Civil Defense - a weblog by Joshua Breitbart

Earlier this week, I encouraged you to take action to thwart the NYPD’s rewrite of the city’s overly vague parade rules. I objected not because of the content, but because of the process, calling it Singapore on the Hudson.

The NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Public Information sent this out Friday afternoon:

In view of comments already received on the proposed revision to Chapter 19 of Title 38 of the Official Compilation of Rules of the City of New York, the Police Departmwnt has withdrawn the proposed revisions regarding parade permits and will publish new ones in the City Record narrower in scope with a new hearing date. As a result, the public hearing scheduled for Wednesday, August 23, 2006 has been cancelled.

From what I understand they will simply raise the number of people that can constitute a parade from two to something like ten.

As far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t change a thing. If the NYPD is writing the rules, I object.

The NYPD should have less authority over parades and protests, not more.

Two of the bloggers I respect the most, Browfemipower and Nubian from blac(k)ademic, both of whom participated in the 2006 Allied Media Conference, have both moved their blogspot blogs to their own, self-hosted sites. That’s awesome.

It affirms a piece of advice I’ve shared with a couple of friends who recently started blogging: omnicrisis, and Zapagringo: start out with an independent url. It only costs $9 from godaddy.com, which offers free redirects. That way, when you’re ready to leave your mass-host behind, you will already have a separate identity. And you won’t be advertising your host as much in the meantime.

I haven’t been blogging for very long, though I have been supporting online journalism for quite a while through Indymedia (global, US, and NYC) and such. Before this blog, I was a writer for RNCwatch and CounterRecruiter.net (thanks to Mike Burke) but those were issue blogs, which is kind of different than finding a personal voice. Nevertheless, I’ve learned a few things and the first is that you share what you know as soon as possible because if you hold onto your knowledge it will just become outdated.

In addition to those two points – independent urls and say it now – here are some other things I was told or learned myself:

1. your voice is more unique than you think (Steve)
2. self-promotion (it is America, after all)
   - syndication (as through Indyblogs, NYC IMC, Philly IMC, and Philly Future)
   - linking: give and ye shall receive (remember to link to your own previous posts)
   - commenting: same thing; comments on a blog are like testimonials on Friendster
   - email. Some people send out a first notice to all of their contacts right away. I would wait until you’ve been at it for a while. Then send out a link to a particularly hot post and let people find the other good stuff on your site. If there is a person or group/listserv you want to read a particular article, send it out just to them.
3. regular readers will use RSS readers, so make sure your feed(s) are easy to find
4. post at least once a week (Sascha); don’t be afraid to take a break, but then get back into it
5. work on multiple posts at the same time, save drafts
6. if you finish a post after noon, save it and publish it in the morning
7. you already write more than you think; turn your IM chats or your email exchanges or your drunken rants into posts
8. do something to stand out and stay on target (Jed)
9. having an independent host is easier than you think (Steve)
10. having a platform of any kind obligates you to speak out on the most pressing issues of the day
11. don’t be afraid to say something that’s been said, especially if you were the one who said it; repetition is the lifeblood of blogging (but give credit with links, especially if you were the one who said it)
12. the digitization of the public sphere is the new jim crow (Antwuan, Brownfemipower)

Building on that last point, it’s important to support other people finding their own voice and platform. If all you see around you is dudes starting up blogs, you gotta do something about that. Don’t censor yourself. As I used to say when people complained that too much of Indymedia’s content was from the US, don’t push for less of the content you don’t want, push for more of the content you do want. In the scheme of things, we’re all still censored compared to corporate media and wealthy people.

On the other hand, some people might actually have something better or just different to do, even if they’re good writers, like Kat and Hannah. (I love it when they do post, though.) If blogging doesn’t float your boat or serve your long-term interests, I understand why you wouldn’t bother. So don’t push anyone too hard to do it.

But when someone does get started, give whatever support you can. I don’t get much traffic (maybe 50 visitors a day on average and 35-40 feeds), but every bit helps. So here are some more shoutouts:

• Becca writing about her life and her work at ILSR, including our collaborations on municipal wireless
• Kate, from whom I have already learned so much about Irish American politics
• and blixx, sharing his DJ sets, recipes, and thoughts on the wars

I think all three of them started using WordPress on my recommendation and I stand behind that. I’ve used Typepad, though not as an owner or administrator. Blogspot blogs all look the same to me, with the white on black. I like WordPress. It’s the newest, seems to promote popular control of the platform (if not open source in general), and has a very friendly interface. It’s easy to find your syndication feed, and they even make it easy to have feeds for different categories. I’ve encountered some bugs, but mostly all the functions are smooth.

