City Council Votes Tomorrow: Wireless Philadelphia
hello all,
just a heads up — tomorrow (wednesday)is the last big hearing that the city is organizing on the municipal wireless project. the city is about to enter into a formal contract with wireless philadelphia, the nonprofit set up by the city to manage a wireless network built by earthlink. please consider stopping by — wednesday, april 26, 2006, at 2:00 pm, in room 400, city hall. please come if you can, and forward widely!
there are many, many questions about how our community needs will be served by this new network. will wireless philadelphia and earthlink make it possible for community organizations to help get their neighbors online? how many of us will need to buy expensive wireless devices to
supplement the wireless coming from the streetlights? and will the important community content - like the videos produced at scribe video center, the content hosted at the IMC, and the community newspapers and websites scattered across the city - be marginalized or promoted to
users of the network.
immediately after the hearing, city council’s joint committees on technology & information services, and public property & public works will vote on whether to authorize the city’s plan, so there should be a pretty big crowd. this is a big chance for the earthlink executives to see to see that we are watching them — and that we’ll be there to make sure they deliver the Internet service our city needs.
to learn more about the contracts between the city, the wireless philadelphia nonprofit, and earthlink, visit becca vargo dagget of the municipal telecommunications project’s website:
http://www.newrules.org/info/philly-earthlink-contract.html . and read IMC and mediatank organizer josh breitbart’s blog here –
http://breitbart.wordpress.com/tag/wireless.
for indymedia activists — this is a good opportunity to ask questions directly of the decisionmakers in this process, and to interview people in the audience on what they’d want from a wireless service. hope to see some of you there.
hannah s.
prometheusradioproject
ps — kiss kiss kill is playing a show with the juanita family at the sattelite (50th and baltimore) at 7pm friday night. this show is FREE. yeah!
