THE BEST WAY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE OF CLEVELAND WI-FI IS TO INVENT IT

Full Cleveland is very enthusiastic about the One Cleveland/Intel "Digital City" announcement, pointing to Dan Hanson's Inside Business article about it, but is disappointed by the lukewarm "old Cleveland" reaction of unnamed bloggers who apparently just want their free wi-fi.

In response, George at BFD gets a little snarky, apparently feeling they're talking about him even though his first reaction to the announcement was very happy.

Is FC talking about my comment that the announcement would leave a lot of people scratching their heads? Well, I admit this wasn't exactly an expression of dumbstruck awe, but then, the announcement (let alone the standard 1C hype surrounding it) wasn't exactly news. After all, City Council appropriated the money for the City part of the project back in June. But Lev Gonick's detailed strategy paper about the whole enterprise is news, or at least important new information -- hence my main point, that interested people should take the time to read it.

I'm a One Cleveland fan. I think Lev and his many collaborators are creating something remarkable and important. I think One Cleveland is a very good thing for northeast Ohio.

But it isn't a community wi-fi project. 1C isn't a "community network" at all, in the ordinary meaning of that term -- i.e. a cooperative or nonprofit provider of direct networking service to individual users. Despite Lev's frequent use of that term, and his frequently invoked imagery of a wireless cloud throughout the city and the region, service to individuals, households and businesses is not in 1C's charter or business plan. Its market is, and always has been, governments and nonprofit organizations. Big nonprofits, for now... smaller ones, eventually. But never direct service to household and business users.

If you read Lev's strategy paper, you'll see that he wants One Cleveland to bring us all into one coherent, standards-based ultra-broadband network that involves multiple providers including private ISPs. He calls for a set-aside of system resources for low-income communities, which could support nonprofit community networks among other things. And 1C encourages its nonprofit institutional members, right now, to consider including public wi-fi access in their technology plans. So you can't say that Lev and other 1C folks aren't interested in engaging the broad public (whether laptop toters or low-income households) in the system they're building. They clearly are committed to doing just that.

But that's not the same thing as "delivering wi-fi to the masses".

George points out that the last paragraph of Lev's paper seems to say "that there isn’t a wireless strategy for OneCleveland, but there should be." He wonders if this might represent a "sea change" in 1C's planning.

Here's what I think. I think we should stop wondering about what One Cleveland will or won't do to bring cheap (or free) broadband to us masses. The best way to predict the future is to invent it, yes? If we think a better future for Cleveland requires a community-driven, affordable broadband network now (citywide a la Philadelphia and San Francisco, or neighborhood-level a la Houston), then let's start figuring out how it could happen, and get on with making it happen, our own selves.

Do we think there should be a different kind of city initiative? Well, we're voters, there's an election on, and time's a-wasting to make it an issue.

Or do we think it makes more sense to just start building and meshing local networks? Well, then let's start doing that.

"We make the road by walking." Something tells me that the sooner grassroots broadband advocates start making our own road, the sooner we'll find One Cleveland ready to join us on the journey.