Friday, June 15, 2007 was a very special day for community in Chicago and for Chicago community media. The Benton Foundation and the Community Media Workshop convened a Community Media Summit with the launch of the Benton Media Scan - What's Going on in Community Media a report by Fred Johnson of the University of Massachusetts, Boston with Karen Menichelli, Benton Foundation.

Julia Stasch, Chair of Mayor Daley's Advisory Council on Closing the Digital Divide released it's official report at the summit - the Chicago Report on Digital Excellence.

Third time's the charm! The International Summit for Community Wireless Networks is a few days away. We look forward to seeing you there.

SEO and the NPO: Grassroots.org has launched a toolkit for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for non-profits - spread the word.

Civic Garden: The notion of the Civic Garden we've been promoting locally in Chicago (as an evolution of the Minneapolis' "Walled Garden") is being taken up in Minneapolis.

I can report back from quite a succesful summit put together by our very own Sascha Meinrath of CUWiN. This was the second such summit convened by Sascha. I dutifully served as requested on two panel sessions that we gladly opened to a general discussion in short order. I spoke more from a frame of community networking than anything else, as my time is mostly spent considering these issue in Illinois context, and organizing with others in Illinois to promote community networking principles and dialogue around them. I was pleased to have others in the community networking and technology sectors present to deepen the points I was most committed to, especially the Ohio gang: Bill Callahan and Angela Stuber. As my experience at the conference was fairly narrow I'd rather open it up to the several other AFCN folk to offer their comments, and for Sascha to summarize his own summit, along with links and references to how you can partake of the proceedings after the fact….