Cruz One to the Rescue: Technical Support
Cruz One is a volunteer organization which provides technical support to our Santa Cruz County community during crisis such as the Covid-19 or Coronavirus outbreak. Our goal is to facilitate remote access for students and workers in an effort to minimize the impact of mandated quarantines.
Our first priority is to enable our educational system to provide remote based learning. This includes technology support for our K-12 schools and their teachers and students, such as enabling video based training.
Our second priority is to enable our community to work remotely. Many small businesses in our community are not equipped to transition and support remote work.
All groups face various challenges in our region ranging from lack of sufficient internet connections, lack of cell phone coverage, and other technology issues.
We think we’ve built a repeatable model, if you want to know more about how we did it, you can read more.
In these unprecedented times, business leaders in the tech sector from Santa Cruz and beyond are mobilizing their expertise. In doing so, they are weaponizing social networks and other Silicon Valley-built tools for good.
“Governments and nonprofits are good for taking care of business as usual,” Neklason says, “but COVID-19 is requiring more of a wartime effort, where the community itself is mobilized. Chris Miller, founder and CEO of the web-development company Launch Brigade and business consultancy Cloud Brigade is leading the charge with his rapid development of Cruz One as a digital resource. Together with Chris Frost, director of technology and infrastructure at Cruzio Internet, CTO Chris Neklason, and the support of Zoom product manager Esther Yoon, Cruz One materialized to coordinate internet, virtual learning, training, and support for education.