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.