Community Wi-Fi Forum: Notes and Photos

Community Wi-Fi Forum photograph taken by Steve Garfield. Michael Oh put together these notes from the April 19, 2005 Boston Wi-Fi Community Forum at the Boston Public Library. Steve Garfield's video highlights of the event are on Councillor John Tobin's weblog. ------ We need to get community groups involved to work together - Digital Divide Network - Organizers Collaborative Possible ideas for business model - Zoning model, similar to commercial and residential zoning Possible technical implementations - Simply change all the open linksys networks to "BostonWAG" or some other trademarked SSID - MIT Roofnet home-grown mesh networking on Netgear routers - Build on community access points - Do not want Boston to be the ISP! What people want from the city - A commitment to support a community network, to donate resources and bandwidth, but not necessarily external access (i.e. they would provide intra-network connection, but not to the outside world) - enable easy or low cost access to city fibre (for above) - Motivate businesses to be a part of the network (through a refund on access or purchases required to be a part of the network) - To include wireless access from community technology centers or libraries as part of the budget (although it was mentioned that the e-rate federal regulations may limit this) - Provide access to city facilities for a buildout. Fire boxes, police and fire towers, etc. - To go after funding that may help (federal tax revenue?) - Help get cooperation from Comcast, Verizon, etc. - To define the vision (access for everyone) - Access to lampposts and lights - Push for the Universities (which get many tax exemptions) to help with access - Provide cover for liability and abuse complaints (cover from the RIAA for example) The idea must be self sustaining - tech support options must be thought about - terms of service Access for EVERYONE! - May not be one business model - May not be one technology - Pour resources into literacy also, if you can't read, you can't use a computer - Everyone can be a content provider