1997
Annual Report
Consulting to Other Organizations
In 1997 CCSI was retained by two different organizations to assist them in carrying out projects in
post-Soviet societies. We assisted the New York-based National Council on Economic Education
with a project in Ukraine, focused on training secondary and college-level educators in new
methods of teaching economics [Note]. CCSI’s work involved: (a) demonstrating the basics of e-mail and
Internet access at a teacher training workshop on the outskirts of Kyiv (Ukraine), (b) arranging e-
mail services in Ukraine for 20-30 of the teachers in the program; (c) designing the NCEE’s
EconomicsInternational Web site; and (d) writing and publishing a book, both in English and in
Russian, titled Internet Resources for Economic Educators. CCSI accomplished all of these goals
at a cost approximately 20% below the budget we submitted to NCEE.
Ekaterinburg, Russia, was the venue of the fourth annual New Media for a New World
conference. This conference, intended to promote the development of online journalism in Russia,
brought together more than 150 Russian journalists and a small group of American experts for
three days in this major industrial center of the Urals region. Held in mid-October, the conference
was funded by the Media Development Project of USAID, the Open Society Institute of Russia,
and the Knight Ridder Foundation. CCSI worked with Kevin Woodward, producer of the Mercury
Center (online edition of the San Jose Mercury News), the Center for War, Peace and the
News Media in New York, the National Press Institute in Moscow, and Urals State University
in Ekaterinburg, to organize American participation in the conference. This included
representatives of Knight-Ridder, MSNBC, Studio Archetype, Sidana Systems, the University of
Florida’s Interactive Media Lab—and CCSI. It was a strong team and, by general agreement
among those who had attended previous others, the most successful of all four New Media for a
New World conferences—since the first held in Moscow in 1994.
As part of our work on the New Media for a New World project, CCSI also produced a
third edition of our Russian-language publication Internet dlya Zhurnalistov (“The Internet
for Journalists”). This was distributed to all conference participants and was a very popular
resource. Funds managed by CCSI for the conference amounted to more than $39,000, of which
10% represented income to CCSI for our administrative and publishing services.
Note:
The project, which involves other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, is funded by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement of the U.S. Department of Education.