SC26’s Long Thread: Stitching Chicago’s Neighborhoods Into a Lasting Network

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Dwayne Douglas (left), chief executive officer of QUILT Corporation, and Dylan Jacob (right), SC26 SCinet Chair and a Networking Services group lead at the DOE’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet). 

The doctor appointment took Rosemary three and a half hours. After arranging the ride, getting everything in order, and waiting in the waiting room, she spent about 15 minutes with the doctor to review the labs provided the week before. After the ride home, she shared her frustration with her nephew, Dwayne Douglas, whose background is in IT and telecom. He offered what seemed like an obvious fix: “You could just do a telehealth visit,” he recalls. “And she said to me, ‘What is that?’” 

After Douglas explained that his aunt could see her doctor online and have him explain the lab results via video conferencing, he learned she did not have a computer or Internet. As someone steeped in IT, he was surprised by Rosemary’s response: “I don’t have Internet, and what do I need any of that for?”

Today, Douglas is the chief executive officer of QUILT Corporation, a Chicago-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit he founded to help bridge not just the digital divide, but the educational, economic, and social barriers that often accompany it. QUILT was born from a simple realization: opportunity increasingly depends on technology, yet too many people and communities remain disconnected from its benefits. This year, QUILT is partnering with the SC conference’s SCinet. SCinet is the volunteer organization that builds the high-bandwidth, low-latency network serving the entire SC Conference, from attendees and the technical program to an exhibition floor with hundreds of exhibitors, including government agencies, academia, and industry. 

SCinet is typically known as a blazing-fast network that showcases experimental networking and emerging technologies. The network is built roughly one month before the conference, then taken down the weekend the conference ends. This year, Douglas and SC26 SCinet Chair Dylan Jacob are using the conference’s unique resources to help establish the foundation for a network and workforce pathway in Chicago intended to continue developing long after the conference leaves McCormick Place.

Douglas grew up in neighborhoods like his Aunt Rosemary’s before his ambitions sent him elsewhere. 

“I am a product of those environments,” he says. 

After visiting his aunt, Douglas drove back to the suburbs, where he says he took Internet access for granted, and started digging into this technology gap. It was the first time he encountered the term “digital divide.” 

“It was beyond my thought or belief or imagination that people were still not connected to the Internet,” Douglas admits.

That realization led Douglas, who grew up in Chicago, to redirect his decades of experience in technology and telecommunications toward addressing barriers that were too often overlooked. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020, the consequences of digital exclusion became impossible to ignore.

“They could not connect the kids to the schools,” Douglas explains. “They could not send them devices, access points, or hotspots and have them actually work. It is like going to a football game and trying to pull up your tickets. You can’t get them, because you have 64,000 people hitting the same tower.”

The main objective, Douglas says, is to empower communities and help change the socioeconomic conditions that limit opportunities.

“I can give someone a device, but who really cares if you have a device or Internet access if they are not engaging with it for self-empowerment?” he says. “If they are just consuming, just give them a television.” He adds that the effort is about helping people recognize how technology can improve their everyday lives, much like essential utilities such as water and electricity. The organization’s name also reflects the approach Douglas chose to address the problem.

“We are quilting organizations together to build agency and the pathway needed to get individuals into those empowering situations,” Douglas says. 

For Douglas, the work is personal. He understands that communities are not simply places where problems need solving. They are home to families, local leaders, organizations, and untapped potential. QUILT begins by listening and working alongside trusted community partners, bringing together resources, relationships, and opportunities that might otherwise never reach the people who need them.

Sometimes, solving challenges means forging new paths. Douglas discovered that partnerships and good intentions could only go so far when communities lacked reliable connectivity. That challenge led him to establish NODE Networks, a separate telecommunications company focused on addressing infrastructure barriers and expanding connectivity opportunities. NODE subsequently became an Eligible Telecommunications Carrier in Illinois. It was a practical response to a difficult reality: communities cannot fully participate in the digital economy if the infrastructure needed to connect them remains out of reach.

“I can’t put a connectivity program in order if I can’t connect,” he says.

Dwayne Douglas (center) talks with visitors at a QUILT and NODE display. 

