On the morning of Saturday, May 8, 2004, members of the IEEE Oakland East Bay (OEB) Communications Society (ComSoc) and UC Berkeley student chapter gathered at the Prescott-Joseph Community Center in West Oakland to celebrate the completion of the Bridging the Digital Divide (BDD) project with the DUSTY staff, volunteers, and students.

The project had its genesis over a year ago, when the OEB ComSoc chapter as part of its Education and Community outreach decided to sponsor and fund a project that would enable EE students to complement their classroom learning with hands-on experience bringing computer and networking technology to underserved schools and community groups in the local area. The project was enthusiastically received by undergraduate students of the IEEE chapter at UC Berkeley . After an extensive search among local school administrations and community groups, the BDD project team decided to work with DUSTY.

DUSTY (Digital Underground Story Telling for Youth) is an after-school literacy and technology program in West Oakland for elementary and middle-school kids. Kids come to DUSTY generally from 3:00 until 6:00. They have snacks; engage in activities geared toward exercising reading and writing skills, character and community building, creative expression, and technology skill development; and get help with homework. The central semester-long project at DUSTY is a “Digital Story”, a kind of movie-making process that begins with a written story and evolves into a multi-media video integrating various kinds of imagery, music, text and sound. The students work on computers to create their own Digital Stories, using Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe Premiere, and iMovie. At the end of each semester, the students' stories are shown at the Parkway Theatre in downtown Oakland.

DUSTY is a joint project developed by the Prescott-Joseph Center for Community Enhancement and the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley and involves an entire community of people: professors, undergrads, grad students and alumni from UC Berkeley, Oakland community members, parents and kids.

The IEEE students, under the guidance of IEEE OEB ComSoc members, contributed to the DUSTY community by enhancing the networking in the video lab and upgrading video capturing and editing platforms. The networking improvements included replacement of hubs with managed switches, labeling and organization of network connections, partitioning into VLANs, and configuration of firewall security. The platform upgrades included additional local memory for editing performance and network storage for backup. The successful completion of the project provided a practical learning experience for the EE students and enhanced network performance for the DUSTY program.

The BDD project involved a number of groups coming together in a joint effort at both learning and community empowerment.