Civil Defense - a weblog by Joshua Breitbart

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People’s Production House spent much of the last two weeks in Biloxi and New Orleans, working with grantees of the Ms. Foundation in the Gulf Coast. My colleagues (I was holding down the fort in NYC) worked with local residents to produce radio segments about their lives and the ongoing process of recovery, leaving them with production equipment, new skill-sets, and customized how-to materials.

It looked a little something like this…

… but I assume it sounded a bit different in the doing. That video was shot and edited by renown movement videographer Jacquie Soohen, over the course of a single day at Renaissance Village. Thanks, Jacquie!

Renaissance Village is the largest FEMA trailer park in the country with over 500 families (built by The Shaw Group, a large Louisiana firm cozy with Bush, on a no-bid contract after Katrina). The residents are understandably distrustful of outsiders, especially journalists. But there is an amazing youth center there and Abdulai Bah and Deepa Fernandes from People’s Production House have, over time, been welcomed into the park’s community as allies.

We have the ability to expand on this partnership and make some more great radio, but we need to raise a bit of money to make it happen.

The next step would be to build a direct relationship between the peer trainers of Radio Rootz (People’s Production House’s youth program) with the youth of the Teen Learning Center. Learning from people their own age is the best way to cement the Renaissance Village youth’s skills and desire for media making. And it would certainly expand the Rootz trainers’ abilities. (Rootz peer trainers are New York City high school students or recent graduates who have spent at least a year in the Rootz program.)

If you would like to support this effort, please consider making a donation of $50 or $100 through our secure online donation page.

Thank you!

Michael Maranda posted a comment recently to my testimony before the New York City Broadband Advisory Committee. He asked me to expand on one of my recommendations:

• Promote horizontal relationships among stakeholders rather than hub-and-spoke relationships that all connect to this committee or to any one person or organization.

The original promise in Philadelphia was to tie the city together with “invisible thread.” That’s what Dianah Neff told National Geographic. It hasn’t happened.

In planning the network and passing it through City Council, Wireless Philadelphia solicited input and testimony from a variety of nonprofit organizations. All of those organizations care about the issue of Internet usage and all work with overlapping constituencies. Yet Wireless Philadelphia did not take any steps to foster relationships among them that would encourage synergistic collaborations.

Instead, WP is forming “Wireless Internet Partnerships” or WIPs, a series of one-one-one relationships between Wireless Philadelphia and individual organizations. I am not aware of any plans to connect these WIPs to each other so the groups can form their own partnerships. At best, maybe we’ll see a WIP cocktail hour.

Ideally, the horizontal relationships would extend beyond the organizational level. I’d like to see local conventions where all of the users of the network could gather, and the people who make up these nonprofits’ constituencies could get to know each other. I think these municipal wireless projects will benefit by emphasizing their local-ness and I think the users/local residents will benefit from having stronger social bonds.

Unfortunately, I don’t think Wireless Philadelphia or Earthlink want their customers to have the capacity for collective action or self-management. Not surprising for a for-profit company with meager customer service. But the nonprofit should be trying to build community, not disempower users.

The problem for Wireless Philadelphia is that the only reason for them to exist is to mediate the relationships between the City and Earthlink, Earthlink and the poor residents of Philadelphia, and the WIPs and Earthlink. If all of those entities could relate directly to each other, they’d quickly realize there is no reason for WP to exist.

I think the system in Minneapolis, where the Minneapolis Digital Inclusion Fund Advisory Committee has just released it’s RFP, is better, but not perfect. There, the people that pushed for digital inclusion funding organized themselves, though the efforts were soon co-opted into an official “Task Force.” The result is a community-advised fund at the Minneapolis Foundation, funded primarily through a revenue-sharing agreement with US Internet, the local network operator.

The participants in that Advisory Committee have horizontal relationships with each other instead of all having separate relationships with a new nonprofit, as in Philadelphia. However, I can’t find any list of the members of the committee online (though I know Peter Fleck is one because he’s blogged about it). That makes me concerned that those relationships won’t grow beyond the Committee’s boundaries.

If they want to push that network further, they are going to be swimming upstream. The process of soliciting grant applications from 501(c)3 organizations is notorious for pitting groups against one another and creating secretive one-to-one relationships between applicants and funders.

Minniapolis Digital Inclusion Advisory Committee should consider setting up something like GiveMeaning.com – not to let people vote for recipients of the Committee’s funds, but to promote awareness of the broad variety of initiatives people in the city are doing and to give those initiatives an avenue to raise additional funds.

Last Monday, the New York City Broadband Advisory Committee gathered to hear testimony from the Department of Education’s new Chief Information Officer, Ted Brodheim. Mr. Brodheim is highly regarded, having previously worked on Wall Street at JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley.

His testimony was very interesting. He discussed the potential for web-based tools to return collaboration to the learning process now that the NYC public schools are no longer neighborhood-based. But the DOE is not implementing any such projects because they cannot do so equitably, given students’ varying levels of access to the Internet. He also very clearly said that “market forces will not address this [inequity] on their own.”

Unfortunately, even though the meetings of the NYC BAC are open to the public, there was no way you could have known about it beforehand so there was no way the public could have actually attended. In other words, the meeting wasn’t public at all.

