A Blog of Her Own

This morning’s speaker was Joan Frye Williams who talked about one-stop shopping for library users. And now I’m in a session called “The Commons - What Have we Learned about User-Centred Library Service” and Susan Beatty (UofC) has just shown us their one-stop Commons desk that provides not only library/reference service, but also technical service for students. There are librarians and IT folks who man the desk and can help students with all their needs. So, already the universities are getting this.

This session is actually a look at the experiences in three post-secondary institutions. University of Calgary (Susan Beatty), Red Deer College (Sona Kothari), and University of Alberta (Geoff Harder).

RDCollege - located front and centre and near a coffee kiosk, mix of work spaces/furniture. Library as ‘being’ space. Have people there just hanging out as friends; they are using the library as living room. And experience has shown that they will rearrange the furniture.

Sona touched on another point that Joan Frye Williams made earlier in the day - signage. In RDC’s case, they have a mis-match between their in-library, print signage and the terminology they use on the web; print signs point to periodicals, while the web speaks of journals and articles. Joan spoke more of simplicity and clarity- the Ask and Get windows from her local burger joint.

Some similiarities in all these Commons:

• Built on partnerships (Library, IT group, faculty, student union, etc)
• Laptop access is important (electricity, wireless, ethernet)
• Extended hours (reference, technology support)
• Ongoing assessment to be able to continue to improve
• Location is important

Joan made this point, and Geoff and Sona also touched on it (Sona with the moving furniture) - you can’t make patrons/customers/civilians do things your way. It doesn’t matter if your way is better, their way is good enough for them and it suits them. So learn how to adapt. Learn how to provide superior service in the way that people want it. Maybe that means that if the sofa is always moving to a certain location you should look at setting things up that way on purpose.

Oh, and we had a special guest at the session as well. She didn’t want to focus, though. Sona says she (Nancy)* was drunk.

Tag: alc2006

*Added for Marcus

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” –Scott Adams

Well, I’m here in Jasper again. I love this conference, if only because it’s held at the Jasper Park Lodge. This year we’re in Point Cabin, the haunted one. Haven’t seen a ghost yet, though.

Now, for real conference talk…The keynote speaker on Friday was Avi Lewis, very inspirational. He spoke of the need to reclaim public spaces–and the library is one of those public spaces. Avi has produced a documentary, The Take, which looks at autoworkers in Argentina who have taken over their closed factory and started producing again. I didn’t attend the screening, but I’m placing a hold for it at the library. In my IB class last year, we looked at the whole issue of the IMF and WorldBank demands of countries when they provide financing - Argentina was once the poster child of IMF policy adoption - and how it has failed countries such as Argentina, and the documentary does an amazing job of showing the issues and how people are reacting and getting on with their lives now.

You know, it seems that this is my year to get involved with some social activism. First I have the Community Wireless Network and the current of taking back freedom of speech, freedom of communication. Now I have a library conference and its talk of reclaiming public spaces.

From Avi, I went to a session called Opening the Library Closet:Diversity, Equity and Social Responsibility in Alberta Libraries (by Alvin Schrader from the UofA SLIS). I was curious about social responsibility in a library - I mean, with all the talk of corporate social responsibility, I wanted to know what that meant in a library context. I’m afraid the subject was not what I expected. Now, I know the “Closet” in the title should have been a clue, but I was not expecting it to be a session specifically about sexual orientation and servicing the needs of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth patrons. Nothing wrong with that, just not what I expected. I’m not a librarian, so collection development and programs in any area are, well, beyond me. That said, it was an excellent session (of course I stayed!), and really eye-opening in what materials are not out there. This probably isn’t the only minority community that is being poorly served in public libraries, so the information presented could be tailored to meet many different needs.
More later…

Tag: alc2006

“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of old ones.” –John Cage

Dana Porter all lit up for Exams at Student Life Centre

Some fun from my Alma Mater, UWaterloo. You have to think it was the engineers…

Unbeknownst to us, each session had a scribe – someone to capture the major elements of each session since no one could be at all of them. Wow. So today we’re starting with them presenting their summaries before we breakaway into track-themed groups to discuss strategies, action items and next steps –to discuss what this means and where we are to go from here.

Angel investor and VC session was cancelled because there are none.

