Warren Hegg was so dedicated to the idea of training the technology-disadvantaged that he not only gave up a lucrative consulting business, he also routinely missed mortgage payments on his house. His passion has paid off, because the Digital Clubhouse Network (DCN) has garnered praise and support from big technology companies, the Smithsonian Institute, and political and philanthropic leaders nationwide, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

PNN reported on Hegg and the DCN last year, after the network started the Digitally Abled Producers Project.

The project brought together a wide variety of children, teens and young adults to learn multimedia skills, so they could produce short films, Web programs and CD-ROMs about their lives, their interests and their communities. In turn, these young people were urged to share their knowledge with others, so people who otherwise were on the wrong side of the digital divide could learn and benefit from new technologies.

The nonprofit DCN, which also has an office in New York's Silicon Alley district, does much more than this, however. Hegg, his coworkers and volunteers have trained thousands of people -- including the elderly, the disabled and those with life-threatening illnesses -- in the skills they need to take part in the digital technology revolution, the Chronicle reports.

A main emphasis is teaching people to make their own short, still-image films (generally about five minutes long and 150 megabytes in size) in digital formats, which can be used on Web sites and/or CD-ROMS. The multimedia equipment and software is donated by companies including Adobe, Apple, Cisco, Mitsubishi and wireless network device provider Proxim Inc.

Many of the short films, including a project by breast-cancer patients and another by World War II veterans, are in history collections managed by the Smithsonian Institute, the newspaper reports.

Hegg, 55, wants to do more. He used a recent visit by U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno to his Sunnyvale, Calif. headquarters to announce the "Cousins of the Clubhouse 2000 Project," intended to create up to 50 more digital clubhouses around the country (preferably at least one in each state), the newspaper reports.

"In my dream of dreams, you'd have one of these clubhouses in every town in the nation, where every senior, every at-risk youngster, every kid in a wheelchair, every woman struggling to master a 21st century job would have access -- and the network would be as ubiquitous as the Web itself," he told the newspaper.

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