There are dozens of cities in the U.S. and other countries employing or planning to employ Wi-Fi technology in citywide hot spots or clouds. Internationally these include Taipei, Perth, Hong Kong, Pretoria, Cebu City, Auckland, Adelaide, Zamora (Spain), Eindhoven, Amsterdam, Liverpool, Portsmouth and Brussels. Domestic cities include Seattle, San Francisco, Anaheim, Minneapolis, Portland (OR), Las Vegas, Atlanta, Dayton, Los Angeles, Spokane, Lexington, and several smaller cities such as Bowling Green, Cerritos (CA), LaFayette and others. Even Macedonia is planning a wireless network covering over 1,000 square miles of territory ... essentially making it a Wi-Fi country.
The first Wireless Cities ... Community Context conference was held recently to look past e-government services and explore how wireless can be used to enhance community collaboration. Speakers included representatives from Wikimedia, Creative Commons, Jambo Networks, Gather.com, Digital Access Project, MNartists.org, the cities of Portland and Minneapolis, and the Public Technology Institute, among others. This article reviews some of the key discussion points brought out in that conference.
Urban Technologies
Wi-Fi operates in the unregulated part of the spectrum as an information service. It's not the fastest technology. Fiber to the home has greater bandwidth. Even DSL and cable modem are faster. But wireless has low installation costs making it a disruptive technology competitive with legacy operators like DSL and cable; and its services can potentially be offered at rates that will appeal to the digitally disenfranchised.
In establishing wireless networks each local government focuses its services upon the business of government -- first responders, schools, property revenues and basic services. However, some cities with foresight are gathering input from residents on community-centered ideas and directions for wireless. These ideas include impacts in the arts, community projects and create a richer mix of social interconnectedness through wireless.
Plans to offer municipal wireless as a free city amenity haven't worked out very well. Wireless Philadelphia started as a free public amenity, but last summer they joined the ranks of cities such as Portland and Minneapolis in establishing public/private partnerships. Public/private partnerships don't require the city to own or maintain the network. It is owned, installed and maintained by a private vendor that also bills subscribers. The city often serves as the anchor tenant. From the city's perspective it's a utility.
Wi-Fi is considered an urban technology because it requires a high density of subscribers to pay for the numerous radio "hanging assets" attached to powered street light poles and traffic signals. A high enough density of assets allows for mesh networks or clouds that completely cover an area, in contrast to strings of isolated hot spots.
Wi-Max is a similar urban technology that covers a city, but uses a "big stick" transmitter (similar to a television tower) and local tower receivers (similar to cell phone towers). The barriers for Wi-Max are lack of consumer recognition, the large established base of Wi-Fi users and lack of mobility across a wide range of devices.
Mobility matters to a city's chief information officer (CIO). Mobility provides a means for consolidating and improving upon a wide variety of government services. Wireless IP (Internet protocols) improve current analog radio communications between dispatch and first responders. < a href="http://corpus-christi.texas.com" target="_blank">Gas meters, water meters can be read automatically. Add to this capability the flexibility of wireless traffic cameras, transit schedule updates, amber alerts and uploading files to/from city workers in the field.
Wireless fits the CIO's mandate to provide dynamic e-government services within lowered budgets. That's why RFPs and contracts for wireless services focus only on essential services and cost savings. But does a city's vision for wireless always have to be attached to essential services? Why not also leverage it for other purposes as determined by city residents?
Will unwiring a city change social discourse? How will it impact volunteerism? The arts? The disenfranchised? What the Wireless Cities conference made clear is that it's not so much the technology that determines the eQoL (e-quality of life) ... but what you're going to do with it.
Enhancing Lifestyle
Wireless is about enhancing current lifestyle with a richer mix. McDonald's offers Wi-Fi in some of its parking lots. Kids, already hanging out, are making parking lots a teen wireless venue. They have found this service to be good and make it part of their lifestyle. But instead of leaving it in the hands of commercial property owners like McDonald's or Starbuck's, why not offer it as part of the civic lifestyle made possible by local government?
