Ensuring more active participation by black Americans in STEM fields is a matter of guaranteeing people a place at the table, as Morgan State University math education professor Roni Ellington puts it.

Roughly one in three households in the U.S. earning less than $25,000 each year have broadband Internet access, according to this infographic from Online Degree Programs titled “The Internet Access Gap in Education.” View the infographic here. Or from Online Degree Programs here. And, as it turns out, in Baltimore, 35 percent of households earn less [...]

Mission: Launch, a social enterprise startup founded last summer to help ex-offenders with reentry, was one of six projects chosen for the first crowdfunding class on girltank, a crowdfunding website for female social entrepreneurs worldwide.

Members of the North Baltimore Broad Initiative pleaded their case for wanting better broadband options to Comcast and Verizon representatives the evening of March 14. Their efforts, however, appear futile. Said Tad Bishop, Verizon’s vice president of governmental affairs, “At this time we’ve not been extending any [FiOS] franchises anywhere in the country,” reports North [...]

Big telecommunications companies — Comcast, Verizon and others — are “not in the business of making sure that everybody has reasonably priced Internet access,” says national academic Susan Crawford. It’s a problem that’s close to the chest here. As Technically Baltimore reported, a coalition of neighborhoods organized as the North Baltimore Broadband Initiative have already held one [...]

Efforts presently underway in Baltimore to close the digital divide include establishing free WiFi hotspots inside the city’s historic public markets and laying more fiber cable downtown. Generally, talk of mitigating cities’ digital divides is often coded language for thinking up ways to extend broadband Internet and services to low-income neighborhoods still populated predominantly by [...]

This is Technically Baltimore’s One Big Idea. We’d like to use this space to allow technologists, community organizers, activists and other thought leaders in Baltimore city propose one idea for making this city a better place to live and work. Since 1998, Lance Lucas has been working to bring computer education — in the form of certification [...]

As Baltimore city’s CIO Chris Tonjes told the crowd at December’s Baltimore TechBreakfast, he’s looking to change up some of the tenets of the mission of the Mayor’s Office of Information Technology. Part of his proposed shift is to have MOIT focus more on greater public engagement and improving digital access across the city, as [...]