High PTA, have their own domain names and are counted separately. DCN subscriber web sites generate an additional million hits on an average week.

DCN currently provides local non-profits with 66 easy-to-maintain Simple Site web sites and six full Content-Management System sites, the largest of which is the DHS PTA site. DCN won a 2007 Grassroots Techie award for its Simple Sites program.

A Community Date Book

60 local organizations currently participate in DCN’s community calendar project. Each maintains its own group calendar and contributes events to a pooled community calendar at events.dcn.org. There are currently 6,541 events in the event database.

We’ve Got the Records to Prove It

DCN’s database server provides searchable community data for several organizations. The largest single database is the Yolo Clerk-Recorder’s 4,350,362-record list of documents recorded from 1970 to the present day. The Clerk-Recorder also uses the DCN database server to provide a searchable database of 12,226 Fictitious Business Names. Over the past several elections, DCN volunteers have compiled a database of 3,568 City of Davis campaign finance records.

Refurbished Computers

DCN has donated over 100 refurbished, used computer systems to area schools, public housing facilities, migrant camps, low-income families, and local public access sites.

The Local In Box

DCN’s e-mail list server  has 167 active community group lists, with 22,127 subscriptions and over 1 gigabyte of list archives. The largest list, AYSO-Announce, has 1,468 subscribers.

List server activity varies wildly with the needs of organizations. On a typical week day, the DCN group list server delivers around 10,000 messages to local in boxes.

21st-Century Classes

DCN has hosted 27 different classes and seminars since 2000. Some, like The Future of Telecommunications in the Davis Region, were taught once. Others, like E-Mail List Management for Non-Profits are taught several times a season.

Paying the Bills

For the last complete fiscal year (2005-2006), the DCN budget was approximately $95,000. Income sources comprised contracts and Memoranda of Understanding (47%), network services (31%), grants and donations (12%), rental income (5%), and loans (5%). Expenses consisted of network operations (44%), staff (35%), and office overhead (21%).