Person

Steve Cisler

Steve Cisler is a librarian by training who only began using computers when he was middle-aged (42).

He had a one Macintosh public computer lab in my branch library in the San Francisco area in 1984. In 1985 he joined The Well, a computer conferencing system, and ran a forum on information and libraries for many years. In 1988 at Apple Computer library he started a grant program called Apple Library of Tomorrow. He made dozens of grants for innovative projects in the U.S. and Canadian museums and libraries. He supported the first copyright free online book about the Internet (Electronic Frontier Foundation's Big Dummies Guide to the Internet), and at the same time he became very interested in local community networks like the Free-Nets and early citizen-run community web sites. He worked on de-regulation of the radio frequencies and standards that became known as 802.11 or Wi-Fi. Over the past seven years he has consulted in Latin America, Thailand, Jordan, and Uganda on short-term ICT projects involving telecenters, school computer labs, and indigenous groups.