I saw presentations from Blogspot, Typepad, and WordPress at the Webzine 2005 conference, all of whom gave me Indymedia flashbacks by saying they wanted to make it possible for the whole world to publish to the Internet. There are also Friendster, MySpace, and LiveJournal blogs, but those platforms all seem to want to be bigger than the sum of its users.

I got the best vibe from Matt’s presentation (Matt is the lead developer of WordPress) and they were offering beta access to their then-new hosted service, so I signed up. I didn’t do much with it until the National Summit for Community Wireless, when Steve gave me some encouragement and I realized I knew some things about Philly’s plans that no one else knew and that this very specific community was interested in.

It’s been fun to write more, especially with the encouragement of friends like Ibrahim, Chris, Hannah and especially Kat. Thanks!!!

The new law being drafted and prepared for enforcement by the NYPD would set a terrible precedent.

It’s a bad law, for sure. It greatly broadens the power of the NYPD to enforce it’s “parading without a permit” crime. Here’s what it says:

• Any group of two (yes, 2) or more cyclists or pedestrians traveling down a public street, who violate any traffic law, rule or regulation can be arrested for parading without a permit;
• Every group of 20 or more cyclists must obtain a permit and approved route from the NYPD;
• Every group of 35 or more pedestrians must obtain a permit and approved route from the NYPD.

This will turn New York City into Singapore on the Hudson. It will give the police the authority to arrest anyone on the street. They may already do this, but this will make it legitimate.

You and your friend jaywalk? Go to jail. You and a friend riding your bikes without bells, outside of bike lanes, or with your feet off the pedals? Go to jail. Not, go to jail on some trumped up charge. Go to jail as in, guilty as charged.

And that’s not even the real problem with this law. The city obviously needs new rules on parading after a judge struck down the overly-broad current statute the NYPD was using to arrest bike riders indiscriminately at the monthly Critical Mass rides.

The New York Civil Liberties Union has offered a much better solution, forming an independent agency charged with issuing parade and assembly permits, which it published as part of its analysis of police misconduct during the 2004 Republican National Convention.

Really, the First Amendment is the only permit we need. The police and the mayor forfeited their permitting authority when they so blatantly abused it in that summer of 2004, as confirmed recently in court.

Policing parades notwithstanding, the real problem of this new law is that it was written by the executive branch of our local government, not the legislative branch. There’s a name for that kind of government, and it’s not democracy.

The NYPD made the announcement on July 18, is holding an informational hearing on August 23 at their headquarters, and can put the measure into effect the next day.

It never has to go before City Council, the state legislature, or Congress. But it is written like a law, will have the effect of law, and violating it will be a crime punishable with at least a night in jail (or three nights, as people who “paraded without a permit” during the 2004 Republican National Convention received).

This is more than a further slide down the slope of high-pressure, sacrifice-your-civil-liberties policing we’ve seen throughout the current and previous Republican mayors. This is a dangerous new precedent that says the NYPD gets to write its own laws and decide how to enforce them.

We need to get City Council to stand up for itself and us:

1. Contact Speaker Quinn and tell her you oppose the proposed rules: http://www.nyccouncil.info/rightnow/contactspkr.cfm
2. Contact your City Councilmember, tell them you’re outraged over the NYPD’s proposed changes to the parade permit rules and ask your City Councilmember to speak out about them at the August 23rd hearing. Look up your Councilmember at: http://www.nyccouncil.info/constituent/index.cfm

If you want to take part in public events:

1. Speak at the public forum being held tonight, Thursday, August 17, at 7:00 pm at St. Mark’s Church.
2. Join a public rally before the NYPD hearing at 6:00 pm on Wednesday, August 23, at 1 Police Plaza.

For more information, visit Assemble for Rights NYC and Transportation Alternatives.

UPDATE: NYPD has withdrawn the first draft, which is why it’s important to object to the principle, not the content.

