I met Steve online when he was at Apple and had been using our gopher server. He got me to speak at “Ties that Bind” and we met several times when he was in NZ or Australia.

My family were lucky to have Steve visit us at home on one trip, and on another, he and Nancy were holidaying in NZ. It was always a great joy to spend time with them both.

I was googling tonight to read that quiet steady voice, describing a world far from mine, and with a view wider than I can see. Now I’m at a loss for words.

To Nancy and family we send our love. May God bless you all.

Robin and Richard

I never spent as much time talking with Steve as I wanted to.. whenever we had contact I felt that I wanted more… to listen to him more and talk with him more. I felt an affinity with him as we were both librarians for whom moving into the world of the internet was a way of expanding one’s librarian identity rather than abandoning it. The last time I saw him was just after his offline year. He sent emails to me every now and then.. usually an offlist exchange in response to some onlist debate or discussion.

For me, in our world of ICTs for development, andsocial change, Steve practiced what I admired most: a way of thinking and doing that was non-ideological but value based… critical but pragmatic.. with the values not being about abstract things.. but about how people’s daily lives were affected. Often when people talk about community networking I get kind of annoyed because the term community is used in a way that is so rarified and political and generalised that any sense of the people, individuals, families, businesses, organisations, that make up communities is lost.

Steve never did that. For him community and community networking was about real people doing real things. I think it is for this reason that so many people in our network (Association for Progressive Communications), particularly in Latin America, held Steve in such high regard.

To Steve’s family… no one can really help you get through this process of getting used to Steve’s absence, but it is good to read that you value these comments. This use of the internet by so many different people to share their experiences and memories of Steve is exactly the kind of human focused use of technology that he believed in.

Steve and I were going to be at the same meeting in Italy later this month (July2008)…. sadly he will not be there, and his loss will be felt in more ways than one.

Anriette Esterhuysen

I remember an ASIS meeting in New Mexico many years ago. In addition to some great programs, a few of us, including Steve, ended up visiting a vineyard. I don’t remember the wine but I do remember Steve talking about the percentage of households in New Mexico without telephones and what the possibilities for them might be. He was always thinking, always patient, always connecting people.

My thoughts are with Steve’s family. Thank you for sharing him with so many of us.

I didn’t get all the speakers; in a couple of cases I was just kind of overtaken by the stories and forgot to take pictures.

Mike Ward

Carl Fleischhauer

Sujet: [Telecentros] Tributo a Steve Cisler
Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:19:47 -0500
De: Maria de Lourdes Acosta Cruz
Répondre à :: lacosta@chasquinet.org, Telecentros de América Latina y el Caribe
Organisation: Fundacion ChasquiNet
Pour :: Telecentros de América Latina y el Caribe

Estimad@s amig@s de somos@telecentros:

Hemos preparado un espacio dedicado a Steve Cisler dentro de la página
Web de somos@telecentros (www.tele-centros.org). Hemos recopilado
algunos de los mensajes que él compartió con la Red a través de nuestra
lista de intercambio; además de organizar y socializar todos nuestros
mensajes escritos por su despedida. Un segmento también incluye los
documentos compartidos por Steve en el centro de recursos.

L@s invitamos a incluir más aportes, en caso de tenerlos, en este
espacio dedicado a Steve, como un tributo al amigo.

Un abrazo.

Lula

–
María de Lourdes Acosta Cruz
Fundación ChasquiNet
Comunicación Social
lacosta@chasquinet.org

Dear Steve,

I am going to miss you in the quiet and subtle ways that will make certain memories sweeter and more painful at the same time.

I know “missing” is such a selfish response to your death: I would like to have you around as my friend and colleague for many more years, for I have learned from you a lot since we met in 1991 and have enjoyed your company immensely all these years. It is my loss, and that’s what we complain about when we miss you.

You were a genuinely good human being, and I am so glad that we were able to reconnect and work together for the better part of the last two years. My learning from you continued, and I felt that the bonds of our friendship were not strained by working together but were, in fact, strengthened as we thought about the challenges involved in building online communities and the roles (if any, you would say) for information technology in developing countries.
I have to thank you for introducing me to the Internet. You were the first person I met at Apple who knew anything about the Internet in the early 1990s, and I recall being in awe as you showed me some of the first web pages on meteorology and quite a few others that I immediately turned around and used in my presentations about the educational and learning potential of computers and the Internet. Of course, it was not directly from you but from others that I later learned that you had been instrumental in supporting the work of an Australian hacker (the details here were hazy) who created the first TCP/IP stack for the Mac, at a time when the company had officially declared that the Internet didn’t matter and that the future belonged to Apple OneWorld, a competitor to AOL that quickly went kaput! So on behalf of all Mac users who now use the Internet on a daily basis, thank you!