Policy group

• National coalition exists and is dealing with media reform issues. They will provide bullets on relevant points that we need to be talking about. They have a more detailed website in the works
• Contact your local legislators as individuals and as community groups. Use the information gathered from the above bullet
• Encouraged to use socialtext.com website to share information
• Creating a bloggers network.
• Set up an online forum that shares detailed, current information that can lay the basis of what is posted to the blogs
• Attend freedom to connect conference and enlist their help (blogging, messaging, etc)
• Create a council of regional organizers to get the word out (national coalition – regional organizers – individuals)

Tech group

• Bridge the communications barrier between the technical groups
• Open up communication with commercial groups
• More communication between disparate areas (commercial, techies, people, community groups, government, leaders)
• Be involved in creating standards
• Register at freenetworks.org to create content channels for different people to communicate.
• Do less parallel development and more collaborative development

Implementation and sustainability models

• Strategic goals

• Manuals to take back to elected officials to discuss
• Manuals for how to build by coalitions
• Case studies not created by vendors (success and failures)
• Coordinated efforts

• CWN and MWN work together
• Overcome the antagonism between people who do community outreach and people who do business model (lead to change in language)
• Be aware that the technology is changing (not a static …
• Be realistic about technology
• Maintain your options
• Set modest goals (figureout what your’e going to do and accept that you might not be the best person to do something)

Thoughts

We need to get more Canadian policy makers and business people to attend (we had techies and researchers, but no one to look at sustainability and policy development in CA).

Comment from one attendee: differences between CWN and MWN and keeping the community as close to the network as possible.

I don’t know—I guess I’d come down on the side of muni-wireless and by that, I mean the idea that the municipality should build this as part of infrastructure. The content can be community based, and I can definitely see problems in how we can do that (if the community doesn’t have access to the hardware). I guess CWN has been a grass-roots movement, but MWN is a business decision and generally happens when the muni decides wireless will help them run their city better and then open it up to the public. Can these two perspectives be reconciled?

Models in small towns (rather than top-down alien ship of Philadelphia), it’s the different community groups coming together to build. Other models that intertwine the institutions building the network with sustainable community groups as it’s built (like libraries, senior groups, etc). So maybe there is a common ground. And these are the models that will work in Alberta.

Comment: this is political. There is a connection between building networks technically, building networks socially, and building networks politically (Alison).

Message: neutrality of people putting together the network is important. Commercial is OK, as long as network neutrality is retained.

I’m falling hopelessly behind. That means I’m posting something closer to my rough notes. Filling in the blanks is left as an exercise for the reader.

Panelists: John Atkinson (Wireless Ghana), David Young (CUWiN), Michael Peralta (Tribal Digital Village), Arun Mehta (Radiophony), Bogdan Tancic (BGWireless)

Bogdan

• Need to improve technology or wireless networks at the physical layer to increase throughputs.
• BGwireless community network infrastructure
• Node consists of one AP, omni-directional antenna, point-to-point link to another node, can handle about 20 users/node and coverage is approx 1km.
• Use HG24 (HyperGain) to link hops together.
• Get 40-50Mbps
• Can actually run high-bandwidth applications over this.
• This is a serious wireless network. Very different from the urban groups that are looking at providing connectivity everywhere to support a connected lifestyle.
• BGWireless has a workshop where they make their own antennas. They have information about their antennas on the website.

Arun

Teaches programming to blind people – to the blind, the computer is as important a development as written language was for non-blind. But screen readers are not available in every language. So a computer is advanced technology for many people

What we consider to be advanced today we may consider primitive in two years.

We are at a critical juncture (like microcomputers were in 70’s). There’s a difference between what we had then and what we have now – then the big companies thought micros were a joke, they figured they’d disappear, no one considered them a threat. Today, the big telecoms are worried (and fighting). They do see the potential. And telecom is regulated, and regulations are different in different parts of the world.

How do we advance wireless networks? One of the most interesting developments is the hack of the Altheros chip set; we’re now able to take commercially available hardware and hack it to do completely different things. This is particularly important in developing countries; it’s not easy for the police to see that you’ve gone in and changed code to do something that would be illegal. Even more we could use steer-able antennas to allow for better use of spectrum (highly directional antennas while working in omni field)

GNU Radio – FBGA integrated circuit that can be programmed/changed. You can do anything at all. You can make advanced telecom devices – it’s like the IBM PC compatible. Open source, fully programmable mobile phone on steroids. And you don’t have to have advanced telecommunications training to program them thanks to middleware. Great device for teaching students how to do telecom programming, how to make stuff. If you’re interested in rural communications in developing countries, and there are many different standards (CDMA, GPRS…) – if GNU Radio can detect what type of phone that’s come into range and provide service.

Enables working in frequencies that are much lower frequency and allow for connections without line of sight requirements.