There was no public announcement of the meeting. Nothing on their official website. No “E-Update for the Committee on Technology in Government of the New York City Council.”

I have no idea how many other of these non-public meetings the Committee has held. I only found out about it through happenstance at the last minute. (I took extensive notes, which you can read at the Digital Expansion website.)

For the Broadband Advisory Committee to hold de facto private meetings is both shameful and counterproductive. The so-called public hearings – held during the day on work days and publicized primarily through email – have not been much better, as Antwuan Wallace pointed out at the Brooklyn hearing.

When I testified before the Committee, I emphasized the need for an open and participatory process. They are clearly failing in that regard, but they are losing more than just the full range of perspectives. They are sacrificing perhaps their best chance at having their recommendations taken seriously and acted upon.

The final part of last week’s meeting was an unfocused discussion about the Committee’s purpose and what form their final report should take. It seems apparent that no one is steering the ship.

From what I can tell, the reason they did not issue any public announcement about the meeting is not out of malice or sneakiness. It seems to be because no one is tasked with keeping the public informed. I’m sure it’s all they can do to keep the members informed about when and where the meetings will be.

I’ll write more soon about what might come out of this process, but right now they are working from a position of weakness.

One other note: I learned at the meeting that Bruce Lai, currently Council Member Gale Brewer’s Chief of Staff, is leaving his position to work for Mr. Brodheim at DOE. That’s a loss for proponents of universal affordable broadband, but a gain for the children of New York City.

With a series of bills recently introduced in Congress, the media reform movement’s DC wing has finally gone on the offensive. The Community Broadband Act, the Broadband Data Improvement Act, and the Local Community Radio Act would break down significant barriers to expanding community media throughout the country.

“Up to this point with a GOP Congress, it’s been all about blocking the bad stuff,” Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott said.

A list of their campaigns bears that out, imploring people to Save The Internet, Stop Postal Rate Hikes, Rescue Internet Radio and Protect Public Media. Now, after four years of damage control, Free Press and its allies are starting to push for an expansion of local media and for new tools to hold media corporations accountable.

The Community Broadband Act, sponsored by Representatives Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Fred Upton (R-MI), would authorize municipalities to build their own broadband networks. It would override bans of such projects on the books in 14 states. The League of Cities and other local advocates have pushed for the federal law to return their authority and flexibility to address local gaps in broadband deployment.

Pushing for proactive changes opens the way for a fundamentally different relationship between lobbyists in DC and community activists. The process of blocking bad legislation in Congress or flawed FCC regulations has put the DC groups at the helm with grassroots organizations helping with education and mobilization. We are beginning to see a more balanced partnership, with the legislative wonks responding to needs that communities have defined for themselves – removing legislative barriers and increasing access to helpful information.

The Broadband Data Improvement Act, sponsored by Daniel Inouye (D-HI) in the Senate and Ed Markey (D-MA) in the House, would correct serious flaws in the way the federal government measures broadband Internet availability and usage, making it easier for consumers to hold providers accountable. The FCC currently counts as broadband any connection of 200 kbps, which is closer to dial-up speeds than today’s standard connections over DSL or cable. It also counts an entire zip code as having broadband access as long as a single individual in that zip code has it.

The Digital Expansion Initiative, my program at People’s Production House, is partnering with the NYU Department of Environmental Medicine to conduct a citywide phone survey to get decent data on of Internet usage in New York City. These statistics will not give a perfect picture, which is why we are also partnering with community organizations to interview people who have limited access to the Internet. But the survey is a critical piece of the project, since we cannot interview everyone and we need to have a sense of how our interviewees’ experiences are. The Broadband Data Improvement Act would give everyone access to meaningful data on Internet usage, making it easier to identify which communities should be engaged in processes to expand participation in the online world.

If the improved data collection reveals inequities in Internet access, the Community Broadband Act will be key to addressing them. Action by municipal governments has become a key tactic for promoting high speed Internet usage where private companies do not offer the service or offer it at a prohibitively high price.

This trend of proactive legislation will continue into the fall. The bipartisan Local Community Radio Act of 2007 could double or even triple the number of low power FM stations on the dial, according to Prometheus Radio Project, which helps build LPFM stations and is advocating for the legislation. It would also permit new stations in major urban areas – everywhere except New York, LA, and Chicago.

“Those who believe that policy change starts from the grassroots believe that a victory of this magnitude is more than just a media reform milestone, but a chance to build real, lasting institutions that will help people,” Prometheus’s Hannah Sassaman said. “Those people will lead the media policy fights of the future.”

The bill corrects a shortcoming in the law from 2000 that originally created the LPFM license category. In response to pressure from National Public Radio and industry lobbyists, who claimed the new stations would cause interference, Congress limited the new licenses to sparsely populated areas with equally sparse radio dials. Congress initiated a study that disproved the industry claims, but never followed up – until Prometheus and its allies in DC began a push to change the law.

New community media outlets, in turn, will make it easier to hold the line if the tide turns back in favor of incumbent corporations. The people who benefit from these new laws will be able to come to DC in the future to push for further positive reforms.

“Damn straight,” says Sassaman. “Community activists have proven that they are hotshot lobbyists.”