Theorizing Community Organizations on the Web

Article by Josef Sorett

Our goal in the first issue of THAT was to introduce the reader to the Hiphop Archive’s first Web-based research project, and to this end you met the Zone project staff and we gave you a small taste of our earliest findings. In this brief article you will gain entrance into some of the inner workings of the mind of the Zone, what we have called Theorizing Community Organizations on the Web.

After some preliminary research, we were encouraged by the overwhelming Web presence of Hiphop organizing, yet there was consensus on the challenge of drawing boundaries and definitions for each search. With the hopes of finding a method to the madness, our staff gathered together to ask pressing questions, just a few of the most fundamental being: What does it mean to be a community organization on the Web? How do we most effectively use search engines? What is the relationship between Internet communities and organizations serving specific physical localities? You can imagine some of the complications.

Breaking from the lab, the Zone researchers resumed the research over the past few months with the goal of exhausting the category in their respective zone. With some working definitions framed, we created several categories to focus our efforts and came up with the following types of data that helped to clarify our research efforts. We identified six basic types of organizations that include Hiphop and exist to serve and empower specific communities:

• Organizations that have a Hiphop component (e.g., a Hiphop program at a local Urban League or community center)
  
  
• Organizations that are dedicated solely to Hiphop (e.g., KRS-ONE’s Temple of Hiphop)
  
  
• A Hiphop for-profit entity that has a service component (e.g., Bad Boy’s Daddy's House)
  
  
• A general for-profit that has a Hiphop component (e.g., beverage corporations and media conglomerates)
  
  
• Cyber organization that has Hiphop component (e.g., blackelectorate.com)
  
  
• Cyber organization dedicated to Hiphop (e.g., www.africanhiphop.com)

Once we established these categories, organizations that focus on various themes such as youth development, health, the arts, spirituality, and so on were placed into separate sub-categories. Here are some samples of our results from each of the Zones.*

1. Atlanta - Hip Hop 4 Humanity
      http://www.sosodef.net/yaheard.html
2. Boston - Prophecy Communications
      http://www.prophecycommunications.com
3. Los Angeles - Asian Hip-Hop Summit
      http://www.asianhiphopsummit.com
4. Miami - Cultural Development Group
      http://www.cdgfl.org/tindex.html
5. New York City - Nkiru Center
      http://www.nkirucenter.org

* Our complete findings were compiled into a packet that is available at http://www.hiphoparchive.org/zones/. A hardcopy of this information was distributed at the Hiphop Community Activism and Education Roundtable on September 28, 2002.

Contact: Josef Sorett sorett@hiphoparchive.org