Free Space optics (wireless optic communications) No regulations issues, efficient, easier to focus. You can shorter masts. If you use infrared, no one can see what you’re doing. Optics is not black magic, we’ve been dealing with it for centuries, one of the most expensive things in broadcasting is the pre-amp—in the case of light, your pre-amp is simple, it’s a passive device, it’s called a lens. We’re used to optics. (low power, spectrum is unregulated) Can you imagine the Internet today with its 500% annual growth without optic technology? We’re going to be wanting this capability in wireless. We can’t run fibre to every house in a third world country, but we could do optical wireless.

What’s holding up the optical wireless uptake? Us, we’re just not doing any research; people have not been interested. We need to start some real research into this in order to overcome the problems that will come with. This is not a new technology; the point is building critical mass of interest. RF is good, but there are limits to what RF can provide for bandwidth. We need to look to the future.

Print disabled – also interested in this problem; software that works for visually impaired also works for illiterate (if the computer’s reading to you, you don’t need to worry about not being able to read). So, things that can do audio are interesting…Asterisk server (OpenSource PBX). Asterisk was also mentioned by Gabe as the tool being use to serve out the stories in his [murmur] project.

David

Problems with mesh networks and some technologies that might help resolve them

1/ hops/distance from Internet

As you get farther away from the Internet gateway, your bandwidth is going to be dropping off because of interference. Can use more than one channel to retransmit to avoid collision. We advance the networks by using >1 channel on each node.

2/ Marginal links; a link where errors occur often enough that you usually have to retransmit in order to get past that link.

Have nodes collaborate to rebuild damaged packets : multi-radio diversity. I’m not sure if this is the reference Doug was thinking of, but there’s a paper by researchers at MIT here.

3/ Adaptive antenna systems at 900MHz band (new ubiquity.com cheap radio)

900 MHz helps to get around the problem of rain on trees…There is less interference with signal than 2.4GHz; 900MHz can get through more things. But it’s hard to build on small scale – it has really high gain; you might need have an antenna 3* as large in order to get the signal. It doesn’t allow you to really focus the signal.

4/ Important not to get too hung up on wireless; it’s an awesome technology, but it’s easy to forget about wire and we should look at how we can use it.

Use wire if you can. AC wire, CableTV go to almost everyone’s home. So why not power line networking? There are issues there, too.

John

He has problems and he’s interested in help – so he’s sharing the problems

In Ghana, there’s a link that needs to go 30K, in the TCP/IP handshake there can be problems with time out of the SYN before the ACK gets back so it resends. Of course, there’s a requirement that this be doable with inexpensive, non-enterprise equipment.

BGWireless has a 60K link and they changed their acktimeout. (discussion ensued). Right now, John’s system works, it’s just retransmitting packets a lot.

Could be the software. Others who have long links like this working are using MikroTik software.

Michael

Wanted to get native reservations in the county connected again (southern California tribal) 3 tribes divided into 18 reservations. Idea to bring broadband access to these rural communities.

Used 5.8 for long links (greater than 5K). Some links use 2.4 because can’t meet the power demands. The power is solar for all the backbone towers which are placed on the tops of mountains. Some sites have propane generators as a backup; lesson learned from an extremely rainy season in 2004 where they had 2 months of rain.

Had shadow project where took teens to learn everything they did and at end of project they were given the job of building 2 towers.

Sustainability: costs $8K/month for DH3 link—need to find ways to fund, have created some businesses to generate revenue.

Michael showed some photos of extreme weather conditions in which things are operating; rain, ice, snow, rockslides.

Technorati Tag:NS4CWN

Moderator: Michael Lenczner (Île Sans Fil)

Panelists : Benoit Grégoire (WiFiDog), Alison Powell (Île Sans Fil), Gabe Sawhney (Wireless Toronto), Jo Walsh (World Summit of Free Information Infrastructures)

I’ve arrived late because I was busy networking. I missed Alison, Jo, and Michael. I’m sorry about that.

I’m hearing ‘wifi is boring, where is the content?’

I’m hearing about an age gap where older people somehow have an expectation that this (content?) needs to be done like cable TV, mass media, etc. – we need to have big money to create the content, to build the network. Younger people have better awareness of how we can do interesting things and we can do it among people, we connect together.

I’m hearing there’s a political awakening, technological awakening. We’re not longer just here to be pushed to, we can interact and create. We’re supposed to be passive users, be told rather than question what else it can do…

[murmur] (Gabe)

This is a really fun project that Gabe was telling me about last night. It’s an oral storytelling project about specific areas of the city. Record audio stories by people of important things about the place, each place has a sign with a phone number to call and you can hear the story.