Here’s a fun thing to cheer up your Monday: a new political party is in formation in the United States. The Pirate Party of the United States is part of an international response to the crackdown on the sharing of intellectual and creative products.

I wrote about this issue briefly in June, but the main catalyst for the Pirate Party was the US-MPAA-backed Swedish raid on the file-sharing site The Pirate Bay back in the spring. Support for piracy and filesharing was already very high in Sweden – the Pirate Party already existed there – but this gave it a huge boost.

Apparently, the barriers to entry for a political party are very low in Sweden and the Pirate Party seems to be on the verge of actually capturing seats in the parliament, which could give it some leverage in shaping the government there.

They’ve also inspired allies to launch parties in Belgium, France, and Italy. There is also an international pro-piracy lobby.

The situation is very different in the US, of course, where third parties are relegated to the margins. It makes one question if that is the best way to build a movement around this issue here. On the other hand, one can imagine how this issue could energize young people here the way it does in Sweden.

The Bush administration is moving in the opposite direction, towards a more repressive online environment. Congress recently ratified the Convention on Cybercrime, a really bad treaty that basically requires the US to enforce other countries’ Internet laws. They’re on the verge of passing DOPA, the Deleting Online Predators Act, which would ban social networking sites (as defined by the FCC) in schools and libraries. These changes are in addition to the corporate-sponsored closing of the Internet that we know of as the loss of net neutrality.

The Pirate Party is focused on copyright reform, privacy, and net neutrality. This has the potential to be a very popular and radical undertaking if they can articulate their message in a plain and compelling way. It’s not easy and I don’t have any reason to assume that they will be able to do this, but I find an issue-based party more compelling than, for example, the Green Party, which just wants to be more progressive in general than the Democrats. I think issue-based third parties have historically had more impact on US politics, too.

Defending the Internet might just be enough to get this party off the ground – at least in Second Life.

There was a time when it seemed like everyone was following in Philadelphia’s footsteps. When Wireless Phildelphia accepted Earthlink’s bid to build, own, and operate a citywide wireless broadband network, it sparked a wave of enthusiasm. New developments in municipal wireless suggest that its debut may have been its crest.

When Earthlink won the Philly contract, it suddenly seemed that every major city was in negotiations with the Atlanta-based ISP. Minneapolis and San Francisco led the charge toward a model in which the corporation would pay for and own the entire network.

It was billed as a “no cost” way to get some community benefits in the form of “digital inclusion.” Because it is being pioneered in Philadelphia, this type of corporate-owned network is sometimes called the Philadelphia model. Its ascendance has less to do with the merit of the business model than with specific circumstances surrounding Wireless Philadelphia.

The committee Mayor Street appointed in August 2004 to make recommendations on a potential citywide wireless network originally considered five business models ranging from fully corporate, to a municipal utility, to a free community network.

At about the same time, an anti-municipal broadband bill was advancing in the Pennsylvania legislature, driven by Verizon. Incumbent phone companies had successfully pushed laws in a dozen or so statehouses that severely restricted or completely eliminated cities’ right to provide this service to their residents. (See this map for state by state information.)

The bill in PA (HB 30) came late in the legislative season, after people had taken notice of these new laws, and it ran smack into the most prominent wireless broadband project in the country. The popular outcry from Philadelphia created the very real possibility that Governor Rendell would veto the bill, so Verizon and the city compromised: Verizon agreed to waive its right of first refusal in Philadelphia, and the law went through.

The public argument for the law was that this, like most things, is something best left to the private sector. Even though Philly carved out space to choose whatever path it wanted, the pressure of this argument remained. Earthlink’s offer to remove the financial risk seemed especially appealing to people who were already taking a risk on a new technology. It certainly was appealing to City Council members who weren’t going to have to approve any funding for the network.

(A Comcast rep saw the pressure from the incumbents as helpful. ‘The city never would have gotten a deal this good if we hadn’t have gotten involved,’ he told me.)

It turned out, Pennsylvania was the end of the line for the anti-muni-broadband laws. In Indiana, an anti-muni provision was stripped from an otherwise terrible “state franchising” bill. At the federal level, pending Telecommunications Act rewrites in both the House and Senate would put an end to all existing and future municipal broadband bans.

The wave crested at the same moment that muni-broadband broke through with the Philadelphia project. That timing magnified the impact of the anti-muni ideology. While it faded in the state capitols, it now had a place among wifi task forces who had to use the Philadelphia model as the starting point for their discussions.

