wrythings

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

Next up on my reading list is (Gore’s latest book) The Assault on Reason.

Gore has taken on the most important issues of the day: the environment, the politics of media, public life. These are grounded in the big questions of living together on this planet. His tone is measured. Had the Supreme Court handled the 2000 elections other than they did, would Gore be the Statesman he is now?

I am one among many Chicagoans who were deeply inspired by the success of the Minneapolis grassroots digital inclusion effort that attained a Community Benefits Agreement as a part of their city-wide wireless agreement. Among the concepts promoted in Minneapolis was a provision of a “walled garden” … a space of community identified and city content that would be freely accessible to anyone able to receive the wireless signal. Some resources were also to go towards community portals for up to 90 neighborhoods in Minneapolis. Presumably, the content of those portals would be included in the walled garden? A committee was formed to flesh out those details of the contract.

The Minneapolis Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) served for us as a starting point in the Chicago campaign (still under way and in need of support) and led to the formation of the Chicago Digital Access Alliance (CDAA). We began by taking a positive but critical look at the Minneapolis model, considering it an evolutionary step in public connectivity.

With each item on the Minneapolis CBA we asked: did they get enough? what does Chicago want? what does Chicago need? These are all preparatory to the wider dialog: what kind of Chicago do we want to be?

Chicago’s a bigger city … in terms of population and geography. Scale matters, and local political culture does too. But aside from those particulars, the principles of the movement for digital excellence and civic engagement allow for a wider dialog between and within communities. Communications policy as an object of public deliberation requires that we step up the discourse to a new level. We’re addressing topics that are multilayered and cross-cutting with all of our social needs and aspirations.

The “Walled Garden” appeared to be one of those concepts that required much further deliberation, not to mention some work on the language and framing.

A “walled garden” has some negative connotations in Internet parlance. A gated community doesn’t truly serve it’s residents well, nor our wider society, but we understand what motivates people to create them. This dissatisfaction with the terminology was not a minor part in desiring something more, something better.

But let’s start with the specifics of the original framing of Minneapolis’ walled garden concept: some community identified content and some city provided content would be freely available to anyone within range of the wireless signal. This ties to the basic questions of ownership of Wireless Internet Real Estate: splash pages and portals. Communities and Cities need a mechanism for local content and local identity and it needs to be front and center. We should view this space from a civic perspective. In Chicago we ask: what is the character of the network we want? Is’nt the splash page… the landing page as you join the network a critical aspect of that? What will the network encourage?

Some city content. Public convenience, utility and necessity. Branding for the city on the network. Lot’s of motivations there. But though we may be citizens and residents of a particular city, are we not also citizens and residents of the state in which we live, and of the nation? In other words, if there is a logic to having public access to city government resources online, in a free “walled garden” area, would this same logic not extend to state government sites, and federal sites? This broke open the concept and the idea of the Civic Garden emerged. Why not make all .gov sites available under these terms? The airwaves belong to the public anyway. We only license them out (or make them available for unlicensed use). Wireless providers need access to the right of way, pole attachments etc., you get the point.

If we accept the premise that leads to “some city content” being made available in this way, all .Gov is a step away.

Now, let us build on this case. Promotion of educational institutions and resources serves the public interest. Let’s make the content of school and higher learning available under this framework. Hence our call to make .edu a part of the Civic Garden. Now, .edu is a shorthand here: we intend this to cover the concept of education broadly.

An interesting aspect of this differentiation of select top level domains (TLDs) is in how the brands allowed themselves to be diluted. A fair number of government sites have been established under .com, with a supposition that people can’t type .gov. The different TLDs have meaning, and this is a means of opening the discourse on the relevance of the public sphere. We have an interest in opening up spaces for the commons.

The third leg of the Civic Garden pertains to community content produced locally, outside of government or government funded institutional channels. The Minneapolis walled garden and support of community portals establishes the basic principle. Communities have a right to create their own identity and to shape the character and flavor of the local network.

I expect the model of the Civic Garden to continue to evolve… word is that Minneapolis is adopting use of the term in association with their effort.

To start: there isn’t enough of it, of decent quality, interconnected and given priority.

Is that blunt enough?

Some problems require a collective response, but too often we accept those problems as intractable, because as individuals the issue is overwhelming in scale. How do we get ourselves to the point where we can even begin to explore the collective option?

Traffic and Transit

We’ve privileged the unsustainable. We have refused to invest in a truly public infrastructure. If we consider all the costs involved with traffic how would that compare with a reconstruction of public transit worthy of the public? That is, a system that is well-interconnected, efficient, (sufficiently frequent in service), reliable, comfortable and clean?

We can begin with the cost of traffic. This is not intended to be exhaustive. This is just to get us started on the critical path. Leaving the Chicago Green Festival this was brought home to me … Lake Shore Drive looked like a parking lot. Many urban thoroughfares look like that twice a day. With cars backed up as far as the eye can see you have to wonder at the fuel consumed and the value of our time as we sit waiting to get through the traffic and on to our destination. This does not even begin to address the cost of road maintenance (or construction), nor those of pollution.

What are the aggregate costs on these and other measures we may come up with, for traffic and transit, for any city on any given day?

We choose traffic over transit because transit doesn’t satisfactorily meet our needs, and we have each adjusted to the situation from an individualized frame of reference. We believe the extent of our impact on the situation is limited to that frame. We’ve bought in to consumerism as opposed to collectivism. This is not a question of a free-market versus a communistic system, but it is a question of how we can better live together. We need to be able to explore the characteristics of network and public aggregated solutions without having to defend against such simplistic rhetoric. This applies to questions of transit, as much as other public services and utilities, including communications networks such as broadband or citywide wireless. Each of these is a matter of infrastructure and capacity and demands public discourse and deliberation.