There's something positive about a local government using wireless to capture the attention of young people who have never before connected (at least in a positive way) with government. Wireless networks can provide access where the people are. But it's the responsibility of the neighborhoods to engage young people with social applications mirroring the key descriptors of their lives: social ... mobile ... and remixed.
Wireless could be thought of as just another technology for transmitting bits. But it's more. It provides more ubiquity for access, location-based collaboration and greater opportunity for content creation without boundaries.? If the fat digital pipes of fiber-to-the-home, DSL and cable are now becoming a tool for on-demand television and film content from corporate sources, then wireless is about creating your own content.
Content rules ... or at least matters. Prosumers make new creative remixes of not only music but also ring tones and home movies with tools such as iDVD and GarageBand. Add commentary to your neighbor's video blog on local pollution issues. Use Jambo to cooperatively make plans for a block party. Interactively chat about the layout of a neighborhood truck garden while standing in the garden. Use Google Earth to plan the route for a political demonstration as you walk it. Request the assistance of people around you at the lakeshore to help you collect samples for your high school water quality project. Bring you laptop to an experimental theater so that you can upload your vacation photos as scenery backdrops projected during the play.
Content (and creativity) rules!
[Part 2] Urban creativity and social networks
Wireless Arts and Culture
Like politics, all art is local. Artists use local subjects to convey universal topics to a wider audience. Whether Monet depicts a garden foot-bridge or a Hmong troupe performs traditional dances, they both convey local experiences to a universal audience.
Artists who employ wireless technology similarly connect local cultural and social experiences to an international audience. But wireless also allows the audience to alter the experience through feedback and mediated participation.
Wireless is fast becoming the choice of performance artists. First there were performances employing flashmobs, a term made popular by Howard Rheingold. Mobilizing large groups of people via cellphones to participate in a one-time, coordinated action not only shows the power of wireless but also makes tangible an otherwise invisible technology.
When computer chips became embedded in automobiles, keys, refrigerators, wallets, even light bulbs, the talk was of pervasive computing. Now artists talk of exposing the technology and making it more visually apparent on the street. Making the invisible visible demystifies and exposes the underlying technology.
Outdoors public celebrations of mobile wireless such as New York's Spectropolis are established around invisible technology made physical. Examples include digital projectors suspended by balloons projecting imagery received over a wireless link, or riding bicycles that receive text messages and print them onto sidewalks.
Those same embedded chips in objects make possible greater mobility ... and mobility makes possible the immediate documentation and sharing of news and events in real time. Citizen journalists are now able to upload video or photos immediately from wireless cameras to hyperlocal news sites. Combine wireless with video blogging and you have story content made available from your locale to any location on the globe in near-real time.
Traditional Performance Made New
For nearly a decade collaborative online novels and other online literary works have been available on the Internet. In these works writers collaboratively contribute sections later edited into a whole piece of fiction. Recently there was a fictitious video game world "Epic Legends of the Hierarchs" created extemporaneously by dozens people over the period of just four days. Creative collaboration has always existed in the arts, but now the rate of collaboration is fast approaching that of performance art.
The Spark Festival of Electronic Music and art challenges both the traditional outcome and process of making music. One organizer is developing wireless instruments allowing interactivity with his listening audience. By making musical riffs available through Wi-Fi his local audience will be able to "jam" with him by modifying and sending the riffs back to be included in the ongoing musical performance. The audience becomes collaborator in the performance.
Similar real-time collaborations could be applied to dance performances, poetry slams, even live theater. For example, say an experimental theater group was developing a thematic play on vacations at the Grand Canyon. They would advertise that ticket holders load their Wi-Fi laptops with vacation photos and bring them to the performance. The stage manager could then select and arrange the photos, projecting them onto the scenery backdrops to accentuate moments in the play. The value is in connecting audience members to the production and to each other. Wireless gives that connection immediacy.
