The IM interview I did with David McCallum for Vague Terrain is online. I really like it. We got to talking about how location =! geography, which is cool. It was a lot of fun to chat with him. My buddy Marc Tuters has a piece in there as well.
I mean, wifidog has profiles.
Anyways, many, many people are about to get laid because of ISF. In Montreal, and hopefully across the 34 other cities that use the dog.
Benoit and Francois did it. Hats off, gentlemen. This is so weird. It’s been a dream for 3 1/2 years and now it’s there. Just have to get users to fill them in.
boya! :-)
check it out:
About Election07 And make sure you check out this.
I’m really happy that we did it in collaboration with Zap Quebec. I organized a similar thing last year with Wireless Toronto to show cultural content across the two cities.
Obviously the hard work of this project is all the volunteer time building community wireless networks. The easy thing is to put some neat content on it.
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Thought I need to make that last statement more clear. I had fun thinking this up and coordinating it, getting someone to set up planet planet, working with Zap, etc. But that work is just icing compared to the enormous time that we have all put in create and maintain this network that give us these capabilities. That’s the only reason that this project was possible.
I just finished an application for Google Summer of Code for Wifidog. If any of you have any pals there, please put in a good word. I worked on it with Jake (it was his idea).
Russel’s presenting at the Facil meeting on thurs. I should go. But another big application due on friday.
Protecting property rights in a digital world
I love working with Alison. She was the first academic I recruited to ISF back in the day. And she has been worth her weight in gold. She has been a valued full member of ISF and she has helped us in many ways over the last 3 years - from helping us become partners of CRACIN research team when we were only invited on as a minor participants, spreading our reputation internationally through her publishing and presentations, helping us understand ourselves and our goals through self-reflexive criticism, to learning how to install and repair routers. She hasn’t been afraid to get her hands dirty and she hasn’t made us feel that she is looking down at us through a microscope. She has worked hard to find a balance between being a researcher and working alongside us to accomplish our goals. That is what this paper is about.
Among other things she addresses in this paper is the (mostly) passive sexism and unease that women volunteers have encountered when trying to become members of ISF. It’s an important and to my mind, unresolved issue in all of the tech groups I work with.
She’s done well by ISF, not by being a captive academic who’s sole job is to serve as a press agent trumpeting our achievements, but by being an engaged, caring researcher and knowing that criticism can help us. I’m proud to have worked with her on this project and I’m appreciative of ISF for giving us the opportunity to become friends.
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What Can I Say? (Or, “Île Sans Fil are Thieves and Liars”1)
Stories from the heart of participatory research
Alison Powell
Concordia University
Fredericton, New Brunswick February, 2007
Montreal, Friday night, end of October, 2006
In a café on St-Laurent I cup a mug of tea and wind my scarf against the cold. Michael from Île Sans Fil (or ISF) and I are meeting to discuss a writing project for this journal, and I am trying to find a new angle on a story I’ve lived in for two years. The last thing I want to do is to write another case study of “Canada’s most successful community wireless network.” I’m no longer inspired to write about innovative business models that encourage local businesses to share their internet bandwidth. I have already written about the sociology of volunteer groups that define their political engagement through technology. While I feel that ISF’s use of Wi-Fi hotspots to create new media distribution sites, and their work with artists creates sites of cultural exchange is interesting, I don’t only want to tell that story. I have piles of field notes that tell the story of the relationships at the heart of my research. I haven’t written about them, but I want to begin to tell those stories, as difficult and confusing as they may be.
For a long time I have been doing what the methods books call “participant observation” – meeting, interviewing, traveling with, arguing, drinking beer with, misunderstanding, and becoming friends with members of ISF. After all these experiences I don’t know what else to say. Part of me wants to leave it behind, to drink my tea and read books as I think PhD students are supposed to do.
“Mike” I say, “I’m tired. I don’t want to write any more cheerful case studies.”
“Then don’t,” he says, stirring his coffee. “Write about your adventures with us. Tell some stories. You don’t have to be cheerful. Heck, call the piece “Ile Sans Fil are thieves and liars!”
“Oh, I can’t say that,” I say. Then I pause. “Can I really say that!?” And I laugh.
I’m doing an interview on IM with David McCallum. He’s guest editor for an issue of Vague Terrain focusing on Locative art. I’ve never an IM interview before and I was kinda nervous. I don’t really like chatting because of the way that you have to pay attention between responses. And because I usually try to be funny over IM and fall flat. But I fired up some music and now I’m blogging and reading about him and it’s not so bad. :-)
Ahh - Amy just called me. I don’t think that I’ve ever been on some many communications systems at once. All I need is for someone at the office to try and talk to me.
