We’ve long been supporters of OneWebDay, and were even invited by Susan Crawford, its founder, to talk at the first couple of OWD events a few years ago. If you want to help organize the excellent OWD in NYC, help out at http://my.onewebday.org/group/owdnyc.
I hope you can act soon to help us build early momentum! If you plan to support or organize for OneWebDay, there are 2 steps you can take right now. All told, these actions should take about 10-20 minutes.
Be amongst the first members to sign up for my.OneWebDay.org, our new social network and collaboration platform for participating organizations and volunteer organizers. Here are some things you can do immediately:
Upload a picture for your profile. Let’s set a precedent for new members. It looks so much more lively and inviting when you can actually see the people in the community.
Start a group: If you plan to help out at the local level, start a group for your local team. We already have the OWD NYC group started. Consider naming your local group something short and snappy (SEA OWD for Seattle, DC OWD for Washington, DC, etc). For some, it will make sense to start a group on my.OneWebDay for your organization if you want to recruit your members to a hub to share your organization’s plans for OneWebDay. One exciting feature: local OWD Teams will be mapped. Don’t forget to add a picture for your group, too.
For those who represent organizations: please let us know if we can add you to our list of Participating Organizations. Please let me know specifically how you would like to be listed, and I will pass that information to Nathan. Later on, we will shoot to post logos if you would like your logo to show as your link on that page.
Please let me know if you have any questions. OneWebDay is powered by your ideas, your energy, and your action. Thank you so much for your early involvement and support in OWD09!
Come join us for a meetup to solicit ideas, interest, participants and planners in the upcoming Breakout! Festival on July 1 at 6:45pm at New Work City (200 Varick Street, Suite 507b).
This summer the BREAKOUT! Festival will return creative work to the streets of New York. Using coworking as a model, and injecting lightweight versions of essential office infrastructure into urban public spaces, BREAKOUT! will explore new and productive niches for working outside of traditional office buildings. BREAKOUT! seeks to create a new architecture for the creative city by appropriating public spaces for the collaborative knowledge work that drives the contemporary city.
This meetup gathers together fans, volunteers, and planners interested in helping make outdoor coworking and the BREAKOUT! Festival a success.
The Agenda? Discuss:
the upcoming New York Festival (September 18th – October 30th)
RFI Response to City Wireless Internet Access for New York CityParks and Other Open Spaces
Prepared by:
Dana Spiegel, Executive Director, NYCwireless
Rob Kelley and Anthony Townsend, Executive Board Members
Overview
NYCwireless is a non-profit organization that advocates and enables the growth of free, public wireless internet access in New York City and surrounding areas. Founded in 2001, NYCwireless serves thousands of individuals throughout the New York City metro area through the dozens of hotspots installed in NYC Parks, Public Spaces, and Affordable Housing Buildings.
Over the past several years, NYCwireless has built free, public wireless networks in dozens of New York Cityparks and open spaces through partnerships with local organizations such as the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation and Madison Square Park Conservancy and business improvement districts such as the Alliance for Downtown New York. These include hotspots in Bryant Park, Madison Square Park, Wagner Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Jackson Square Park, Stuyvesant Cove Park (the first fully solar powered hotspot in New York), Tompkins Square Park, Bowling Green Park, City Hall Park, the South Street Seaport, the Winter Garden, the Atrium at 60 Wall Street, Stone Street, Wall Street Park, and the Vietnam Veterans Plaza, among others.
NYCwireless also assists under-served communities in getting affordable internet access. NYCwireless works with Dunn Development Corporation and Community Access, a non-profit housing organization, to train volunteers and building residents to build and maintain wireless networks in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. The networks provide 8 buildings with more than 50 residents per building with private, high-speed wireless connections.
According to a survey by NYCwireless Board Member Laura Forlano, Wi-Fi is a factor in attracting people to specific locations throughout the city for 70% of those surveyed. These findings have potential implications for economic development and support the rationale that WiFi may enable commerce and productivity that would not have occurred otherwise. For example, one respondent commutes 20 minutes from Queens to use the Bryant Park wireless network on weekends in order to work on his food and wine website outside rather than at home.
At NYCwireless, we’ve worked with many local leaders. Some of them are BIDs like the Downtown Alliance or public benefit corporations like the Battery Park City Authority. Some are local developers, like the one we’re working with in the West Village who transformed a park and part of a neighborhood from being a place for homeless people to being a place for families and children. These local leaders have transformed their communities, and helped us bring internet to the people. Unfortunately so many more come to us with visions of helping out their neighborhood, but don’t have the funds to make it happen. While NYCwireless provides a very low cost option for building public Wi-Fi, its not without installation and maintenance cost. And many of the local leaders we’ve spoken to have no current means to get the funding they need to build and create local broadband. In speaking with them, we know that with just enough funding, these people too could change their communities, and bring whole neighborhoods online. Funding must be injected into local communities in order to provide resources for these leaders to do their work. Read the rest of this entry »
Published by Dana Spiegel on May 26, 2009 under News1 Comment »
The BBC has an excellent map that shows the disparities of broadband access speeds in 8 very different countries. Of particular interest is the exponential drop off between the few countries that have the fastest speeds and the rest of the countries in an OECD report. The US, which is in the middle of the pack, actually seems to be in the “long tail” of the list:
DoITT seems to recognize the value in Wi-Fi in parks and public spaces, and indicates that they are clearly aware of the work that organizations other than the Parks Department have done to grow free public Wi-Fi.