The SCinet Connection

The road to partnering with SCinet ran through St. Louis, where Jacob was working on SC25. Jacob is a Networking Services group lead for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s dedicated high-performance network for scientific research, Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), and has been a SCinet volunteer for 15 years. Another SC volunteer, Tom Costello, introduced a proposal through SCinet’s Network Research Exhibition, which showed a connectivity experiment linking the show floor to a node out in the community that happened to belong to QUILT. 

“And that is where I met Dwayne,” Jacob says.

SC26 SCinet Chair Dylan Jacob speaks at SC25 in St. Louis.

Jacob was already looking for a community engagement project, which is one of SCinet’s pillars. In recent years, the organization launched CommUNITY, a program that allows underserved community members to engage with SCinet and help build the network. 

“I had already spoken with Kevin Hayden, the general chair, several times about SC26,” says Jacob, “and one thing we talked about each time was being able to leave something behind once the conference moves on. This seems like it was meant to happen.”

As SC26 comes to Chicago, SCinet volunteers are working with QUILT to carry that commitment forward through THREAD, a proposed community-based research and learning network connecting neighborhood organizations, schools, and housing communities with advanced technology infrastructure.

For Douglas, the significance goes far beyond connecting buildings. It is about a young person in North Lawndale, Austin, Woodlawn, or South Shore having an opportunity to experience the same advanced technologies being developed in universities, research laboratories, and technology companies. It is about transforming neighborhoods from places where technology is simply consumed into places where people can learn, contribute, innovate, and build their futures.

Douglas describes THREAD as “a community-grade, research-level fabric.” 

For his part, Douglas is assembling the physical layer, partnering with Cook County and negotiating with local fiber providers, including Zayo, ICN, and Crosstown Fiber, as well as ComEd, the electric utility, for access to infrastructure already running through these neighborhoods.

“Our whole effort is not to dig,” he says. “We want to use existing infrastructure that’s already in the community, underutilized.” 

Continuing the Vision

Two cornerstone partners in QUILT’s work are Arista Networks and QTS Data Centers. QTS has provided critical data center space and infrastructure, while Arista, an SC26 SCinet Diamond Contributor and longtime SC exhibitor, has contributed networking equipment to help establish the technical foundation for THREAD. Their support demonstrates how established technology companies can bring meaningful resources to communities historically excluded from advanced technology opportunities. The initiative also benefits from individual professional volunteers.

SCinet will do the assessment and design work for the citywide network. Each SCinet chair has roughly a year, so Jacob and Douglas looked for what would deliver “the most bang for the buck,” which led to site assessments at locations representative of QUILT’s target neighborhoods. Each assessment produced findings and a recommended design. 

“By doing that with different types of sites, we basically created a model that can be replicated throughout the Chicago area,” Jacob says. 

These assessments also serve as training opportunities for the volunteers who work on them, he adds: “There is a bit of an art to doing site assessments. It is a process and an art to doing it right.”

The resulting sites could also support N’SPIRE Centers that QUILT is developing across Chicago. These are envisioned as neighborhood spaces where residents can engage in empowerment training and enter skill pathways wherever they fit, from digital literacy and everyday technology skills to certification programs in fiber splicing, networking, and cybersecurity.

“We don’t tell you where you can get in or fit in,” Douglas says. “You get in and fit in where you choose to, and we meet you at that level and move you through it.”

Jacob says he is measuring success by the motion created through the engagement and hopes SCinet is helping pave the way for long-term impact by providing this foundational network. 

“When I look at SCinet’s role here, it is an enabler,” Jacob says. The aim is to help QUILT gain “the momentum that it needs to continue building out this fabric after the conference has gone.”

Douglas sees the partnership as a way to help underserved Chicagoans in much the same way. 

“For us, it is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to connect Chicago communities to the advanced technology, the research, the infrastructure, and the workforce ecosystem being built around them,” he says. “QUILT’s role in this is to make sure communities are not just spectators of that future. They become participants in it.”

“The conference comes to McCormick Place for one week,” he adds. “And our question is, ‘What remains in Chicago communities after it leaves?’”

SC26 and SCinet