mtl3p

I’m going to keep going on this. It’s very rough draft, but I want to get it down. (and yes, when I get stuff down, it is here. I don’t want to let things wither away in textfiles on my desktop).

Let’s take a look at the projects that we want to do in Montreal:

1 - free wireless in public spaces and hopefully in the future a low-cost individually owned + operated mesh network or a community-owned wimax group. also more control over telecom via asterisk.

2 - opening up cultural production
ex: promoting production and consumption of individually or small group produced text, video (using rss, bittorrent, and tagging systems), audio, etc

3 - calendar syndication so that you can both find out about events better (and more importantly - publish/promote events more easily).

4 - make mapping tools accessible by individuals and groups in Montreal (because presenting information visually in that way is very powerful)
ex: environmental groups, local citizen groups showing issues on maps

5 - help individuals find each other
ex: yulblog, friendster, and we’ll be developing friendster-type system in Wifidog (less features) which is not works with other services (ex: calendaring system + map annotation system via OpenID).

6 - opening up political (and other public) information and making it, not only more accessible to - which only means possible to be used - but actually more known/used by montreal citizens- using ICT tools to increase democratic involvement.
ex: like theyworkforus where you can get emails or RSS about what your local councilor is up to (what his attendance is like, what he votes for/against, his stance on issues important to you). Some of this kind of information is available on the web - perhaps on individual coucillors or MP’s websites, but we want more access to public records and a centralized, easy way to become and stay informed about issues that are important to use. Local groups could spend their time republishing and re-contextualizing that information instead of having to spend a lot of time digging it up).

Go check it out! - it’s absolutely amazing. They way that they have this is *not* because they pay some guy to do research and add in all this data. Parliament publishs it on their website, but they publish it in bare-bones html pages that are only ordered by date. Also the language they use is incomprehensible. There’s no way that a regular citizen could or ever would dig up that kind of information. Another tool would be creating a montreal political wiki where we (as a community) kept up to date on Montreal politicians (all of them, not just the big ones), as well as status of different political issues.

So . . . (stopping to breath) . . . If you put these things together, what do you get?

It’s sure as hell not a an effort to create a social club for geeks or a project to make montreal more attractive to tourists. It’s an effort to change Montreal. It’s people trying to gain more control over their lives, over their communities. It’s an attempt to change how power is distributed.

Once we recognize this, we can better work together (using *our* ways of organizing - which are very powerful), we can attract allies with similar interests / goals, and most importantly, we will be more motivated because we will understand the importance of our work.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 4th, 2005 at 7:11 am and is filed under Whatever. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.