by PATRICK LEJTENYI

No one will ever mistake Gadget for your typical suburban kid with a MySpace page. He looks every bit the homeless punk, with a brightly coloured mohawk, a face full of piercings and a cigarette lighter wedged through his right earlobe. But thanks to filmmaker Daniel Cross, himself no stranger to Gadget’s universe—he made 1997’s The Street: A Film With the Homeless and 2001’s Squeegee Punks in Traffic (S.P.I.T.)—the former street kid is bringing some tech savviness and networking opportunities to Canada’s homeless.

To be launched at the United Nations’ World Urban Forum in Vancouver next week, Homelessnation

.org is a site aimed specifically at street people in Canada’s three big cities. Consisting primarily of blogs, videos, forums, a resource list and e-mail hosting, the site isn’t unlike a MySpace for the homeless. “We get that comparison a lot,” Gadget says, sitting in the office of Eyesteel film on St-Laurent and Mont-Royal.

Sitting next to Gadget, Cross says he came up with the idea about a year ago, inspired mainly by the limits making a feature film presented. “We shot 400 hours worth of footage for S.P.I.T.,” he says. “I got tired of cutting out 398-and-a-half.”

Gadget is the site’s Montreal outreach guy, making the rounds of the homeless and telling them about the site and filming them to upload their stories and testimonials. Having lived on the street for five years and working in street-related places like needle exchanges and shelters, he’s a familiar face to many young homeless Montrealers, and, most importantly, can talk to them as an equal. “When I heard about this project from [S.P.I.T cameraman] Roach, I was like, ‘I get to be [a homeless activist] full-time? Yeah!’”

Gadget’s first assignment was last November, filming the homeless using the facilities at Montreal art collective Action Terroriste Socialement Acceptable’s (ATSA) annual tent city in Berri Square. “We wanted to go kerbside,” says Cross. “We didn’t want to just be locked into shelters.”

By approaching strangers rather than friends, Gadget says the inaugural filming was a “baptism of fire. We didn’t want to use the safety net of people I know.”

In general, he says, the subjects he films are generally open and forthcoming about their experiences, although it is easier to approach youths, who consider Gadget a peer and have better access to technology in the facilities they frequent. Homelessnation.org has donated computers to street-youth oriented institutions like Spectre de rue, the Refuge des jeunes and la Maison des Amis du Plateau. Cross says places for older homeless people are sorely lacking in their respective IT facilities, something that will translate to the demographic using Homelessnation.org.

“We want to bridge the digital divide,” says Cross. The site now has 418 members from across Canada, and the team hope to expand their presence in smaller cities like Quebec City, Ottawa and Thunder Bay.

In Vancouver, the pair plan on getting their voices heard by the diplomats and academics attending the conference. They’ll be setting up shop at Oppenheimer Park’s Speakers’ Corner in the notorious Downtown Eastside and “stream a live feed into the hallowed halls” of the conference, says Cross.

“We want to crack a few eggs,” he says.