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DIA Tools Working for Community Wi-Fi

02:30 PM Aug 23, 2005

Andrew Rasiej, a progressive Internet entrepreneur who's using the DemocracyInAction platform through DemocracyInAction.com (a socially conscious business, as distinct from DemocracyInAction.org, a nonprofit), is running for Public Advocate in New York on a platform of increasing technology access -- including wireless throughout the city and in the subway tubes.

He faces a primary on Sept. 13. Neither dot-com nor not-org actually endorse political candidates or programmes, even clients, but we still dig synergy between open-source tech philosophy in both means and ends.

Meanwhile, Neal Peirce reviews the cities-vs.-companies (and companies-vs.-companies) struggles over open-access wireless. Not only a good read on an important issue, but a good reminder of an oft-neglected aspect to tech liberation theology: the reliance, at the end of the day, on a considerable infrastructure of physical widgets, regulatory enforcement, and brass-knuckle politics ... lots of things that resolve to such un-Silicon Valley fundamentals as coal mines and gendarmes.

The very best signature file I ever saw was in the all-text world when I first went online in the early 90's: "Use of the technology necessary to transmit this message does not imply endorsement of Western industrial civilization."

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