Launched in TO, expanded to Montreal, Vancouver and even Calgary.

It was in thinking about where he wanted to take [murmur], problem is the collecting of the information, the content. This lead to Wireless toronto which has a similar philosophy but really consider this to be more of a platform for content or delivery platform for content.

What other content projects are out there?

• Nysonglines.com
• Yellowarrow.net
• Socialight.com
• Beerhunter.ca
• Envisiontoronto.com
• Daviswiki.org
• Wikistreets.com
• Plazes.com
• Palatial.com
• www.Communitywalk.com
• www.wayfaring.com (jacktracker tracks Jack from the show 24)

Examples of projects being built by people – have potential to change how people interact with the city and with each other in a city, preservation of history (keeping the history of architecture even when the buildings have come down). Follows a wikipedia or del.icio.us model –wireless enabling social networking.

WiFiDog as the delivery platform for this type of content.

Right now, people choose to add the content, they self-select. Can we encourage this type of activity in rural communities? Can we encourage people who are not as techno-integrated to begin using this technology to capture their history? Think about how rich the content could become! The local historical societies in rural communities will have to be engaged to promote, the libraries can be a central location for capturing the content, a coordinating location for the project.

Wifidog (Benoit)

• Captive portal (hack of all hacks, using features of your browser and wireless to control the first few pages you see when viewing the WWW. Will never be really secure, but it is secure enough for what it does. Does not require special software to be installed on the client.)
• Local content management system (content is truly dependent on where you are)
• Hotspot network management system (so wifidog knows where you are, which is important for the point above)

It seems we’ve got some hecklers in the audience. I think the SeattleWireless crew are going to have to buy Benoit a beer to make up for all the interruptions. This is an audience full of people who are using the software and really know it, so they’re all filling in the blanks.

• content is king but it’s expensive and time consuming, you don’t want to create and arrange that (outsource that to anyone and everyone)
• content management is even harder than you think
• end users want content, not tools

You know, this is a really interesting product and it really needs to be looked at more closely.

Technorati tag: NS4CWN

The biggest problem with this summit – choosing which session to attend. There really are just so many good things happening that it’s hard to pick one session to be in. For this time slot, I’ve had to forego a technology intro, open source wireless, implementing a free wireless networking system in a municipality, and international wireless initiatives in favour of learning how to put the community in the CWN. The only session that wasn’t hard for me to give up with the National Wireless Policy 101 and only because it’s going to be very much about US national policy. I think it’s interesting and important, but it’s just going to have to take a back seat to more local issues.

So, I’m here in a big room with a few people and we’ve decided to try to cozy things up with some furniture re-arranging. It’s probably driving the folks trying to video record it nuts! They spent so much time setting up properly and getting the lighting right, etc.

Moderator: Josh Breitbart, Media Tank

Panelists: Sue Beckwith, St. Louis WizKids; Dharma Daily, Promethus Radio Project; Nazeer Sadeeq Holms, St. Louis Association of Community Organizations

Josh – recognizes that the revolution is going to need a lot more that just the geeks around the room last night – a recognition that this is about the community, the user. So Michael, we’re hearing others are also the same page as you.

Sue (WizKids) started us all off with a listening exercise to look at how important learning to listen is in building community. Josh mentioned that when it was his turn to listen he prepared himself like the initial blank Tetris screen and then tried to fit the information he heard together like the blocks falling in.

My partner from the exercise was Ben W. from St. Louis Indy Media Centre. In searching for their website I discovered that there’s an Alberta Indy Media group too. I’ll probably have to create a whole new blog entry to explore that.

Now we get in to the intro’s. Josh (Media Tank) spoke of evolution of Philadelphia’s network from CWN to Muni Wireless, to commercial – and the desire to keep the community’s voice in the shaping the network (hold company accountable to community).

Dharma (Prometheus) helps people build radio stations but the regulation of airwaves is a barrier – looking to wireless, other licensing regimes to open this up. Compared to radio technology, wireless is hard to work with (because it’s emerging technology) – so still learning about wireless and community wireless, etc.

