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Digital Excellence Blog
Mayor Daley's Advisory Council on Closing the Digital Divide unveiled it's report yesterday at the Community Media Summit convened by the Benton Foundation and the Community Media Workshop. Leaders from the Twin Cities, Grand Rapids and Cleveland and elsewhere were on hand for this public statement of a vision for Chicago as a City of Excellence.
The Chicago Digital Access Alliance and CTCNet Chicago are quite proud of our role in promoting this vision. |
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June 16th, 2007 @ 11:32AM |
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It's time to revisit the ownership/business models for city-wide wireless and broadband communications. Cities have bought into a vendor driven model, but once you buy in, you really want things to work well enough that you aren't embarrassed. It's then that the vendors have you, unless you have real guts and have adequate protections built into the contract. Chances are your city doesn't.
Major cities like Houston and Philly ... early adopters and (self) proclaimed models for Muni-Wireless networks ... have diminished the vision in successive renegotiations... follow the shrinking wireless footprints. |
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May 27th, 2007 @ 6:30PM |
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APIs - application programming interfaces - in a web context are the lifeblood of Web 2.0. Standards make the web go round. It's baked in to the basics of the Web from the early beginning. Web 2.0 was inevitable, eventually. (What's next?)
Web or no web... this is about interchange of flows: data and other resources.
Standardization: publication of standards, adoption of standards, especially open standards which become a platform for new practices and for future standards are critical. (Opening space for innovation and leveraging of innovations.)
Now, what's a missing API? Imaging we have a way of looking at a field of interaction, just as we might look at a program ans ask how we can refactor the program so it is more robust and more usable? Over a field of applications ... i.e. various tools we might use and might wish worked better together... we can hypothesize potential APIs that would serve those purposes.
I'm proposing a more strategic approach to identifying those APIs. Taking this recursively, let's propose a standard and a toolset that helps us find the missing APIs. |
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May 14th, 2007 @ 12:36PM |
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Non-profits (and many other unincorporated voluntary assemblages) are here to make change - we're part of a movement for empowerment and quality of life. We are attentive to the character of our work and the character of the field we work in, and these are reflective of our deep concern for how we should live and work together in the world.
We look for partners that share our values, and more and more we ask questions that suggest we like to mean what we pay (as they say at grasscommons.org).
Now, I have had it in my mind for some time that the Non-profit/Voluntary sector - those who would prefer the .ORG top level domain (TLD) as their brand of choice, for the values it connotes - deserve the option of a domain registrar that shares their values, and would work to the community interest, and not exclusively to narrow business interests.
Would we pay a little more for such service? Man of us probably would. And so would others even if they weren't seeking a .org! Which is to say, there would be potential in serving the domain registration needs in other TLDs.
I view this as part of a differentiation of roles within the network of those working for the public good. There is a logic for entities providing services to non-profits to take on this role on purely business/organizational strategy grounds. As other domain registrars make money by upselling to other services (and frequently sell domains at tight margins and perhaps occasionally as loss-leader) the non-profit technical assistance provider or support entity can reap benefits by upselling to other services - even if the "sale" does not involve a monetary exchange. We're mission driven and not money driven.
If you need to bring your services to non-profits and grassroots groups, help them by (helping them) managing the domain process in an ethical way. Give them someone they can trust to look out for their interest in serving the public interest.
Who can take on this role?
If no present entity can or will - can't we as a community do this ourselves? |
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May 13th, 2007 @ 2:08PM |
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Illinois Libraries are fending off some unwanted legislation with unfunded filtering mandates. Full announcement from ILA on the May 14 Day of Unity is posted here.
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May 12th, 2007 @ 6:41PM |
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Here's a teaser for Drop Digital (in Digital Inclusion and just about everywhere else)
What is Digital Literacy without deep dedication to cultivating Literacy and Judgment? What is Digital Citizenship without ongoing effort to promote a robust Civic Life? What is Digital Inclusion without a true effort and policy of Inclusion? What’s the Expansion in Digital Expansion? Digital Government? Digital Community? Digital Neighborhoods? The Digerati? Don’t get me started on Digital Futures and Opportunities…
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May 12th, 2007 @ 12:09AM |
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I'm working on a wider promotion of the concept of the Civic Garden we have established in Chicago. I've written a blog entry on it's roots in Minneapolis' proposed "Walled Garden" at http://wrythings.net/
Briefly, the principle is that certain top-level-domains (TLDs) are different, and that networks established for the public good, or proposed/purportes to have a public purpose or benefit should make sites with .gov, .edu, .org TLDs freely accessible... especially in cases of wireless networks.
Additionally, in the principle of supporting local culture and content, a civic garden implies more than carrying these TLDs at no charge ... it also involves infrastructure for civic engagement and support of local content.
These are rough formulations, but they capture the intent of the concept introduced at the launch of the Chicago Digital Access Alliance in September, 2006.
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May 11th, 2007 @ 11:43PM |
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So much to say! I have been a fan of the Grass Commons vision (not to mention the team) for some time. So much so, I've recently joined their Board!
When I first learned of the vision to develop the Network of Integrated Consumer Knowledge - NICK I was stunned. It's something we clearly need. I thought: how the heck are we going to get there? It takes some chutzpah to even dream this thing, but that is exactly what we need more of. And we do need NICK. Though it looks to be a long-range project, it may be better to think of NICK as establishing a standard and a technology for sharing consumer knowledge. That's what I like about it. The Open API for Consumer Knowledge.
If that wasn't cool enough, look at the underlying technology they have evolved in trying to bring this big vision to the world: WagN
They say Wiki + Tagg'n = WagN, and that's a good mash-up style descriptor. But being a stickler for the evolution of our language and logic in these new worlds I wonder how we will describe it in the future when it is more natural to us.... when we are, let's say, more fluent in WagN. And I do think we ought to think of these applications in terms of a grammar of what they make possible. We'll leave that aside for now.
And then there is Hooze.
Hooze?
I don't know.
Third base.
Abbott & Costello aside, Hooze will help us to know or remember who's behind a product and that will help us mean what we pay as the Grass Commons saying goes. |
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April 24th, 2007 @ 10:33PM |
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