This so heavily biased the discussion that it seemed to close off some of the most exciting possibilities of wireless broadband, especially the prospect of direct community or municipal ownership. The debate over the future of the open Internet has shown how critical this is. Infrastructure ownership is the only real leverage you can have. Inexpensive and easy to install wireless technology makes this possible.

Wireless technology is so accessible that it was invented and cultivated at the community level before municipalities became interested. However, instead of partnering with the pioneering community wireless networks, the Philadelphia model pushed cities to see corporations like Earthlink as their most appropriate partner.

After roughly a year, this trend is over.

The momentum came up against nearly-immediate resistance in San Francisco. The mayor’s team there rushed into a deal with an Earthlink-Google partnership that must have seemed freer-than-free: they would pay for and own the network and offer a no-charge, ad-supported, barely-broadband tier.

Community advocates jumped on the lack of financial support for digital inclusion, the disregard for existing community wireless networks (CWNs) and community technology centers (CTCs), and the failure to protect privacy. As many as four of the Supervisors (they’re equivalent to city council members) are now interested in true municipal ownership. The city is holding a hearing on August 15 to examine this possibility.

Other cities are taking note. Berkeley seems to be viewing its neighbor’s Earthlink ventures with skepticism. It is now investigating the much more ambitious option of a municipally owned fiber-to-the-premises network. St. Paul is taking a deliberative approach in its broadband initiative, mainly out of concern about what it would give up by following Minneapolis’s lead in to a corporate-owned network. (For a great debate on the merits of public ownership, see this thread from MuniWireless.com.)

At the state level, the debate has shifted so dramatically that proponents of pervasive broadband can now consider rolling back some of the restrictions (for example via State Representative Mike Sturla’s “green light” bill in Harrisburg, HB 2466) while they wait to see if Congressional legislation pre-empts them all.

Boston’s Wireless Task Force, while not asking for the city to spend its own money, has recommended a citywide wireless network owned by a not-for-profit corporation that will not be a service provider, only a wholesaler. Unlike the Philadelphia model, in which Earthlink is the primary service provider and also sets the terms of wholesale access, this model offers a level playing field for all service providers. Under this proposal, the barriers to becoming an ISP will be very low compared to Philadelphia.

The barriers to ISP entry are not insurmountable in Philly, but they exist. Under the Wireless Philadelphia-Earthlink contract, potential service providers must pay a $5000 fee and prepay $10,000 toward future purchases of wholesale network access. Plus, Wireless Philadelphia only has indirect influence over the wholesale rate and terms of access. And there will be significant volume discounts for large ISPs, putting local companies and community organizations at a competitive disadvantage.

Boston task force members say that an association of neighbors could meet the threshold to be an ISP under their model. The wholesale rate would be the same for all retailers.
What Boston is looking at is more in line with the early thinking in Philadelphia than with the final outcome, the Philadelphia model. In other words, all of the options are back on the table. The pressure from the incumbents and the blind believers in the private sector has eased.

Read more of my articles on wireless. (Thanks to Becca Vargo Daggett for her help with this article.)

If you’re in the Pacific Northwest or care about community media, there are two events you need to put on your agenda.

The first is Prometheus Radio Project’s 10th barnraising, this one with PCUN - Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (Treeplanters and Farmworkers United of the Northwest) in Woodburn, Oregon, outside of Portland.

(LPFM stations are restricted to small towns because of a piece of bad legislation pushed through Congress by the National Association of Broadcasters and NPR, which Prometheus is working to overturn.)

Check out PCUN’s awesome promotional film for the station.

I won’t be at this one since it’s on the other side of the country, but I’ve been to a couple and they are loads of fun with lots of hands-on work and great people. If you can be there next weekend, August 18-20, I highly recommend it. They just extended their pre-registration deadline.

The second major event in that region is the Northwest Community Radio Summit in Seattle, September 15-17. College and community radio stations from Oregon to Alaska will be coming together to build a regional network for collaboration and content-sharing.
I love network-building. Plus, the radio summit is being put on by some of the same folks from Reclaim The Media who put on the counter-conference to the NAB meeting in Seattle in 2002.

