Our Vision

RaceMatters.org is a web portal intended to encourage and provide inspiration and tools for racial reconciliation. It has information about racial matters throughout America and the world, both historical and current. However, our most important purpose is to provide information about people and organizations whose efforts are helping to achieve racial reconciliation in Palm Beach County, Florida and to serve as a resource for them.

Here are some thoughts about how our effort will develop.

• We believe that racial prejudice and the problems that stem from it are among the most important problems in America and the world.
• We don't think it is useful to say it is a black problem or a white problem. It is a problem we are all hurt by, it is complex, and a multitude of solutions will be needed.
• We believe that we can make a difference by making information readily available that will publicize constructive effort and provide inspiration and tools.
• We believe that multi-cultural and ecumenical efforts and the appreciation of diversity are in sync with us.
• We believe that children are the very most important part of a strategy for racial reconciliation. We will give importance to efforts directed to improving the well-being of children, especially children at risk.
• We feel there should be a contact list of people in PBC who would like to be kept informed about important events related to racial reconciliation. This list will be important for encouraging participation in events that help racial reconciliation. Our vision is that there will be a contact person who cares about racial reconciliation in every community organization, place of worship, school and business in Palm Beach County.

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RaceMatters.org is in continual development and was last updated on December 1, 2006. So far, for demo and discussion purposes, we have identified 1177 resource items, and we have a search engine.

The most important next work will enable us to add content more easily and will enable any visitor to our website to add his or her evaluation to specific items of content. The conclusions from all evaluations will then be available to guide future visitors. Our website includes controversial viewpoints and it includes information about discriminatory violations that might not be wanted by some visitors. We call this material "sensitive". When are further along in developing this site, the visitor will have the ability to filter out sensitive material when using the "Search" facility. One will also be able to turn on or off a filter which will particularly identify Palm Beach County people, institutions and events. 91 items are treated as "sensitive" at this time.

Important public questions and tasks include these.

• We should have an advisory board on whom we depend for guidance in terms of the sort of content we will seek and how we will present it. At this point, our content is only meant to help our discussion about what sort of website we want and how it should evolve. Our website may look and behave differently when it is more mature.
• One key to our design that is critical is that this website must be self maintaining as much as possible whereby visitors are invited to evaluate our content and make new suggestions.
• We will monitor the major search engines to discover new material that becomes available on the web so that it can be added to our database.
• We must establish proper procedures and legal relationships so that our work does not violate copyright laws. Some of the material presently on our website will be removed as discussion proceeds.
• We need to recruit volunteers to help in the following ways.
  • If you represent or know an organization about which information should be provided in RaceMatters.org, please go to http://www.Qkw.com/racematters/contribute.htm and send us information. You can also mail it to us at the address below. The best telephone to call is 561-368-7445 and e-mail should be to WebSteward.
  • If you would be willing to serve as a reader, editor or evaluator of material, please let us know.
  • If you would be willing to type (or scan) material that is only available to us in hard copy, please let us know.

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Important technical considerations and next steps include these. These are the items for which funding is needed. Items in boldface are high priority.

Exceptional features:

• all the technical powers of a major search engine plus filtering of content.
• we will spider other search engines and certain important websites to identify new material quickly, we don't anticipate that we will spider the web ourselves.
• it will include information from major archives not spidered by search engines (newspaper archives).
• we will be able to efficiently add content we think is important.
• visitors can add content (provided it survives our screening).
• any visitor can evaluate resources to help future visitors.
• we will include filters to tailor responses to the technology and taste of the visitor.
  • select Palm Beach County content, national content, or both.
  • filter out "sensitive items".

Essential requirements:

• it must work well for people with low tech home computers
• we must build onto existing technology for this to be affordable
• this facility must be self-maintaining to the extent possible
• we must provide for policing its links to weed out obsolete links
• we must build a process for screening contributions from visitors
• response must be fast and clean (no advertising or gimicky graphics)

Helps for Research:

• Some very important, very large documents can be made far more accessible by adding them to our portal files and indexing them with our search engine. An example would be the Community Profiles from the Knight Foundation.
• Many serious researchers insist on paper copies of material. They say a computer screen is not adequate for serious work. In addition, printing to ordinary printers is very slow. Therefore we should have a facility that will allow a researcher to select resources (few or many) and then send a command so that all will be printed on a high speed printer or placed in a postscript or pdf file so Kinko's can easily print it.

Possible extensions:

• we can promote local current events that can help racial reconciliation (for any community ?)
• threaded discussion groups can be added if desired
• bulletin boards can be added if desired

Cooperation desired:

• researchers who will use it who by their use will make it better
• volunteer editors and evaluators
• legal guidelines and relationships, e.g. with the media

Other:

• Domain names already secured: RaceMatters.org, RaceMatters.net, and ValuingDiversity.org.
• note a good example in paragraph 3 - "How Race Is Lived in America" from the New York Times
• http://www.Qkw.com/refer/racematters.htm - our current plan
• http://www.Qkw.com/racematters/systemplan.htm#legalissues - legal and marketing issues

Funding required for progress we expect to make in the next few months is minimally $9000. This will achieve major progress on all the items above which are in boldface. Here is how it would be spent. (scanner & OCR software will be property of TAMPU temporarily in possession of Carl House, all work will be done in a manner appropriate to being integrated into the TAMPU Resource Center, see Phase I report for how APL2000 was selected for this work)

Web hosting service & portal support ($100/month to APL2000, Inc.)	600
Fee to APL2000, Inc. to adapt existing software for our use	5000
Provision for expenses to Carl House in working with APL2000, Inc.	1400
Purchase of a scanner and OCR software	1100
Overhead to Lighthouse Ministries of Boca Raton (10%)	900
Total Phase II Costs	9000

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