Community Networking Hits Media Mainstream (Almost)!
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by Frank Odasz
Bill Moyer’s recent PBS special “The Net @ Risk: Net Neutrality” relates media monopolies and their effects on local radio stations to the threat to free speech in America. At one point, a banner appeared on the screen: “For more on community networking go to www.pbs.org.”
This is one of the few mentions of community networking we've seen in the major media. Stories included how Layfayette, Louisiana rallied to install their own municipal fiber despite attacks by the monopoly telcos. “If we don’t do it, we don’t get it!”
Perhaps future programs will focus on the lessons learned from thousands of community technology centers and community networks struggling to educate citizens, generate local content, and provide fiber and wireless broadband access. Stories such as Technology for All’s Wireless CTC assisting Katrina refugees in the Houston Astrodome could have been highlighted as well as any of the open source municipal wireless efforts such as Champagne-Urbana’s CUWiN project, among many others.
Now that Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank have been awarded the Nobel prize for their third world micro-loans innovations, leveraging information and communication technologies (ICTs) for third world employment has become a hot topic. At issue for those of us involved with poverty reduction and job creation is how such wireless and micro-loan innovations can assist large scale economic development projects such as the National Tribal Development Association’s Katrina Tribal Economic Development project which received a $30 million dollar allocation of New Market Tax Credits to attract needed capital for business development. The target population is low-income Native American communities in the Hurricane Katrina Gulf Opportunity Zone.
There is a proliferation of innovative CTC and CN projects with inspired lessons learned that are leading the way for capacity building community learning programs. How best practices can be gleaned and implemented to inform projects like the Katrina Tribal Initiative is the task at hand, and specifically how new youth media projects, with emphasis on citizen video journalism, are developing models and best practices. While traditional media and many adults resist the newer technologies, youth, as the first generation of “digital natives,” have embraced them.
"The New Face of Learning" from Edutopia magazine is exceptional reading making the case for how blogging, podcasting, and video-authoring can impact education.
If you want to know how to publish news video on the Internet, the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) is creating a step-by-step tutorial with a grant from the Knight Foundation. The free tutorials will feature tools that are free and open to everyone, such as the Democracy Player, a comprehensive, open-source Internet TV system developed by the PCF and in use now. According to their press release, "PCF's Democracy Video Player builds on cutting-edge RSS feeds, the Firefox browser, and BitTorrent syndication technology to empower anyone to watch, share, broadcast and download video over the Internet. The Democracy Player enables higher digital resolution, full-screen video playback, continuous non-buffered play and an open standards environment free of adware or spyware—a much more TV-like experience than traditional web video. (Download Democracy Player free at www.getdemocracy.com.)"
There are communities way out in front covering community events and contributing to the community's sense of self. World-global.com has already established itself as a center for outsourcing, relocation and teleworking in the Outer Hebrides Islands of Scotland. According to Donnie Morrison, its manager, “We are pretty much up to full employment here which is good news. We have developed a TransNational Project with partners across Northern Europe and are nominated as a best practice model for strategy development, planning, deployment and evaluation of services across the domains of e-Government, e-Health, e-Learning, E-Business and e-Work (Teleworking) by the European Commission." Now, according to Donnie, they've also just launched a pilot IPTV station based in their local communities. They've also launched a new culture and heritage site for expatriated Scots. See their own community website, too.
Frank Odasz served this past year as the Community Networking priority area coordinator for the CTC VISTA Project. He wrote extensively for the ComTechReview, and is a prolific author whose work can be found at lone-eagles.com, including his summary of "Resources for VISTAS."
