Davis Community Network

The Davis Community Network, also known as DCN, uses Internet resources to build local and regional community. It was founded in 1994 as the area's first non-university Internet access provider and is the registrant of the 168.150.0.0/16 netblock and the manager of the davis.ca.us geographic domain. Today, it provides web, e-mail list and calendar resources to hundreds of local organizations, and maintains an extensive directory of local web resources.

Their mission statement is "...to strengthen the community by helping people understand and benefit from participation in the electronic information era." Some of DCN's activities and resources include:

• DCN's Directory of local web resources.
• The community calendar. A web calendar that pools the events of many community organizations.
• Around election time, visit DCN's Voter Information Project for local campaign finance and economic interest disclosures.
• Free Internet-related classes;
• Free web sites, e-mail lists, calendars and other Internet resources to community groups, non-profits and institutions;
• Partnerships and informal relationships with City and County government, UCD, schools, business groups, and others;
• Development of open-source applications for community use;
• Research projects such as putting high resolution orthophotos of Davis online; and more
• DCN ran a forum at http://forum.dcn.org for 3 weeks from Monday, June 21 through Sunday, July 11 in 2004 about "The Davis City Council's Goals and Key Objectives for 2004-2006". For some reason the usernames and profiles are messed up with spam now, even though the posts are still there.

DCN is a tax-exempt, nonprofit, 501(c)(3) charitable organization. It relies in large part on public support. If you'd like to help it reach its fundraising goal of $20,000 for FY2006, please see this PDF or DCN's page at Network for Good.

DCN is not an ISP. It has a contractual agreement with Omsoft Technologies to manage dialup subscribers, and to help manage DCN's Network Operations Center at 1623 5th St.

DCN was the first off-campus ISP in Davis, beginning in 1994. As commercial ISP's appeared, DCN arranged an ISP partnership relationship with Omsoft Technologies, which pays to DCN a small portion of subscriber income to support our main efforts. ["Users/RichardLowenberg" Richard Lowenberg was the executive director from date to date.

Though supported by outside grants (principally from CalTrans and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) in its startup years, DCN has had partial, and now total local support since its inception. DCN is partnership based, and was begun with participation by UCD, the City of Davis and the DJUSD. It has a long running partnership with the Yolo Elections Office.

Davis Wiki was featured in the DCNews email newsletter on 5-25-2005

In The Spotlight
************
Currently in the DCN Community Spotlight is the DavisWiki
web site, at: http://www.daviswiki.org/

OK. We've said it here before. We really like this site.
Started by a few friends on the UCD campus, it now has
thousands of active participants. DavisWiki is a great
addition to community Internetworking in Davis. Take a look.
If there's something you can't find on DCN, it may be on DavisWiki.