wrythings

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.

The results of the NetSquared vote are due today. Without needing to know the outcome… I want to give a big thank you to CompuMentor, TechSoup and the NetSquared team … they really brought excitement to the field of socially conscious developers! Or at least they opened a space, invited us in, and made that space warm and productive and safe, and we brought the excitement together.

I personally needed that positive networking. I have felt it often in open space, but haven’t felt it to this extent online - not with so many groups and individuals. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Wireless Cities Communities of Interests: Media and Wireless Communities

The last paragraph of the entry linked above deserves reflection:

Finally it’s important to keep in mind the histories of media. For example, when television was introduced, it was seen as a medium with great potential for education and for creating communities. This is no longer seen to be the case. Radio too had a similar romance in it’s early days. Will wireless have a same fate?

If we are aware of this history, what pains must we take to break the pattern? Is there anything we can do to make sure promises made for the commonweal are kept?

So much to say! I have been a fan of the Grass Commons vision (not to mention the team) for some time. So much so, I’ve recently joined their Board!

When I first learned of the vision to develop the Network of Integrated Consumer Knowledge - NICK I was stunned. It’s something we clearly need. I thought: how the heck are we going to get there? It takes some chutzpah to even dream this thing, but that is exactly what we need more of. And we do need NICK. Though it looks to be a long-range project, it may be better to think of NICK as establishing a standard and a technology for sharing consumer knowledge. That’s what I like about it. The Open API for Consumer Knowledge.

If that wasn’t cool enough, look at the underlying technology they have evolved in trying to bring this big vision to the world: WagN

They say Wiki + Tagg’n = WagN, and that’s a good mash-up style descriptor. But being a stickler for the evolution of our language and logic in these new worlds I wonder how we will describe it in the future when it is more natural to us…. when we are, let’s say, more fluent in WagN. And I do think we ought to think of these applications in terms of a grammar of what they make possible. We’ll leave that aside for now.

And then there is Hooze.

Hooze?

I don’t know.

Third base.

Abbott & Costello aside, Hooze will help us to know or remember who’s behind a product and that will help us mean what we pay as the Grass Commons saying goes.

While thinking about a panel on Digital Excellence and Community Internet that Sascha asked me to put together for the 2007 International Summit for Community Wireless Networks I was reviewing some notes I intended to blog from the previous one, held in St. Charles, near St. Louis, Missouri, and decided the story I had heard warranted a retelling.

I’ll neglect the niceties of transition and jump right to my notes:

Media tools have expanded in tremendous variety as a result of computing and the Internet. Collaborative and advanced communication tools are often not the first tools brought to communities when digital divisions are being addressed, but they are the most empowering because they are the tools of using one’s voice.

Let’s for a moment take “voice” literally, as opposed to metaphorically (as creative/expressive outlet)… to consider a wonderful example where quite the opposite occurred.

I’d heard part of the story before, as I am friends with communications technology activists who were directly involved in the efforts to bring community communications infrastructure and tools to the hurricane devastated gulf.

Harold Feld, of the Media Access Project, a DC group directly engaged in media policy advocacy at the national level recounted the story as a story of political heroism and to some degree one of civil disobedience.

I was caught up in the poetry of Feld’s closing address to our group, on the themes of Passion and Politics and the recovery of the positive in these themes and in their connection to each other, so forgive me for glossing things over and only offering a limited piece of what he was saying, and also if I blend the next series of points which really is an agglomeration of the sentiments expressed by several.

The main thing for me as regard to this conversation is that many people think of wireless in terms of computing and laptops… making life and work perhaps more flexible and comfortable for white-collar workers…. the image being people accessing their laptops for whatever purpose in a cafe.

Leaders in the wireless movement took it upon themselves to actively engage with the FCC and more directly in the effort to help others in the aftermath of Katrina. They got in their cars and went down to a staging area on someone’s farm and proceeded to deploy community developed wireless communications backbone equipment… not so people could use laptops at cafes but so people could use Voice over Internet services to contact friends and family - to reconnect - to let others know how they were.

Another person recounted the story of one of these wireless activists who needed to climb a tower, and a local sheriff whose entire communications capability was reduced to a 2-way radio… and the sheriff asked simply what the activist was going to do for him and his community… essentially, are you going to do something good for us?

Politics was set aside for a political act. The sheriff, understanding that this person was bringing telephony to an area where the communications infrastructure was wiped out was there to do something good. He said, of the tower and door, which they really didn’t have any permission to legally access… if it is locked, “I’ll shoot the lock off myself.”

Together they acted, in a political act… one not too dissimilar from civil disobedience…

These sorts of stories need to be told and retold. There are community level solutions to many problems, and some involve technologies that while advanced, are not terribly difficult to understand or deploy, and which have robust features and characteristics. The communities’ ability to respond in crisis is something that requires greater distribution of digital and technical literacy, but more than that it requires an understanding that we can act to our common benefit on many more areas of our life than we otherwise generally feel.

Moving on to one last example… a gentleman from India spoke eloquently on the importance of technology for communications among those with disabilities… thinking even of tools that voice enable applications or allow for alternate means of processing text, that this has benefits likewise for low-literacy persons… imagining that we have local community intranets replete with data of use to people…

These are all examples of community resources and potential resources that can be deployed and invested in on a local basis… and yet we are so little aware of these possibilities. These are media resources with social purpose: overcoming isolation and empowering people.

My friend Gerry Gleason recently commented:

Now that the peer-produced encyclopedia, Wikipedia, surpasses all but the premier commercial encyclopedia in completeness and quality, and it is arguably the equal to that one (Britannica), I see it as only a matter of time before peer-produced independent media surpasses all the commercial offerings (can anybody name one that might compete, ok maybe in print, the NY Times, but that’s it)?

Gerry’s comment brought forth an echo from my recent visit to the Pantheon (Paris) where there is a statue to Diderot to the effect that the Encyclopedia paved the way for the social revolution…

So, now, the revolution of the Internet and a wiki-mode of participating in knowledge.

David Isenberg has a great write up of the recent Moyer’s report “The Net at Risk” at WorldChanging