wrythings

The long awaited report from the Mayor’s Advisory Council on Closing the Digital Divide was released Friday June 15th at the Community Media Summit convened by the Benton Foundation and the Community Media Workshop under the title The City that NetWorks: Transforming Society and Economy Through Digital Excellence.

Digital Excellence is both means and end for Chicago as the City of Excellence. The Chicago Digital Access Alliance (CDAA) had a large hand in bringing this vision into the public sphere. We’ll turn a critical eye to the details of the report, as is our duty, but for now we celebrate it’s release and the vision that has been established, and we offer our deepest gratitude to Julia M. Stasch for her service to our city in chairing the Mayor’s Advisory Council and shepherding this visionary and historical document.

Stay tuned for analysis and response.

While at NetSquared Y2 there was a tension between certain perspectives around profit, narrow-sense sustainability and the non-profit sector. Dave C. shared some links with his fellows in the grassroots and philanthropic sectors, asking for us to get to work on our language and conceptual schema to defend what is in fact different about what we do.

At the NetSquared conference recently, there was a comment made by a venture capitalist that “Some nonprofits just suck”.  This was partially attached to a discussion of nonprofit sustainability models, with a very large portion of participants taking it for granted that “sustainability” meant charging for services. There is an entrenched view that foundation grant funding and other donations can never be “sustainable”, and that there must be a return on services offered that eventually sustains the organization financially.

I responded to much of this. There’s a synopsis on the Nonprofiteer: http://nonprofiteer.typepad.com/the_nonprofiteer/2007/06/dear_nonprofite.html#comment-72142198

(thanks, Nonprofiteer, for the kind words).

The continuing debate lives here: http://www.tacticalphilanthropy.com/2007/05/some_nonprofits.html#comment-71226258

and here: http://www.tacticalphilanthropy.com/2007/06/philanthropic_c.html#comment-72140764

…and other comment threads on the Tactical Philanthropy site and elsewhere.

Coming under fire for offering services for free, by nonprofit funders who do not seem to understand the difference between “mission-driven” and “profit-driven”, forces me to suggest that we, as a sector, need to develop stronger language regarding these issues. Most of all, we need to work towards a different model of sustainability, so that we can pose alternate definitions when a potential funder equates “sustainability” with a system based on marginal returns for services offered. 

So my question is: “How do we measure sustainability if we’re mission-focused (nonprofit) instead of profit-focused (for profit)?”.

And related: “How do we communicate the difference to the venture capitalist, foundation, and other donor communities who we’re hoping will support our work?”.

In both cases, by “we” I mean all of us mailing list denizens, not our organization in particular.

Responses appreciated. Backup on Tactical Phil would be awesome (I think I’m outnumbered).

Dave.

Phil C. took up that flag long ago, but here’s a current link in response to this: Gift Hub: Something Here Certainly Does Suck

The key for me in the framing of these questions is whether one limits one’s view to the organizational boundary as one views each exchange or transmission of value, or whether one holds an ecological perspective on the flows and is able to see a variety of significant flows.

Would I have been happier with a fiddle than a violin?

Last weekend at the 3rd (now self-admittedly International) Summit for Community Wireless Networks (IS4CWN) the evidence was clear… (based on a plethora of conversations): Community Wireless Networking is not dead, and while (for those in the movement) it may seem to have been eclipsed in the media eye, it hasn’t really had much mainstream attention yet.

It’s the pseudo-muni model that has failed.

The tragedy of the past few years has been a penchant for political leadership to buy what network carriers have been selling. The term Municipal in Muni-Wireless and Muni-Broadband has been co-opted by the sellers of networks to mean coverage of a city rather a more proper sense of Municipal Ownership. Terms are easily diluted in that way, but what is more serious for the various Municipalities and their residents is the dilution of the contracts and hence the vision that drove their initiatives in the first place.

I’ve heard reports from both Houston and Phily that the network footprint won’t be as extensive as originally envisioned. Once you get a contract the city is bought in enough that successive renegotiations can easily be achieved, reducing risk and cost to the vendor, and increasing cost, decreasing scope (which is an aspect of quality) of service, and maybe you can get the city to buy in as an anchor tenant after all.

Cities struggle with their budgets, we know. When you don’t have confidence (which translates into political will) in the potential of these networks you aren’t likely to put your money where your mouth is. It’s foolish model of accounting for costs that can’t simply aggregate the demand of the community and suggest that it will be cheaper to the tax-payers or rate-payers if the Municipality does the network itself… or better yet if the model rolls out as Boston plans: structural separation for a wholesale model with any number of service providers having access to the network infrastructure on the same terms and with very low barrier to entry. (Oddly Chicago completely rejected the possibility of non-profit ownership in the formulation of their request for proposal (RFP) despite a fair amount of testimony.)

So, the leading US cities haven’t put their money where their mouth is - and now the vendors are doing likewise. They win the contract for citywide service and then pull back from delivery.

How much investment is required to make this work? What model of ownership makes the most sense? What sort of business model works? What technology choices should we make? What are the purposes of the network? It’s the answers to network purpose that should drive your business/ownership and technology model, not the reverse. That requires commitment to the purposes of the network as opposed to just the idea of “let’s have a network because others have one”.

So, in the cities where the footprints of their pseudo-muni wireless networks are ever-shrinking… how will we cover the gap? It’s time for public attention to turn to community driven models., and it’s time for us to spread the word, spread the model and dispel the FUD.

Andy writes that wiki may be used in a policy writing experiment on Ed Tech.

What’s critical here? Openness, yes, and sincere attention of Legislative staff or Legislators themselves.

From my good friend Fran:

Dear Colleagues,

Your Illinois libraries are concerned re this filtering legislation. You are probably aware that
internet filters are notorious for not being “smart”. They typically block health and other vital
information, We as librarians believe that filtering is a decision that should be made by a local
school, library, or community, not mandated by the state.

Please join us in unity on May 14th. Let your legislators and all who support free and open
access to the internet and local control know that you oppose this bill.

Thank you all for your support!

Monday, 14 May 2007 Is a Day of Unity for the Illinois Library Community to Demonstrate Our Opposition to House Bill 1727

Public Policy Committee’s Action Plan Regarding Proposed Mandatory Internet Filter Legislation

In response to the Illinois House of Representatives passing House Bill 1727, the Illinois Library Association’s Public Policy Committee met yesterday to determine the library community’s response. ILA requests that libraries communicate and/or demonstrate the negative effects of this legislation. Because the association is a strong promoter of local control, we are recommending that local libraries determine the most appropriate action for their community and act accordingly. The committee did, however, declare:

Monday, 14 May 2007 is a day of unity for the Illinois library community to demonstrate our opposition to House Bill 1727, the mandatory public and school library Internet filter legislation.

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