Neighborhood Bloging and Wireless

Update: Alan informs me that he picked it up before the Portland Communique. Woops, my bad.

There has been a lot of talk in the Portland blog community lately about decentralized neighborhood bloging. I think it all started with Sam Churchill's article on Daily Wireless. Then Portland Communique wrote about the issue. Then Alan over at Bluehole wrote a quick entry about it (which was the first to get my attention).

At first I didn't think I would have a lot to say about this issue. I think there are some great ideas being discussed and I agree with pretty much everything that is being said. After reading through a few of the articles I ended up at the Personal Telco Project page. This is one of my favorite community projects. These guys are solving that last mile problem and doing it on the cheap. Then I stumbled on a page about localized content and this particular sentence:

“many nodes have local wikis, which can be used as a means of community interaction”

Bingo. The light bulb went on over my head and I saw something. Not just decentralized neighborhood bloging, but WIRLESS decentralized neighborhood bloging. Now I am not the first to think of this, I am sure, but this just hit me like a ton of bricks. Why not have city funded, free wireless access in every neighborhood in the city. Run a wiki or a blog or some kind of decentralized neighborhood content creation thing on those access points, editable only by people attached to that access point. Allow anyone to view the content generated.

The reason I am sure that I am not the first to think of this is because the same Sam Churchill that wrote the article on the Daily Wireless, wrote up an extremely compelling proposal for a University Park Wireless community network.

The first question that I think needs to be answered is how we get wireless cable computers into the hands of those who can’t afford them. I think the answer, in part, lies in the hands of groups like Free Geek. Free Geek will give you a free Linux based PC in exchange for 24 hours of volunteer service. Now imagine equipping these computers with a cheap wireless card. Now you have a super cheap wireless access computer.

I think it is important that the City of Portland think outside the box when they start working on community web pages. It is not enough to think of neighborhood information access as simply an issue of centralized content creation. You must work to involve the community in the creation of the content and you must seek out interesting ways to distribute the content to the community.

Posted by Noah Brimhall at February 17, 2004 03:04 PM