That was one of the most enjoyable media conferences I’ve been to: thirteen separate pirate stations set up throughout the city in what they called a “mosquito fleet.” I don’t know if any pirates will be there, probably, but I’m sure it will be a good time for all.

I’ve gotten a lot of comments, most of them off-line and in-person, about my post, “Snarky won’t save the Internet.”

Most recently, someone pointed to an editorial in today’s LA Times, “Weighing High-Tech Bills in Analog,” that seems to be inspired by the snarkfest. It takes as its starting point Congress’s ignorance when it comes to media technology, so one could imagine the “series of tubes” meme giving the editors the idea.

This editorial is actually evidence of exactly the problem I was talking about. The reason we are getting bad policy from Congress is not because Senators and Representatives are stupid are old, but because they are pushing legislation on behalf of the phone companies. (It’s like saying, as the article does, that the purpose of the 1996 Telecommunications Act was to spur competition but, shockingly, wound up leading to consolidation.)

The proper response to the problem with tech legislation isn’t a comic book explaining the Internet to members of Congress, it’s lobbying reform and grassroots pressure.

I didn’t write the original anti-snark piece because I am opposed to funny. I am in favor of humor as a weapon against a more-powerful enemy or to get someone’s attention before following up with more information. So I drew back my anti-snarkism a bit when The Daily Show followed up it’s anti-Stevens segment that misinformed people about the dangers to the open internet with one that more clearly explained the issue.

I’ll also give a big shout to Prometheus Radio Project for their “Series of Fallopian Tubes” t-shirts because they (a) put “Senator Stevens: Don’t Tie Our Tubes!” on the back so it wasn’t just an inside joke, (b) debuted them at the male-dominated HOPE conference where feminism is more radical than net neutrality, and (c) are using the shirts as a fundraiser for digital expansion.

But to the people who scoff at the stupidity of their enemies and chuckle at their own brilliance while doing nothing to actually shift the balance of power, I say bah. Pooh on you. (Maybe I should have labeled my enemy the smugfest rather than the snarkfest.)

While we’re on the subject of net neutrality, can someone tell me when we start pushing for the regulatory scheme we really want for this series of tubes?

Net neutrality is actually a retreat from “open access,” which is what we had before the Supreme Court’s Brand X decision. Open access applied to the Internet when we were using dial-up over and it was classified as a “telecommunications service” like the telephone. With the telephone, that means owners of the lines can’t prioritize their customers’ calls over those of their competitors’ (net neutrality or, as it’s known in the phone world, “common carrier”), but it also means they have to lease their lines to other phone service providers (open access). Open access is how you can have real competition without having a dozen different wires running under your street, through your backyard, and into your house.

As Internet users moved from dial-up to broadband, there was a period where this same sort of leased access seemed to apply. Brand X was an independent Internet Service Provider to whom the cable companies would not provide access to their lines, citing the FCC’s classification of their broadband Internet over cable lines as an “information service” and thus not subject to the regulations of phone lines. The Supreme Court upheld that classification.

Soon after, the phone companies petitioned the FCC to provide the same classification to their DSL broadband service, even though they were still using the same phone lines, and the FCC agreed.

As I understand it, the common carrier provisions were given a sunset of this September to allow for some period of transition before all of the independent ISPs get wiped out and all of our Internet traffic falls into the hands of the phone companies. So we are in the weird position of needing a new law to preserve the status quo.

In a Congressional climate like today’s, we’ll take net neutrality, but what we really want is open access. That would get us out from under the broadband duopoly and allow competition to address problems like bad customer service, high prices, or an internet taking five days to get to your inbox. (The other thing that could accomplish this is a community or municipal broadband infrastructure to rival the corporate infrastructure. More on this later in the week.)

It’s hot. All day outside yesterday, I felt like I was perpetually on the wrong side of an air conditioner. On the local news in Philly they’re talking about a blowtorch effect. There wasn’t a blowtorch effect when we were kids. We had El Niño, which sounds downright quaint.

To drive myself crazy, I regularly compare the weather.com Current Temperature map to the Homeland Security Threat Level chart:

. .

These guys gotta talk to each other about this.

(To keep myself sane, I’ve been watching the videos for Crazy and Lighters Up on YouTube.)

How’s your refrigerator doing? Having trouble keeping things cold, if it’s like mine or many of my friends’. Forget about making ice. If you drop a cube on the floor, you pick it up and use it because it is a precious resource.

