Black Facts Online was created, conceived, programmed and is maintained by Inner-City Software of Dorchester, Massachusetts.  ICS began in 1993 as a one-man operation founded by Ken Granderson, who had been tinkering with computers since the late 70's. His interest in computers and technology helped keep him on a positive track through his teen years and became his ticket out of his hometown of Brooklyn, New York to go to M.I.T. in the Boston area. Several years after completing college, he turned his computer hobby into a business called Inner-City Software.

Inner-City Software started off by developing shareware programs that were sold on electronic bulletin board systems and CompuServe (this was before the Internet became popular). As Ken saw his programs travel around the world and began collecting checks from places as far away as Japan, Australia and South Africa (this was before the elections), he knew that the Information Age held more promise and opportunity for people of modest means like himself than anything that the world had ever seen before. Ken made a commitment that one of the company's objectives would be to help "bring communities of color into the Information Age."

Since that commitment was made in 1994, Inner-City Software initiated several projects during Black History Month to help bring its local communities of color closer to technology. In 1995, ICS took a book on Boston's Black history and transformed it into a multimedia kiosk application that will soon be available to the general public as a CD-ROM. 

In 1996, we brought together several other technology professionals of color in the Boston area and took our local neighborhoods online with a project called Inner City Access, which consists of World Wide Web sites for our local communities. In 1997, we took things to another level (global) with Black Facts Online, which serves people not only in our local area, but throughout the state, country and the entire world.

Besides the obvious technology component of our annual projects, the common concept behind our efforts is the focus on interest above access, content above hardware. We have seen too much energy put into getting people access to computers without giving them reasons to CARE that they have this access. We know of too many computers that people already have access to that are gathering dust because people have not been given enough good reasons to stretch out of their comfort zone and deal with this new, unfamiliar thing called a computer.

We also have seen, all of our lives, that once a person desires something, s/he will find all sorts of ways to gain access to it, but if the desire is not there, access is meaningless. Therefore, our efforts to bring technology to the 'hood do not focus on how cool the technology is, but rather aim to show how the technology can be used as a tool to help people become better at whatever is important to them, give them more options, and ultimately improve their lives. By focusing on things that people are already interested in (like ourselves, our culture and history) and presenting the computer as a vehicle to find out more and feel better about ourselves, we are confident that we can help present the computer in a new and different light.

Part of the vision of ICS is a society where Black people are just as connected with the technology that is taking over every aspect of our society as other ethnic groups of the human family. We believe that the Internet provides us a unique opportunity to bring this vision into reality, and Black Facts Online is a key component of this larger agenda. We want to establish Black Facts Online as the most useful online resource for Black information on the Internet, bar none.

We want Black Facts Online to be the first stop on your 'Net excursions whenever you need to find anything pertaining to people of color on the 'Net. We want schoolchildren to visit Black Facts Online to find out what happened in Black History today. We want adults to visit Black Facts Online every day to look up organizations, products and services that cater to communities of color. We want travelers to visit Black Facts Online to find out where to eat, where to go for various services, and frankly, where to stay away from, if traveling to a racially tense location.

As you can see, we have lots of ideas for what we can do with Black Facts Online over and above its initial offering as a historical search page. We believe that we can make it the most useful page in cyberspace for people of color, but we need your help to make it happen. In the spirit of Umoja, we recognize that a project of this magnitude cannot happen without getting lots of people involved. If you want to find out how YOU can help make Black Facts Online a reality, please visit the link below.