I am a community representative on the Digital Inclusion Fund Advisory Committee and if you drop by often you may have read this article when we were looking for proposals for our very first funding cycle.

I now have forty-five proposals to go thr…

I just moved to Philly and have been trying to read up on your WP reporting (so that I can understand what it’s all about politically, of course:). And very practically speaking, to see if I should sign up with Earthlink/WP. In trying to choose an ISP, I’m wondering if I should go with someone like comcast (expensive), or with with WP (relatively affordable yet shady). Have you heard any feedback about the performance of their service? What do you recommend to someone who wants to be mindful of where they put their dollar?

-mL

If I were to characterize the relationship between government and the nonprofit sector in the two cities I use as examples, I would say that in Philadelphia it is more a situation of patronage and in Minneapolis (which I don’t know as well) it’s more collaborative. Historically, government has not done as much for people in a place like Philly as it has in the upper Midwest.

So in Philadelphia, the Wireless Philadelphia Community Advisory Board went from looking for applications, as Derek Pew said early on, to having its members appointed by each City Councilperson. And Clifton Roscoe, Earthlink’s Project Manager for Philadelphia, ended up on the board of People’s Emergency Center (the one organization in Philly that had both the technical expertise and community connections to shape the WP network, if that had been a goal).

In Minneapolis, the Digital Inclusion self-starters became the official city task force, more or less. I said “co-opted” above partly because this happened in a pretty indelicate way, but also because I am a jaded New Yorker.

Although that kind of suspicion is probably universal here, you’ll find just about every kind of relationship among nonprofits and government agencies in this city. If I had to summarize NYC I’d say, if you’re going to play, you have to play big.

However, I think that we have to be careful of suggesting that one city’s strategy can be successfully imitated in another municipality. That is the mistake that Earthlink itself is making. Just as our city charters and budgets are similar, but different, every aspect of municipal culture may be unique to a city. While learning about other municipalities’ solutions, we must consider the values of our own communities to determine whether those solutions are appropriate for us.

There are real differences in how nonprofits and community groups currently work with and respond to their local governments. In some cities, the nonprofit sector is organized to promote and develop local government initiatives and in other places, nonprofit and community groups work to challenge or improve local government initiatives. We should also acknowledge the cultural differences in our organizational communities in the same way that we work to acknowledge cultural differences in our cultural communities.

I think that the deployments that succeed will continously develop appropriate strategies for working in the existing and emerging civic culture. There will be municipalities and communities which do not value horizontality because they want to exclude their local government from any type of participation in the system. So may be more like a series of parallel lines, than one, connected line.

But, as we will all agree, the more public participation we can guarantee in these deployments, the more robust and successful they will be. Because as public participation increases, those who would be “separate-but-equal” will be enticed to the table of community and civic collabortion.

Or so we hope.