DoITT is open to how they should organize any public-space Wi-Fi initiative, though there are still funding issues (see below).
More parks are being added to the list of possible Parks Department sanctioned free Wi-Fi, however this does beg the question about how parks not on the “official” list are going to be able to get service.
The City wants to work with more BIDs in offering free Wi-Fi, though they don’t acknowledge the fact that the BIDs and other organizations that have created free Wi-Fi hotspots have done so without much involvement by the Parks Department, and often in spite of any blockades the Parks Department has put up.
DoITT is potentially open to other business models for building Wi-Fi hotspots, though as indicated below (and as I have been saying for a number of years), there aren’t any viable ones where businesses can independently fund the buildout and maintenance.
The City is willing to provide both signage and some publicity for the Wi-Fi hotspots.
The City will provide free access and use of city-owned property to facilitate the installation of equipment.
DoITT seems open to reducing insurance requirements for running a hotspot, but even this doesn’t go far enough. We have hotspots where there is NO equipment on park property at all (its on a neighboring building rooftop). Why such installation strategies should require ANY general or personal liability insurance is a mystery (we do carry liability insurance for equipment installation and maintenance).
Any submissions must be mostly non-proprietary, which means that we should all be able to read whatever companies submit for the RFI (we will publish our submission for all to read on this site). DoITT should go one step further and commit to actually publishing all submissions, so we don’t have to file Freedom of Information Law requests just to get them.
The Bad
DoITT talks a lot about “other comparable wireless Internet service” versus Wi-Fi. In the long term, I suppose its important to recognize that laptops and mobile devices may ship with newer wireless standards, but we’re quite a number of years off from this happening, and for the forseeable future, Wi-Fi is it–Apple introduced Wi-Fi on laptops 10 years ago, and those laptops are still compatible with today’s Wi-Fi networks.
Access to city-owned property isn’t the biggest issue in getting Wi-Fi deployed. Getting reasonably fast internet access lines (or WiMax uplinks) is the biggest problem. NYCwireless has had tremendous success rapidly deploying Wi-Fi equipment on building rooftops and even nearby businesses, but we (and WiFiSalon as well) have spent countless, fruitless hours getting internet lines from Verizon. In a recent example, it took over 4 months to get internet service to Wagner Park, even though our gear was installed within a month of signing a contract.
DoITT is looking mostly for one or a few companies to step up and do all the work. We’ve long talked about how the City can take a grass-roots approach to getting local parks and public spaces lit up, but for the most part, DoITT is focussing only on the biggest and most prominent locations. This is unfortunate, since the people in lower income and further afield areas are often the ones who benefit the most from such initiatives, but they seem to be mostly left out of this party.
The Ugly
DoITT seems mostly steadfast in their insistence (as the Parks Department has been in the past) that no City funds should be spent on any buildout or maintenance of hotspots. This is still a really big sticking point: The first Parks RFP required that a concessionaire pay significant money to the Parks department, and the second Parks RFP required that a concessionaire pay some proposed amount of money to the Parks department.
There have been only a handful of interested companies (we offered to pay $1), and the WiFiSalon, the only concessionaire that paid any fees was driven out of business by that requirement. Ad revenue is negligible since such networks see a fraction of the impressions that even a second-tier blog sees, and sponsorship dollars are only available to the most prominent parks like Madison Square Park and Bryant Park, and such deals are done only through whole-park sponsorship, not sponsorship of just the Wi-Fi network.
As I’ve said many times before and as the industry has seen countless times, Ad-based business models are unsustainable for individual hotspots and even reasonable sized hotspot networks. If DoITT and the City want to really ensure that free public Wi-Fi should be made available, and that locations other than the most highly-trafficked and well-to-do are served, they need to step up and offer alternative funding models.
One thing to consider is that the companies that can do the installation and maintenance of high-quality outdoor hotspots (there are few) don’t have big advertising or sales teams to make them self-funding. These are two orthogonal specialties and forcing a single company to be capable of both severely limits the applicant pool and threatens the business viability of any participating company. NYCwireless has been successful because we provide all of the back-end technical know how and support for free public Wi-Fi hotspots. We are paid by our partners (BIDs and others) to perform this service, and they do the money raising since that’s what they are good at.
Published by Dana Spiegel on April 30, 2009 under EventsComments Off
The Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy has posted the schedule for their 2009 Movies with a View movie nights this summer. As many of you know, BBP is one of NYCwireless’ premiere hotspots, and offers a stunning view of Manhattan from just over the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges.
There are some great movies planned for this summer, and the best part is you can use the NYCwirelesshotspot that’s in the park while you get your seat ready and wait for the show to begin (you wouldn’t use your laptop during the movie, would you?).
Published by Rob Kelley on April 13, 2009 under BreakoutComments Off
NYCwireless is helping launch the summer’s Breakout!, the eight-day festival that encourages freelancers, students and office workers to “take to the streets and bring their work with them.”
NYCwireless is a non-profit organization that advocates and enables the growth of free, public wireless Internet access in parks, public spaces, and affordable housing residences in New York City and surrounding areas.
If you are interested in building a free Wi-Fi hotspot in your business, park, or housing development, contact us.
Published by Dana Spiegel on June 29, 2009 under News 
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