This is no joke. We’re fast approaching a world where ice will be an expensive commodity. Ice is water plus energy, both of which are becoming scarce and energy is becoming expensive. The price of natural gas, which fills the elasticity of the electricity market, has gone up more than 30 percent in the last week.

We need to learn how to survive in a hot city using less energy. The recent wave of blackouts has made this abundantly clear. The blackouts in St. Louis and Queens are revealing again how unreliable the current power structures are and what that means for survival.

People’s dissatisfaction with their power companies has been in the news in Queens and St. Louis, but only in a local context. I barely hear reporters even discuss the 2003 blackout.

Mickey Z, who’s from Queens, wrote a great piece, titled “Power (Outage) to the People,” on the ten-day blackout there that hit over 100,000 people. He points out that a deteriorated infrastructure combined with the increased electricity demands of gentrification makes for a bad combination.

Our energy infrastructure is in bad shape. I was in New York the week before Queens went dark and happened to be walking through a stretch of Park Slope where the streetlights were out. It wasn’t clear why until a manhole that Con Ed was working around started shooting out flames, ostensibly from a transformer explosion.

Here’s a crappy photo I took with my cell phone a few seconds after the 20-foot-high flames had eased back:

In St. Louis, Ameren can’t trim the trees around their power lines fast enough. Folks there got the double whammy of a powerful storm that knocked down those trees onto their homes as well as power lines and roads, followed by the week-long blackout affecting over 500,000 people.

In both instances, as we saw with Katrina, disasters like blackouts and heatwaves are deadly for the elderly and the sick. The poorest people get hit the hardest and the people on the edge – like small business in Queens or the working poor in St. Louis – get pushed over. These are the victims of disaster capitalism.

(Another Katrina comparison that came up recently in discussion, which seems relevant here, is Israel’s declaration that everyone who doesn’t leave southern Lebanon is a Hezbollah terrorist. The most vulnerable people – the poor, sick, the elderly – have no choice but to remain.)

At least in Queens, there is a limit to the monetary damages these folks can collect from the utility: $7000 for a business and $350 for a residence. That’s in the agreement between the utility and the state’s Public Service Commission. I understand why you’d want to have some limit on damages in the contract, but that is not enough money.

At least one person is suing for damages, alleging Con Ed did not implement improvements after a 1999 blackout in Washington Heights. (I remember that as an intentional shutdown, the measure that would have limited this blackout. Con Ed was criticized for powering down a poor neighborhood to keep the wealthy rest of Manhattan online. Kind of like flooding the 9th Ward to save the French Quarter.)

Personally, I don’t see why the caps on penalties should remain if Con Ed is not fulfilling service level agreements. Last year, folks on Staten Island waited for power to come back for twice as long as Con Ed promised it would take in its agreement with the PSC. (Municipal broadband and internet-as-utility proponents, take note.)

Following Hurricane Katrina, I wrote about the failure of government to address the current disaster of poverty and racism, labeling it “Katrina in slow motion.” These blackouts are a kind of Katrina at a walking pace.

When I heard that New Orleans had been listed as the North American city most in danger from Global Warming, I wondered which city was second on the list so we could start fortifying it. When Hurricane Rita flooded Galveston I thought I had my answer.

Now I see that it might be St. Louis or Chicago: a city with sharply rising temperature and steadily failing electricity infrastructure. Perhaps Sacramento or New York City. It doesn’t matter really. We’re all on the list.

The Current Disaster inspired the name for this blog because in it, I discussed the need to prepare ourselves to take care of our own communities, since disaster preparedness is a form of redistribution of wealth and the powers that be are doing such a poor job of it.

We need a civil defense corps, not to protect against a Soviet invasion, but ready to assist our neighbors in times of disaster. Most people do this as a matter of course, but we should be training ourselves to be better at it, learning from the experiences of New Orleans after Katrina, New York after September 11, and St. Louis after the Ameren Backout.

And Beirut. Before Israel began it’s invasion, those folks were living in the Paris of Middle East, with new development projects around the city and a bustling economy. Some people have speculated that destroying this economic rival must have been part of the motivation for the attack, otherwise why damage so much of the Lebanese civillian infrastructure, but the important point to make here is that no city is safe from cataclysm of one sort or another.