Location Services and Social Networks
Social applications are the focus of the next generation of the Web, known as Web 2.0. These applications focus upon open participation and the ability to create as well as consume content. They support people connecting to others for a wide range of purposes both through the Internet and locally.
This ability to provide location-based services is another way that wireless can save us time. Technology associated with Wi-Fi can identify your proximity to wireless nodes using a technique similar to locating cell phone signals. And several applications are taking advantage of this capability.
PlaceMail is currently proposed as a location-based cell service. In its individual user mode it's like sending an email to yourself, but instead of specifying a recipient you choose one or more delivery locations. When you find yourself near that location the message is delivered to you (e.g. "pick up cat food"). The social version for PlaceMail allows you to share a grocery list with family members or share a list of grocery items with neighbors assisting other homebound or handicapped neighbors.
Geographic searches through online services usually provide results that are very general and which favor only the search firm's business partners. Searches may not reflect offers by local small business, specific activities at locations (e.g. YMCA classes), or other details relevant to your needs. For example, you are at your daughter's hockey game in northwest Detroit and her hockey stick breaks ... where is a nearby place to get another one? PlaceMail can also be used to aid local support groups, plan play dates, civic meetings, etc. It can even enhance a visit to the area by business travelers, tourists, or residents new to your city.
Placeopedia is a Wikimedia project making use of the wiki engine. Wikis are openly editable Websites where anyone can edit (almost) any page. Placeopedia links Wikipedia articles to Google Earth maps. So if you're reading a wiki article about the islands of Svalbard you can link to its Google maps. It also allows site visitors to add their own connections to other articles and maps.
WikiCities was also established under the Wikimedia Foundation. Started in 2004 it currently hosts around 600 wikis representing neighborhoods, parks, towns and cities, and provides a more local approach than Wikipedia.
Online social networking tools like Meetup or Friendster allow people with common interests to identify each other, chat online, even meet in person. Collaborative tools such as Net Meeting or Groove Workspace allow users to share and edit files simultaneously, chat, teleconference and share calendars. Other online communities employ dynamic location-sensitive technologies.
Jambo Networks is a peer-to-peer social matching service that works through Wi-Fi. It compares user biography items to match people in both offline (through your laptop's own Wi-Fi radio) and online modes. Its services are similar to hotspot based Project PlaceSite, a service to connect people and which uses the metaphor of the "village well".
Jambo searches the local network to find other Jambo users nearby. It also offers a slider bar to determine how close a match a non-friend needs to be before you will be visible to each other. You can use the slider bar to narrow down the list to the people who have the most in common with you such as the school your kids attend or the pets you own.
Pets are family members too. The technology of SNiF (Social Networks in Fur) allows pet owners to interact through social networks for pets ("petworks"). It keeps track of your dog, his dog pals and their activities through infrared and radio technologies in the collar and leash. A Web-based, online community provides access to more static information pertaining to pets and owners. During walks in public spaces the collar and leash system allows for real-time input and output. It helps you to meet and stay connected to neighborhood dog owners, even letting you know when a friend and their dog approach your local park.
Distinguishing between friends and non-friends is important in online communities, especially when you share information about your family. You want to make sure that only trusted friends received that information. If one measure of the life of communities is how well they protect their children then one of greatest potentials of a wireless community network is the ability to augment that protection.
One possibility suggested by the technology of SNiF is tracking children through their interactions with pets. Since children often know and interact with the friendly dogs in a neighborhood, contacts between kids and dogs can be logged and tracked. Though tracking children is still a very controversial social issue, SNiF could provide a point-to-point method for doing so.
For older children wireless communities provide many opportunities for parents to connect to their student's progress in school. This may include checking on homework assignments during your lunch break, reviewing teachers' reports while you commute, and accessing information on school meetings while at the grocery.
Teens could also leverage the local wireless community by meeting resources in their own neighborhoods. They could find out who in the neighborhood has odd jobs for hire, such as leaf raking or car repair to be performed. They could even datamine the oral histories of elderly in the neighborhood for their school writing assignments.