Urban myths of impossibility vs. Amenities in historical context

Our practices and attitudes towards the possible in the several sectors of urban socio-economic life reveal fundamental contradictions. Some behaviors are accepted as the domain of a natural monopoly (or duopoly for an illusion of market), some are left to individual patterns of consumption and behavior and others are the domain of government, governance and patronage. Looking at how the work and life of a city functions on a day to day basis we find no explanation for organizing the different infrastructures as we do other than the historical context of the interests that fought for the current state of affairs. Tracing the history of these domains of our economic life we also see considerable variety - oscillations between private interests, markets, collective responses, monopoly-utility and government driven approaches. There is also plenty of blending and interaction across these categories. In principle we should not allow rhetoric or ideology to foreclose options in our collective response, especially the option of a collective response.

With news that Chicago would move to the next stage in the 2016 Olympic bid, Dan Bassill asked that we take the field for social justice with equivalent passion and dedication. Simply stated: let’s have a Gold Medal for work to end poverty. The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Give and Take blog gave this challenge a controversial spin. What follows is my comment in reply (with a few additional links).

Dan’s challenge is posed for all of us. It’s great that his post is getting attention. If we look for controversy everywhere we are sure to find it even when it isn’t present.

What can the Chronicle do better in this regard? I think there are lessons to be learned in the positive media movement.

I’m not a Pollyanna. There are likely some significant factors regarding the Olympic bid that deserve critical exploration/attention.

The Olympics should bring out our best. Dan’s call should rouse in us that aspiration for addressing the most pressing circumstances in our society.

April 20 the eChicago Symposium was convened at Dominican University, April 20-21 a conference was convened by “A View from the Ground” at the University of Chicago on the 8 blocks of public housing known as Stateway Gardens, and April 21-22 Chicago hosts the Green Festival.

Each event has a deep and conscious grounding in questions of social justice. It feels like many of us are waking up and coming together.

Chicago presents itself as a global city, and aspires to being the greenest city. Calls for sustainable living, living well together and building the Chicago we want are bringing our attention to our institutions and to questions of social justice.

Philanthropy can take a more prominent role in this blurring of the lines between Environmental, Media, Technology, and Social Justice movements.

This convergence of movements is happening anyway, so let’s come together with Olympic aspirations in all that we do, whether we’re in Chicago or not.

Thank you Dan for challenging us to challenge ourselves in the Olympic spirit.

What is Digital Literacy without deep dedication to cultivating Literacy and Judgment? What is Digital Citizenship without ongoing effort to promote a robust Civic Life? What is Digital Inclusion without a true effort and policy of Inclusion? What’s the Expansion in Digital Expansion? Digital Government? Digital Community? Digital Neighborhoods? The Digerati? Don’t get me started on Digital Futures and Opportunities…

Digital isn’t the point, whatever the form: e-this, i-that. We single out recent technologies with magical promise by such signals as they arrive in successive waves. Technology that has permeated society is barely recognized as technology by most of us: television, telephone, tricycles, fire and other dangerous things. We know we need a mechanic when something goes wrong (if we aren’t technically inclined), but with the newer technologies most of society remains mystified (including practitioners).

We can no longer participate in the perpetuation of that mystification through repetition and variation on the incantations. We can’t proclaim the benefits of indiscriminate innovations and extensions in and of the virtual world dreaming that that is enough and will necessarily and sufficiently transform our society.

Digital Inclusion is the term of art that really broke the spell for me. “What art?” you may ask… the selling of networks and network consulting and ancillary services and technologies, whether wireless, WiMAX-WiFi or other broadbands and slices of spectrum. If we’re Keynesians after all, then let’s just say so. If not, or if we’re moderated Keynesians, we had better be more critical of our technology planning and spending. (And by odd coincidence, promoting public discourse on media and technology is just the prescription for an inclusive, civic minded, digital and media literate citizenry ready to take up tools to their own purposes and to make investments toward common purposes.)

We need to become serious about social justice questions, embrace them as the core of our movement. We need to become serious about issues that demand a holistic view, we need to treat our work in the context of the whole of lives of individuals, families and communities.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-digital. To be clear: the digital divide has not gone away but/and deserves our attention in so far as it is a divide, not because it is digital.

I favor a positive view on the way forward as long as it doesn’t deny where we are and what it will take. I see great potential in these technologies and in the expansion of communication capacity. I just want the digital in context and in service to the world we want and the dialogue that gets us headed there, and I want our individual and collective investments to consciously shape the character of our networks and our society. We can’t take these outcomes for granted. The sales pitch is always promising.

So, with each Digitized phrase, we must ask: how does it stand on its own? Can we forget the technical innovation of the moment, live without the distraction and get serious about living together?

In our work promoting Digital Excellence, we’re more than happy to Drop the Digital, we emphasize the Excellence. That’s what we want from students, citizens, families, communities, companies, politics, education and the economy.

If these digital prefix strategies are work-arounds (and no just new and improved sales pitches) for some of us… our attempt at concealing revolutionary socially transforming activity, it’s time for a reality check. We have to become clear about our goals. If it’s a dance of revolutionary work concealed behind revolutionary technologies and obstructed by reactionary policies and practices, make sure it is we who call the tune with the language we choose. Let’s choose what we want and aspire to, not settle upon the limited scraps we may or may not get.