Digital Inclusion Day
Back in Minneapolis, events were off to a roaring start with the additional of a Sunday symposium on Digital Inclusion. The day-long event tackled issues including how to define digital inclusion, community benefits agreements, partnering and collaboration models, creating a nationally peered network, and an "Open Tech" workshop. The conversations were illuminating, and the knowledge gained and connection made, quite rewarding. Esme Vos, of MuniWireless.com, got things started with her keynote.
had been doing in Minneapolis, MN; the Highlights included hearing about the work that Becca Vargo Daggett and Catherine Settaniopen source and open hardware technologies that Ash Dyer (from MIT) was using in his work. Following the day's events, there was a tremendous amount of excitement in building a coalition of folks to work on Digital Inclusion (and, in particular, community benefits agreements) in other places around the country. I had a great discussion with Charles Benton, Chairman of the Benton Foundation and other community organizers from the Chicago area to discuss bringing the successes of Minneapolis to Illinois. On Sunday evening, conversations continued over an intimate dinner at a local community organizer's house -- where strategies for interconnecting municipal networks, information on next-generation wireless technologies, and tactics for organizing around digital inclusion efforts were swapped by a dozen suit-wearing, smores-cooking, bonfire-jumping wireless leaders.
Pre-Conference Workshop & Opening Events
The 6-hour pre-conference workshop day was divided into three tracks ("Applications & Strategies," "Safety," and "Service Organizations") each of which had three sessions. I found the sessions to be a remarkable departure from the more participatory Digital Inclusion Day festivities -- while there's a time and place for the more traditional "panel" format, I found myself spending most of my attention in back-channel discussions (IRC, gAIM, Jabber, Gizmo) with other conference participants. It was widely held among the folks I spoke with that the best parts of the conference were in the breaks in-between the panels -- not that the information wasn't useful, but rather that far too often the presentations were either very service glossings of far more complex projects, technologies, and deployments, or felt like vendor sales pitches.
During the afternoon, I had the pleasure of interviewing a truly legendary telecommunications lawyer, Jim Baller, and Civitium founder, Greg Richardson about their views on working at the cutting edge of the municipal broadband field and how they see things developing over then next decade. These interviews (along with interviews from Becca Vargo Daggett and Catherine Settanni) will be part of a general survey of municipal wireless "influencers" that will be coming out in the next issue of MuniWireless magazine.
By the evening, a group of us decided to go out for Indian food (in solidarity with our fellows who were meeting half-way around the world in India) and discuss the COMMONS Project and how one might go about interlinking municipal and community networks around the country. It was a wonderful discussion with insights from KC Claffy (of CAIDA), Amy Blanchard (from Cisco), David Keyes (from the City of Seattle), and Andrew Odlyzko (from the Digital Technology Center).
The Main Conference
For me, the main highlights from the main conference were the conversations with folks, the "white hat hacking," and the post-conference beergarten and chocolate-fest. The presentations and topics covered were similar to the pre-conference workshop in tenor and depth -- though the "Mayors Driving Public Broadband" event was definitely a must-see. One issue that kept coming up again and again over the course of the entire conference and was reiterated in numerous conversations I had with conference participants is the dearth of objective and honest information available to municipal wireless decision-makers. What little information there is, often comes either from the vendors themselves, or from "analysts" and "strategists" and "consultants" -- many of whom appear to have, at best, a very limited understanding of the technologies and business models they are writing about. Even worse, having seen a good amount of their work, these groups tend to charge hundreds (and often thousands) of dollars for reports and synopses that lack both depth and comprehensiveness.
I'm not naming names, but there were also a few white-hat hackers in the audience at the MuniWireless Conference who decided to see what they could see. They didn't hack into any systems or disable anything -- they simple downloaded a free nifty program called Ethereal and monitored unencrypted traffic at the conference. I blogged a bit about this while it was happening, but it was quite surprising to see both how non-security conscious participants were, and how much information could be collected within a very short time span -- logins and passwords, entire e-mails (both sent and received), instant messaging conversations (even my own since I was not utilizing Off-the-Record messaging while I await the new patch for gAIM 2.0).
There is a tremendous amount of useful information that people can glean from an open network (basically, anything that is not encrypted), it's important to recognize the positive uses that these technologies can be put to (for example, reminding people to be aware that unencrypted communications can be picked up by anyone running a program like Ethereal in your favorite public hotspot). On the other hand, it's also equally important to cut through the paranoia often surrounding debates over network security -- clearly some of the "experts" foisting expensive security systems to an unsuspecting public aren't all too concerned about this in their own broadband use. Since it is extremely easy to secure your own computer using freely available technologies (I mention some tools on my blog), the problem is more about education than the implementation of some (often expensive) technological fix.
At the end of the conference, a large group of us (Digital Inclusion Day presenters, conference organizers, and technophiles) gathered at the hotel bar to relax, take stock of the previous several days, and brainstorm. Aside from being a rather raucous crew, a lot of great ideas came out of this post-conference gathering. Joshua Breitbart, from The Ethos Group and a regular contributor to Digital Communities, got to thinking about how conference participants might help out local community organizations in the Conference's host city and proposed a rather audacious fundraiser for charity involving his head, googles, and a chocolate fountain. Martyn Levy, of RoamAD provided seed money out of his own pocket and proceeded to convince other beergarten attendees to pledge donations to charity if Josh would go through this his stunt. A contract was drawn up (on a cocktail napkin, of course), signed and witnessed. $500 (and counting) has already been pledged, and we are now eagerly awaiting the next MuniWireless Conference (currently scheduled for Dallas, Texas in 2007).