New capabilities inherent in wireless mean that users need to renegotiate social norms. Who will bring the laptop to the block party or Night Out? Will it be the leader of the neighborhood association or a local teenager who plays the role of change agent? New opportunities mean new rules and new public discussions about arts, services, schools and other topics of local control.
Perhaps the first step is to put forward a wireless community benefits agreement for your neighborhood. Get commitments from local resource people to articulate the benefits of wireless and how you plan to incorporate it at the neighborhood level into the wireless plan for your city. Then present it to your city's CIO (chief information officer) as a draft of how to improve the network for the benefit of the citizenry.
[Part 3] The urban divide and geographic information
This third part of a three-part article reports on discussions at the first Wireless Cities ... Community Context conference. The conference looked beyond e-government services to explore how community members enhance their everyday lives through wireless.
Bridging the Digital Divide(s)
There is not one digital divide... there are several. Age, income, education and ethnicity are factors presenting the widest divides that separate Internet users from non-Internet users and broadband users from dial-up users.
According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project only 26 percent of Americans aged 65 and older go online, though 84 percent of 18-29 year olds do so. Just 29 percent of non high school graduates have online access, contrasted with 89 percent of college graduates. And 57 percent of African-Americans go online, compared with 70 percent of whites.
Teens are avid creators of content. About half of all teens either create content in the form of a blog or Web page, share original content or remix content found elsewhere. Urban teens tend to be greater content creators than those in suburbs or rural areas. Though 19 percent of white teens online are bloggers, they're not far ahead of African American (17 percent) or Hispanic (17 percent) teen bloggers. And the percentage of teens who share self-created media is highest in the lowest income bracket (and lowest in the highest income bracket!)
Since broadband usage is currently the best predictor of a wider range of activities in an online life, broadband holds the key for those on the other side of the divide. Broadband users are up 150 percent from 2002, but not across all income strata. Since 2002, dial-up users with income under $30,000 have increased 50 percent while other groups decreased dial-up usage in favor of broadband. If under-served communities don't adopt broadband they will lag behind the rich online experiences of broadband users.
Where can you find inexpensive broadband that will appear to low-income users? Cable companies compete with telecoms for providing moderately high priced broadband services.
Demographic studies on television usage show that low income families are the least likely to subscribe to cable, so cable modem usage is even more remote for them. This is one reason why municipalities are looking toward wireless broadband providers to offer a lower cost alternative.
Wireless cloud access can be accessed from any neighborhood without redlining, costly installation fees and does not violate rental agreements. Wireless clouds may represent the best opportunity to bridge the digital disparity in our urban neighborhoods.
Local Literacy
Within a concentration of poverty it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for a neighborhood to perceive itself as becoming successful. An economic digital divide brings with it gaps in technology literacy and cost of ownership. In turn, these result in a paucity of content relevant to the local community.
Once access is available there is still the cost of ownership and lack of technology literacy as barriers. As $100 laptops become available technology, literacy is perhaps the more difficult problem in bridging the divide. There are many communities defined by color, income, age and language that need technology literacy to compel usage and develop relevant content. Online content is frequently focused on the interests of existing populations and is less relevant and valuable to low income, minority and immigrant populations.
Getting people connected is much more than just having access and tutorials up on the Web. It is also having "boots on the ground." One such grounded effort is through CTCs (Community Technology Centers). There are over a thousand CTCs in the U.S. providing computer usage training at centers peppered through most urban communities. Other groups such as Content Bank aim to spur the development of online content and tools for and by low-income residents and other under-served Americans. One Economy helps low-income people use technology to build assets and join the economic mainstream.
It focuses around four key areas: access services, online consumer content, technology-related policy initiatives and youth leadership.
One exemplary CTC, the Digital Access Project, also provides training and tutorials for basic computer skills to immigrant communities. A few muniwireless RFPs, notably Minneapolis, specifically require respondents to coordinate with neighborhood CTCs and include multilingual instruction for connection through wireless gateways. Participation of immigrant communities is particularly difficult because of language barriers. Community arts groups such as Intermedia Arts seek to give voice to immigrant communities through exhibits on the Web. Exploring the immigrant experience through content they develop themselves gives an unfiltered viewpoint.
