A Blog of Her Own

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