SiteScape® Helps Low-Income Youth Bridge Digital Divide

A Announces $20,000 In-Kind Donation to International Education Non-Profit

Maynard, Mass. (November 25, 2002): SiteScape®, a leading provider of Web-based collaboration software and services, today announced an in-kind donation of more than $20,000 in SiteScape Enterprise Forum collaboration software to Global Education Partnership (G.E.P.), an international non-government organization (NGO) focused on fostering self-reliance among low-income youth and communities around the world.  The donation will be used to strengthen the links between students and instructors from G.E.P.’s divisions in the United States, Kenya, Tanzania, Guatemala and Indonesia by providing a platform for better communication and project collaboration.

G.E.P. expects to break down organizational and country boundaries by giving "public visibility" of activities and information to 1,250 employees, students, and partners spread between the five locations. SiteScape Forum collaboration software will be used to launch G.E.P.’s organization-wide intranet. G.E.P.’s intranet was conceived to support internal communities of students, instructors and collaborative partners using discussion, calendaring and workflow forums. One of the first tasks will be to build a "best practices" area in which instructors can discuss effective teaching practices.  In addition, the G.E.P. Board of Directors will use Forum to discuss important board matters between meetings and to communicate easily and rapidly with people in the field.

G.E.P. also plans to use SiteScape Forum in the classroom to allow student to communicate more easily with one another; for example, Real World Exchange is a recurring project in which students develop questionnaires on topics like World Cup soccer practices for distribution to students in other countries to learn how they live, work and play.  In the past, disseminating the questionnaires and collecting the information has been problematic, a burden that will be eliminated using SiteScape Forum’s polling feature.

According to Jason Wares, Director of Program Development at G.E.P., "The communities we serve are made richer through the wider variety of intellectual assets they can receive from locations across the world using SiteScape’s platform. Sitescape Forum gives our employees more resources to work with and our partners better and easier access to information, which consequently improves the quality of our programs."

Timothy P. Butler, SiteScape President and CEO, added, "SiteScape has a wide variety of educational customers--corporate, higher education, non-profit--using SiteScape Enterprise Forum to facilitate the learning process. We are pleased to be in a position where we can donate software and services to such a worthy cause as the Global Education Program."

About Global Education Partnership (G.E.P.)

G.E.P. is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization with divisions in the United States (Oakland, California), Kenya, Guatemala, Tanzania and Indonesia. The mission of Global Education Partnership is "to provide access to educational resources that increase the capacity of young people to become employable and self-reliant in today's global marketplace." The underlying philosophy of empowerment that permeates the programs that G.E.P. offers in low-income communities in the U.S. and in developing countries is that sustainable development - where people can access and then re-create opportunities to both excel personally and improve their communities - is only possible if the people that ultimately benefit from a program are viewed not as recipients of the program, but as participants in designing and implementing a program that suit their needs.

About SiteScape®

SiteScape, Inc. produces Web-based collaboration software and services that provide immediate return on investment. SiteScape Enterprise Forum and WebWorkZone, a hosted collaboration service, allow employees, customers, business partners and suppliers to easily communicate and share information in a secure, Web-based environment. SiteScape products facilitate business processes such as knowledge management, project management, communities of practice, workflow and e-learning. The company has numerous Fortune 500 and Global 2000 customers, clustered in a wide variety of industries, including energy, construction, high tech, automotive, trade associations, education, health care, legal, and government. For more information about SiteScape, visit http://www.sitescape.com.

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