I like the title of this article he wrote about his last project: Geeks don’t know it’s psychogeography.
Some of the geeks at ISF are pretty oblivious to some of the goals of ISF. They are just there for the tech and the beer. But a surprising number of them are actually really interested - they just don’t want to pour through graduate papers about the concepts.
Tracey’s talking more about infrastructure. It’s very good that she is.
As I mentioned on her blog, I hate the idea calling communications infrastructure “cyberinfrastructure”, “second-order infrastructure”, “virtual infratructure” or anything of that ilk, and I’m even somewhat uncomfortable with “information infrastructure” - just because it differentiates from all other forms of infrastructure and therefore allows for discrimination. Not that Tracey was necessarily proposing any of those terms, just reporting on her readings. I’m working on a network neutrality project and while reading about p2p networks and overselling found the concept of overlay networks - kind of similar but from the comp eng field.
An overlay network is a computer network which is built on top of another network. Nodes in the overlay can be thought of as being connected by virtual or logical links, each of which corresponds to a path, perhaps through many physical links, in the underlying network. For example, many peer-to-peer networks are overlay networks because they run on top of the Internet. Dial-up Internet is an overlay upon the telephone network.
it goes on. And I don’t like it either as a framework for communications infra.
I was talking to a civil engineer the other day and she was talking about how infrastructures are ordered in their world. I forget how she divided them up but it was another totally different way of conceiving of infrastructures.
Doc Searls is trying to work through arguments about telco infrastructure (in the recent linux journal - 2 months till it’s publicly available) and how it should be considered a public utility. Great article, but slightly muddy thinking. We need help in how to start to frame and present this issue as an infrastructure issue. My presentations recently have been on that (in italy and more recently in Toronto) and it will be the subject of my next few presentations. Here’s another article by him on telecom infrastructure being like linux and there’s one other one that I have to find.
And the CWIRP people were in town a few days ago. They’re the most recent academic group studying us. I made sure to talk to them about this and encourage them to pursue this topic because I don’t necessarily have the tools and Tracey probably doesn’t have the time to focus on this. Prof. Barbara Crow has been wrestling with mobile phone policy for a couple of years with ISF’s earlier partner MDCN and it’s very easy to communicate with her about any of this stuff.
I’ve been thinking this for a while now - since oct 2005 when I came back from the london wsfii. My comments then were on the 3d web, and they extend to calendaring infrastructure to civic information infrastructure and the rest. I still believe what I said in that email to the wsfii crowd - that we have to protext *every layer* of the infrastructure. And not just the OSI layers, but all the different application layers that depend upon each other. This is why I’m a hata’ of stuff like second life and the centralization of data.
Maybe it will turn out that infrastructure isn’t the right way to push this argument - but so far i think it’s pretty hot.
Two quotes in her post that I really like - one by the report that Tracey was reading and one by Tracey.
“the tendency to build first and ask questions later, or to treat the technical “code and wires” core as the realest or most essential thing about infrastructure, and the rest as social add-on - that has too frequently defined and limited the work of infrasructural development (p.29).”
and by tracey
“Community wireless infrastructures provide an opportunity to learn by doing infrastructure”.
more later.
Article by Alison Powell and Leslie Shade on Canadian community and muni networks is up.
I’m really happy about this work. I’ve spent a *lot* of time with academics over the last 3 years and seeing this kind of output makes me feel like my energy and trust was well invested.
So I’m in San Diego at the super computing lab at the COMMONS conference. Crazy. Sitting next to Matty from Seattle Wireless. I think he likes me because each time I see him he’s meaner to me.
The people in the room seem to be a mix of community networking / CWN people and internet researchers.
The best intro to this project/conference (besides the main page) is this presentation by kc claffy.
Internet measurement: what have we learned?
There’s *lots* of really smart people in this room. I’ve learned a lot already. I was piling through the reading list saturday and last night (my roommate printed up a bunch of it).
Oh yeah - I spent sunday night in tijuana. That was pretty crazy.
My head hurts already. Not from tj - from trying to catch up on discussions on peering, fcc policy, architecture, rural, internet history, etc. The tough thing is that there’s so many areas of expertise in this room that I can’t concentrate to learn one lingo/viewpoint.
My stomach hurts from tijuana. Not from drinking, I think it was from the tripe soup at the saints festival.
i’m starting to use my ISF category again on this blog just to help Matt make Trees better. Because he’s lost in the woods so far.
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