You launched the Apple Library of Tomorrow program and conducted as well as supported a wide range of projects in and with what was your original professional group: libraries and librarians. You also served on the board of the Internet Society, and organized the Community Networks conferences while at Apple that shaped many efforts around the world. Your personal interest in Native American peoples and cultures extended to your support of work dedicated to the preservation of local languages. For example, you introduced me to the person in Hawai’i whom you had backed with a small research grant as he developed the first font and bilingual dictionary for the Mac so that speakers and writers of the Hawaian language could use this new technology to preserve their history and traditions.

There is another story that links your past work at Apple to the future of an entire industry, and that concerns wireless technology. I recall accompanying you to the roof of Building One in Infinite Loop to check out the antennas that your friend Dwayne Hendricks had set up for a wireless network that covered multiple points in the Bay Area. Later you invited me to a meeting with a person from Motorola who was working with you to lobby congress to free up radio spectrum that could be used for wireless connectivity by computers. A few years later this became a reality as the 802.11b standard was made public, and as the saying goes, the rest is history. Even when you were staying at the hospital I knew you were not losing your marbles because you had scouted out what parts of the hospital had good WiFi reception and which ones didn’t. A couple of days before you died, when I visited while you were having dialysis, you asked the doctor if it would be OK for Nancy to take you in a wheelchair to a spot in the hospital where you could check your email!

Well, you didn’t really like being in the hospital, even if as you said the doctors and the nurses were nice and they provided you with good service. You liked the fresh air, being in your garden, tending to your tomatoes. I am glad I had a chance to read you Neruda’s “Ode to the Tomato” your last Monday morning, for as I said in the inscription of the book of his poems I gave you, you did understand the critical importance of good tomatoes and did your best to cultivate them every year. I do thank you for the many tomatoes and loaves of bread and bottles of wine you have shared with us over the years.
I admired your ability to travel the world widely, make deep friendships wherever you went, and sustain them over the years. You’ve shared with me some of your friends in Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, and other countries. Your experiences were well recorded in your travelogues, the reports you would write and share on the web. I still recall the time you showed me the one you did for a trip to Ecuador in the early 1990s, where you had figured out how to include photos you had taken with one of the first Apple QuickTake digital cameras. You were a great writer and a wonderful storyteller, and given your powers of observation and analysis, your articles, reports, travelogues, blog entries, and so on always left me with a deeper appreciation of the places and the peoples you had encountered. It can be said of a lot of people that they travel widely, but of only a few that they traveled well and you are definitely in this select group.

As early as 1988 you published an article on “Computer-supported cooperative work and groupware,” and most recently you worked with Geof Bowker and Steve Jackson to write a report on Africa Knowledge Infrastructures. Your experiences in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo left a deep impression on you, and I enjoyed walking into your office to hear soft African music in the background playing on your computer.

And so you live on, both on the electronic web and in the human network of friends you built throughout your life, right up to the very end. Many of the nurses and doctors who met you at Kaiser now have their own Steve Cisler stories to share.

We will continue to be pleasantly surprised to find traces of you in places real and virtual, and through people we would not expect to. We will wish you were there to share your take on the world and a laugh at some of the strange things going on. We will want to make plans to get together later to share a meal and drink good wines. We will have many fond memories of your friendship and the times spent working and living together. We will miss you then as much as we do now.

Rest in peace.

Pedro

Lessons from a Master Librarian (10 minute Eulogy/podcast)
http://lone-eagles.com/cislermempodcast.mp3

and the RTF text at http://lone-eagles.com/cislermem.rtf (has to be mac readable, right?)

My cislerianthemes blog posting is http://lone-eagles.com/cislerianthemes3.rtf and has newly added links to Steve’s blog archives and other relevant bits.

Frank Odasz

In the fall of 2003 I had the opportunity to travel through Jordan with Steve, Richard Civille, Michael Gurstein, and Mona Affifi visiting community technology centers in an advisory capacity for the Ministry of Information. I’ve recently pulled out some of the photos from the trip with Steve and posted them at: http://public.fotki.com/petermiller/stevecislerinjordan/.

What the photos show, I’m sure you can see most vividly, is a man both knowledgeable and at ease, genuinely listening and interested in the views, sentiments, and experience of his colleagues and the full range of those involved with CTCs there — end users, staff, administrators, experts, Ministry and other governmental officials influencing the course of community technology. Steve’s quiet calmness, his collegiality, his genuine interest in others were among his more remarkable qualities.

Richard Civille has contributed some of his own photos of the trip with Steve that highlight that remarkable landscapes and a couple of Steve from Richard Lowenberg taken in Colorado Springs. I’ll be pleased to post more or links to others that some of you may have. Professionally and personally, I feel blessed to have known Steve.