Anthony Townsend from the Institute for the Future has this item on the state of ad-supported muni-Wi-Fi networks. One point he makes, and it seems like an obvious one, is that cities should leverage their Wi-Fi networks to provide local information or community-created content.
Discussions about the design of today’s municipal wireless networking efforts have not yet addressed the way community-created content can be solicited and integrated in the splash pages and portal sites where wireless users are greeted when they connect. We do know that cities such as Long Beach, California and business improvement districts in New York City have experimented with local content. However, these past experiments did not leverage the tools we possess today to rethink how we might provide a community bulletin board as an integral part of the municipal wireless experience.
He’s quite right when he says that most municipal broadband networks take users out of their communities.
The directions of current municipal projects instead are unwittingly viewing the wireless network as a means to escape local communities, and as a one-way street for advertisers to subsidize the network’s operating costs.
It seems to me to be a no-brainer that the Wi-Fi log-in pages are the perfect platforms for getting across local information. I would have thought that local politicians had already figured this out. (Hat tip to SmartMobs.)
Cynthia Brumfield at 8:59 AM|Comments(0)
Blogs We Read
