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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