[Rooftops] Re: [msgs] City of Boston WI-FI "summit" Thurs @ Museum of Science (9am - 1pm) (fwd)

[Jim Youll]

Followup please to the rooftops at mit list. Subscriptions: 
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/rooftops rather than msgs.
Rooftops is member-only, but I have set it to permit non-subscribers to 
post w/ moderator intervention. But please join and discuss! It's a 
quiet place.

and i apologise for just-one-more.

Dana -

I've tried not "project" too far into the new and mostly-shapeless 
Boston project. But the limited information that has been released 
provides some basis for concern. This was a sincere attempt to 
interpolate what's known about this project with knowledge of similar 
projects I've seen or participated in. I hope some people will pursue 
these concerns at the upcoming meeting, and with the look-alike 
projects that will surely follow, here and elsewhere. The consultants 
and go-ahead crew don't care what I or any noisy person thinks. But it 
is appropriate to call for justification of experiments that could hurt 
people or waste scarce resources.

The consultants running the project are network engineers, hired to 
solve a social problem that was diagnosed by a city councilman who 
prescribed a technological cure. That isn't an encouraging start. 
Councilor Tobin is surely well-intentioned. But this initiative, on ice 
since last fall, reappears now in part due to the pressures of civic 
pride, an impatient press and eager technoliterati to "keep up with 
Philly", also not grand reasons to move ahead right now.

Discussion at the first public meeting should have been: "what is 
broken in our world and can this new technology make it less broken?" 
But things appear to have passed that point already, as proponents are 
already talking "solutions."

The real scaling problems here are not defined by mesh density, signal 
propagation and routing, but by the forgotten problems of helping a 
crowd of newbies thrive in the difficult Internet environment where 
spam, viruses, and frauds are found at every turn. What sorts of new 
problems will be created in the lives of users? How will this project 
protect them? Assigning responsibility might keep the project rational. 
But who can assign responsibility? Who will assume it? Small offline 
example: Boston parks aren't all safe places right now. Should people 
sit with expensive laptops in parks that were terrorized by shootings 
only last summer, or is this just a project for well-off areas in 
disguise?

At Thursday's public meeting:
- 2/3 of the agenda will discuss money and technology
Properly:
- 0/3 of the agenda should cover technology.
- 3/3 should try to figure out whether problems exist that a wireless 
project could improve.

If the technology just works, then it has no place at a general 
meeting. But there are no functioning precedents at this early stage of 
the art of wireless, so it seems at best risky and at worst dangerous 
to run a live experiment on real people.

The electric parade of whizzo could-be's may raise the hopes of 
disadvantaged communities without their having a grounded understanding 
of the realistic benefits, if any, and leaving them hurt later if the 
project doesn't deliver. We all want amazing wonderful things! But 
baiting an unsuspecting audience, for the sake of a project, is cruel. 
The online survey, for example, found a self-selected crowd of the 
hopeful who revealed their wishes for the extraordinary and improbable.

Finally, if the project is to be sustainable for years (hard stuff, yet 
it must be sustained if it is even begun), then it must originate from 
within the communities, at whatever pace they can safely and 
confortably bear, fast or slow, big scale or small. I don't see that in 
the DNA of the proposed Boston project, considering that it's already 
assumed a top-down we-know-what-you-need approach. Philadelphia 
definitely doesn't have it. I can't put it there. Maybe someone reading 
this can.

see you on the roof.


On May 17, 2005, at 5:16 PM, spiegel at media.mit.edu wrote:

> Hey Jim,
>
> I need to jump in here to correct a few things. As a non-profit in NYC 
> (and someone who has a good deal of respect for your opinion), I must 
> say that much of what you claim in your original email is groundless, 
> and worse, some of it falls victim to the same illogical conclusions 
> that the industry funded "independent" reports put out by the New 
> Millenium Research Council (NMRC).
>
> I don't have time to go into detail, but a few things:
>
> 1) Muni Wi-Fi or Broadband isn't for every community, but each 
> community should have the freedom to decide if it makes sense for 
> them.
>
> 2) Quite a lot of New Yorkers (and non-New Yorkers) make use of our 
> hotspots in the parks of Manhattan. In fact, in aggregate, many 
> thousands of people each month use the 11 parks that are "lit up" 
> through the work of NYCwireless and others. We see lots of use even in 
> the winter (though it is much less than in the warmer months). Also, 
> public space exists indoors as well as out in NYC, as it does in 
> Boston. So your "people don't use the outdoor hotspots" claim is in 
> fact verifiably groundless. :)
>
> 3) There is an enormous amount of forethough that goes into 
> muni-networks. Philly, for example, spent 2 years researching this. 
> Other cities convene panels of stakeholders and produce reports on 
> exactly what should happen (see SF and LA, among others).
>
> 4) It is true that Wi-Fi alone doesn't bridge the Digital Divide, but 
> it is a part of the solution. See: 
> http://www.nycwireless.net/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=11 for a 
> partial discussion of this.
>
> 5) All of the muni-networks that are either in planning or in 
> operation DO NOT have infinite subsidies. In fact, many operate on 
> limited government loans that are paid back in full and then some. 
> See: http://www.freepress.net/docs/mb_telco_lies.pdf and 
> http://www.freepress.net/docs/mb_white_paper.pdf
>
> 6) These initiatives are often pushed by communities and 
> constituencies. Though there are private companies that are pushing 
> muni-networks, these companies base their statements in fact, not the 
> fiction that is put forth by those companies (telco's in particular) 
> that come down against them.
>
> 7) NewburyOpen.net is a great company. Mike Oh (I know him personally) 
> is a great friend of social service, and though he justifies his 
> business involvement with this work as gaining visibility for Tech 
> Superpowers, I'm sure he would do this even if there were no business 
> justification at all. He believes (as we all do) in the power of 
> technology to help overcome social divide issues.
>
> So, I would recommend you take a look at some of the linked documents. 
> And since I know you are actually interested in helping the community, 
> I would recommend you get involved and ensure that what Boston decides 
> to do with its muni-wi-fi actually will aid in some of the social 
> divide issues above. :)
>
> Dana Spiegel
> Executive Director
> NYCwireless
> dana at nycwireless.net
> www.nycwireless.net
> +1 917 402 0422