Published: Nov. 24, 1996 in the San Jose Mercury News

BY DAVID PLOTNIKOFF
Mercury News Staff Writer

Warren Hegg and Sean Griffin are running a little pyramid scheme. So far, they’ve kept it pretty hush-hush. If you want in, it really helps to know somebody who knows somebody. But if these two corporate consultants have their way, it’ll be coming to an elementary school, a senior center or a library near you before long. Ultimately, they’re going to target kids, your grandparents, and some of society’s most vulnerable members.

Instead of greed, this pyramid scheme is fueled by altruism. And instead of easy money, this one traffics in human memory.

While others fret and fulminate about the digital revolution leaving behind the have-nots, know-nots and want-nots, the Digital Clubhouse Network is quietly training hundreds of non-wired citizens, giving them free passage into the world of multimedia computing. Getting the Pilgrims to take mouse in hand for the first time is easy. They’re working with the most compelling content of all – their own life stories.

On the surface, the Clubhouse, a private non-profit group, is in the moviemaking business. Hegg, Griffin and their constantly fluctuating corps of volunteers teach people how to make their own little digital movies – from love letters, newspaper clippings, tape recordings, heirloom photos and just about anything else the winds of time have laid at their feet.

The hook, though, comes later, after the club members have had their first taste of the storyteller’s art. Every freshly minted multimedia producer is, in turn, obligated to teach two others. And every institution touched by the Clubhouse is considered a potential site for another Clubhouse operation.

In a sense, the Clubhouse is a benign virus that’s been incubating for 10 months in the back of a quit office park near Great America in Santa Clara, fed by the largess of a dozen of the valley’s largest high-tech companies.

“It’s like cyberspace, in that I goes on indefinitely,” says Hegg, the program’s executive director and principal evangelist. Hegg, who was the head of international planning for the renowned SRI think-tank in Menlo Park before he became a freelance consultant six years ago, says the club relies on a personal networking model not unlike that used by the likes of Mary Kay and Amway. “If you have six friends, and they have six friends, you have a network,” he says. “We’ve worked closely with the schools, with senior organizations an with other groups, but I also evangelize one-on-one. I was in Lucky, standing in the checkout line and struck up a conversation with a man. I asked him, “How would you like to put your life story on a CD-ROM? We could teach you how to do it. And he showed up. It works like that sometimes.”

In the few months the Clubhouse has been open for business, more than 700 people – a balanced mix of seniors, school kids, educators, women and the disabled – have been through the week-long program at the Clubhouse’s small (35-computer) test facility. The original program, dubbed “Producing the Producers.” Uses an informal curriculum based on a “cookbook” developed by Joe Lambert, founder of the San Francisco Digital Media Center. Participants learn how to block out their movies on storyboards, how to import source material and how to author the 150-megabyte, five-minute productions using four industry-standard multimedia applications.

In September, a second program, called “Cousins of the Clubhouse,” launched. The first flight involved 50 students culled from 10 Santa Clara County schools (mostly elementary), plus an equal number of senior citizens, often the students’ own grandparents. “It is amazing what gets passed back and forth when they’re working on the keyboard together,” says Hegg. “You’ll hear two things out of the grandparents: “I didn’t know the kids cared this much about these things that happened so long ago, but they do.’ And, “These kids are terribly mis-informed. They only know what they’ve seen on TV. I have an obligation to tell them how it really was – because I was there.”

The next step for the Digital Clubhouse will be to take the stories to the Net. They’re already working Web-authoring tools into the mix, and in January, Hegg and Griffin will launch a Net-training program called “Webucation” that will pull in 60 kids, teachers, and parents a day for the rest of the school year. The bigger goal, once Hegg has proven that a stand-alone Clubhouse is a viable model, is to replicate it around the country and seed “Cousins” programs in school computer labs throughout the valley. (Hegg figures it will cost about $25,000 a year to run a stand alone Clubhouse, although he and Griffin have made it though their first 10 months on just a fraction of that.)

In addition to expanding the Clubhouse “network” from one sit to many, Hegg also wants to build alliances with show-business heavies, partnerships that can leverage and protect whatever stories the Clubhouse generates. Toward that end, he’s talking with Time Warner about a deal whereby Clubhouse members would have access to that company’s vast archive of text, photos and sound. In exchange, Time Warner would be allowed to carry some stories on its Pathfinder Web site. He’s also talking with the William Morris Agency about a blanket representation deal that would protect Clubhouse members whose stories have the potential for commercial release.

Hegg may wheel and deal with the Hollywood crowd when they have something of value to offer his Clubhouse members, but he doesn’t mince words when it comes to what the movie industry has done to the art of storytelling: “I love movies. Movies changed my life. But now I walk through the video store and I scan the shelves and I see millions and millions of dollars spent on . . . crud.” With the Clubhouse, “maybe the production values aren’t up to Steven Spielberg levels, but there’s integrity to the stories. When I hear someone telling their own story – it’s real, it’s serious. So I’m here for the stories.”

If you can’t make it to the premiere, you can still dial into the new Clubhouse Web site, slated to open for business Thanksgiving Day. There you’ll find a plentitude of background information on the Clubhouse programs, plus 10 stories specially re-formatted for the Web.