Outreach to the community from resources within that community have the best chance for a positive economic/social impact. The African American Men Project in Minneapolis runs the Right Turn initiative puts technology literacy in the hands of mentors. The initiative takes a team approach to pursue aggressive "street outreach" to young men in jeopardy. It employs community navigators to assess and develop goals with each participant in the process of redirecting their life positively. The project's coordinator, Shane Price, realized that the information model for gathering, managing and correlating data on participants was critical.
Price plans on using wireless laptops to collect information from people where they live. "We'll go out and get people recorded and connected right out in the neighborhood; we'll be able to show them what is possible, right where we meet them, in coffee houses, in libraries and elsewhere," Price said. "You have to build trust right from the beginning. We have the trust that in building our relationships the information will be held in a community organization instead of with the government."
GIS
GIS (Geographic Information Systems) is a statistical method used to collect data from geographical areas (such as neighborhoods) and display that information to users. It's a method for gathering and displaying location-specific information on residents. Data can reflect a variety of measures: pay levels, income percentages, voter participation or just about any information that can be collected and displayed. It's a valuable tool for non-profits seeking statistical data on their clientele. GIS also conveys a clear graphic story to city and county officials concerned with satisfying the needs of their constituencies.
Part of the current trend in publishing GIS data on the Web is to offer Google or Yahoo mapping for determining the location of a community's soft assets. Soft assets are the intellectual and participatory skills of residents. A powerful tool for assessing local assets could be created by combining, i) mapping services with, ii) a campaign to assess the assets of a community, and, iii) a wireless network to reach as many assets as possible. Such a tool could elucidate many hidden resources:
- What are the technology literacy skills of residents within five blocks of each school?
- Are there concentrations of people with fund raising skills and know-how?
- What is the distribution of voters in a radius around this bus stop?
GIS is traditionally used in partnership with neighborhoods, community development centers and state departments of employment and economic development. Until now GIS data has been derived mostly from census data. But now other sources, even data collected through online networks, can be integrated. For example, a software engineer was frustrated looking up each real estate listing on Craigslist. He put the full listing on a single Web-based map linking real estate listings with Google Maps.
The potential is for wireless usage to allow immediate inquiries and updates to the databases from any location. If real estate listings change they can be updated from the field. If a local author moved to the neighborhood invite them to talk at your book club. In the future it is easy to envision Web 2.0 "mash-ups" with two or more technologies connected seamlessly to list garage sale items, map crime sites within minutes of the crimes, even map sidewalks with the least amount of snow accumulated since the last storm. Employ GIS thoughtfully as a "value-add" for your community and establish ongoing funding to help keep GIS relevant to your community's goals.
Wireless Matters
Wireless is a pervasive set of technologies for bridging digital divides, creating relevant collaborative content and revealing the full spectrum of resources within your city, your ward, your neighborhood, even your block. Provision of more efficient e-government and emergency services are just the most obvious usages. Put it in the hands of the community and it becomes a set of tools to celebrate uniqueness, pursue collective interests and discover commonalities.
Think of wireless as a digital version of cable public access, a community resource available in most cities since the 1970s. With the addition of social networking tools and collaborative content it provides a more participative rich-media discourse for opinion sharing, decision making and relevant content.
A new model of digital community access through wireless would employ these dynamic elements. The offering would be inclusive, community-oriented and uniquely distinct from standard Web access. The next few years should reveal new models and new ways of interacting within wireless networks that add positively to community life.
Autor: Gregory Daigle
This article was developed with the assistance of Prof. Brad Hokanson of the University of Minnesota.
Quelle:
- [Part 1] OhmyNews International, 22.11.2005
- [Part 2] OhmyNews International, 30.11.2005
- [Part 3] OhmyNews International, 06.12.2005
