Statement of Intent

OUR NETWORK.
OUR COMMUNITY.
OUR FUTURE.

The Internet is more than a commercial service delivered to individual customers. At its best, it is a shared social and technical infrastructure: a way for people to communicate, create, learn, organize, exchange knowledge, and participate in the decisions that affect their lives.

Its development has always depended upon collaboration, shared standards, interconnected networks, and the willingness of people and institutions to contribute to something larger than themselves.

Yet the ability to connect to the Internet does not mean that everyone participates in it equally.

Access is increasingly mediated by commercial platforms, telecommunications companies, governments, institutions, and technologies designed elsewhere. Cost remains an important barrier, but the digital divide is also shaped by access to equipment, skills, privacy, trust, accessibility, representation, knowledge, and decision-making power.

A person can have an Internet connection while having very little control over the technologies and systems upon which that connection depends.

North End Connect exists because we believe communities should have a meaningful role in determining their own digital futures.

Our purpose is therefore larger than providing Internet access. NEC seeks to strengthen the capacity of Winnipeg’s North End to understand, build, use, maintain, govern, question, and change technology for itself.

We describe this as digital self-determination.