I have heard so many people making apocalyptic comments lately, looking at the wars and the heatwaves. “Is this what the end of the world looks like?” they ask. I don’t think so. It’s a bad time and it’s our time, but this is not the last era of the earth.

While we adjust to it, we must also plant the seeds for the next era, which will surely come, but will only be better than this one if we make it so.

Free Press has begun distributing a call for sessions for their upcoming conference. I just finished reading the lengthy guidelines and, to be honest, the read made me want to not submit a proposal. The tone and content are pretty negative.

I’ve talked to a number of people who didn’t have such a great time at the last conference. (Read my and others’ reportbacks.) Some are discussing how to effect change in the conference style or content, including who gets to speak.

The primary way to do that is through that proposal submission form. I plan to help draft proposals on wireless broadband, license redistribution, and something along the lines of the “Is this what democracy looks like?” discussion from the AMC, as well as a handful of powerful speakers. (Limit two proposals per person.)
A secondary way is by submitting a suggestion for a topic or speaker, which I definitely plan to do, as well.

The deadline for submitting proposals is really soon: August 15. I hope they extend it past Labor Day. I’m sure they have a difficult and lengthy review process they need to start, but August is tough and the proposal form is intimidating.

A third way to shape the conference could be through the outreach committee, or The OC. I understand Free Press plans to form one again this year.

Last year, they formed a committee of five people to assist in outreach and scholarship allotment. The five people were myself, Malkia, Lian Cheun from Center for Third World Organizing, Val Benavidez from the League of Young Voters, and Tony Riddle from Alliance for Community Media. We each received a stipend for our work, a scholarship budget of our own, and a say in distributing the balance of their scholarship funds.

I think The OC did a good job in getting people to the conference, but we and Free Press came up short in providing support to folks once they got to St. Louis. There was a lack of relevant content and friendly spaces.

I believe Free Press recognizes that, but members of this year’s outreach committee will be well placed (and funded) to advocate that FP apply the same process of affirmative action to the presenters as they do to the attendees.

That’s key because right now there are some who doubt that the conference is for them and would not want to be in a position of convincing people to attend. I think there is, in fact, some divergence in the movement, at least from what I see moving between Free Press circles and the Allied Media Conference constituency. (More on this in future posts to this blog, I expect.)

Personally, I figure if you plan to attend at all, you should submit a proposal. Because you know what they say: if you don’t vote, you don’t count.

The Philadelphia wireless project is shifting gears. As the network takes shape, the founders are out.

Philadelphia Chief Information Officer Dianah Neff, credited with conceiving the project, is reportedly about to resign. The Inquirer paints her legacy as one tainted by scandal: an aide whom she kept on the payroll even though he was ineligible for city employment; and an $18 million computerized billing system that doesn’t work.

My friend and colleague Becca Vargo Dagget from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance pointed out how absurd that the city would risk $18 million on the billing system but be unwilling to risk the same amount to own a wireless broadband network.

Check out Becca’s defense of municipally-owned wireless networks in this back-and-forth on the Muniwireless blog. (ILSR is in Minneapolis, by the way, where the next Muniwireless Conference will be October 23.) The post is about Boston’s new proposal, which is similar to the original idea in Philly: having a non-profit pay for, but not operate the network.

Anyway, most people seem to think Neff is getting out while the getting-out’s good and will soon be making even more than her $193,000 salary in the private sector. Another possibille motivation is her bad health, which kept her away from the City Council hearings on the network.

In related news, Wireless Philadelphia recently announced the hiring of a new CEO. Greg Goldman replaces interim CEO Derek Pew who negotiated the contract with Earthlink.

Goldman most recently worked for a real estate firm, but formerly ran a feed-the-hungry type non-profit and worked at the Philadelphia Foundation. He sounds like a non-profiteer who will focus on fundraising. According to the job description, he’ll be making about $175,000 a year.

See the Wireless Philadelphia press release [pdf] on Goldman’s hire. It will be interesting to see if they post any other job announcements.

There will be a new CIO, though it will probably be an internal hire. Earthlink is starting to build the physical structure of the network. Wireless Philadelphia will be seeking community partners, beginning to shape it’s digital inclusion programs. If you want to play a role in defining how those things are going to work, now is the time to speak up.
Read more of my articles on wireless.