Old-school radio technology inexpensive, very accessible to people. (me – we’re perhaps at that early stage of radio where it wasn’t easy and it wasn’t inexpensive and it wasn’t as accessible to everyone – assuming there ever was a time like that)

Dharma has likened the top-down approach to providing networks or communications, etc to an alien ship landing. You’ve given us a great technology but you’re squashing us with it. (people who deploy get to define the project, deliver it, assess it – the community is on the edges and may not be getting what they want or need)

There’s a missing link in our communication systems – the ability to link to our community, the value to us locally (we can send email to someone in Mongolia – great. But how often do you do that? You use tech to find out what’s happening tonight, or this weekend, with the people around you)

Nazeer, (SLACO) a grass-roots organization that works with other community organizations to provide a visual, physical presence in troubled neighborhoods. When asked about how to prioritize an agenda for a neighbourhood, Nazeer point out that it’s the neighborhood that decides what is going to happen.

Sue (WizKids) is a small literacy project (10 families), that built a wireless network, put new dell computers in the homes and can provide internet based training (in private, in the home). Used kids to help create the program and make sure it was appealing. Program set to end in September. Oh, and Wiz stands for Wireless Internet Zone.

Started when recognized that some kids couldn’t read well enough to use the Internet and participate fully in an after-school program. Stunned and pissed that this could be the state of education system – that middle school children could be left that far behind (for one public St. Louis high school an independent auditor found that 98% of the students are not reading proficiently). This is not just a criticism of St. Louis public schools – it’s happening across the country.

So with intros over, we turn into more of a round table to discuss the issues.

So, creating community involvement – even if you (an organization, a geek, a whatever) show up with one idea, you see how it goes, you adapt, to make sure it works for the area. It’s an iterative process (what do I think, what do you think, does this work, how do we adapt it,…) Pay attention, listen to what people’s issues are, what they want. (Three Hills is doing it right. J)

Community organizing breaks down into two areas—Org-to-org connections (build partnerships to reach more people); and taking people who are not organized and bringing them together into organization.

There’s a quality of communication that can be created in a small broadcast area (sometimes we shouldn’t be trying to reach a really wide audience and necessarily dilute the message so it appeals to a broad audience. Sometimes we should focus on a narrow audience and give them exactly what they need/want. And that’s the power in new telecom/wireless networks – we can create a station that appeals to a few, there’s not need for commercial success, we can do niche markets viably. Where am I going? I’m trying to say that each community can build its own communications infrastructure, the library as community centre; the information is gathered and people are enabled to be able to share it with others . You only really need to appeal to a few others, witness blogs. J)

Now I’m just barely keeping up, so point form:

• Make people understand that if they get involved in the project, if they support the project, then it is even more of the community.
• Île sans fil has software that enables really small communities to build their own portals with content (now I’m going to have to be sure to get to one of the île san fil sessions). The org is also working to build mesh wireless networks.
• There’s a program in Philly, set up the network then train highschool students to maintain it (two complementary programs, actually).
• Information/promotion program: set up umbrellas with computers under them and bring people in to show them how Internet can actually work for them (bright umbrellas to attract, outside, then how to use the information—what do they want).
• Message for the techies that aren’t in the room…Prometheus can build a radio station in a weekend, but it takes years to build an organization. Many techies get frustrated; they’re ready to go with the implementation, the technology, but they just see the project being dragged down with ‘nothing happening’. It’s that nothing that’s important to the building of community and sustainability for the initiative.
• What’s the purpose of the technology, who’s it for, what’s it going to serve? (Nazeer)
• Simple idea – more communication for more people. (Dharma)
• Wireless Toronto – less about access and more about content/culture. Generally it seems that the Canadians here are about content and culture where the US participants see creating access as a social issue, and free community wireless creation as activism, democracy. Is this an inherent cultural difference or a reflection of where each country is at in terms of coverage of connectivity? It could be about connectivity, we heard yesterday that the US is 16^th of 17 industrialized countries in something left unstated (I think connectivity).
• How do you get geeks talking to actual people?
• The Umbrella project as a way to reach people.
• Work with others, partner with complementary organizations, groups
• Find those people who can speak to both the geeks and the community.
• Geeks are really just part of the entire change, we aren’t the drivers; users have to be the drivers.

Technorati Tag:NS4CWN

In the small amount of time between the end of the pre-summit and the beginning of the summit-summit, a few of us had time to drive in to St. Louis to see the Arch. I’ve posted some photos to my Flickr account.

I only have a 16Mb card (actually I now have a 128 Mb card thanks to Matt from SeattleWireless, but I didn’t have it when I was taking the photos), so I couldn’t capture too much. I have a really short video clip, too, but I can’t load it to Flickr. I’ll need to find it another home. Wait, the blog let’s me load files…but not this one, not today.