Drumbeat/ideas/communitywireless

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A project headline. The big idea in a nutshell.

bring people online, gracefully open.


A short description. The problem you're trying to solve, challenge you're trying to meet, or concrete goal you're seeking.

Roman peripheral is huge, and Municipio V (5th Local District) is huge as well. This suburb where nois3lab has its place, Colli Aniene [1], has more than 40000 inhabitants. It's a place where its inhabitants sleep without any attractive social activities. Apart from, "bao;bar (open_source/cocktail.bar) [2]" - the previous entrepreneur activity of one of nois3lab's founders, and a public square with its contiguous café, the suburb doesn't offer any other social activity for people. Since 2008, the Provincia di Roma (Local Area Authority) has started his wifi coverage project called ProvinciaWifi [3]. This is going to be FREE (as in freedom and in free beer) and PUBLIC for all its territory. Potentially its users, the Roman local area inhabitants, are about 4 millions, not considering the tourists and whoever is entitled to subscribe this service, according to italian laws. This project has had, and still has about 300 hotspots along the whole territory at the moment of its opening party and, according to Local Area's financial resources, they are going to rise up. The basic ideas beneath this ProvinciaWifi and Zero Digital Divide [4] are simple: even in an “civilized” country as Italy should be, there are some areas where the digital divide is real and a lot of people cannot access the Internet. Thus a public institution like Provincia di Roma comes in, and it's crucial to bring more people online. The best part of this project is most of all about the freedom and neutrality of this network. In fact the technological infrastructure is based on Open source and Free Software, and the Authority has committed itself clearly to maintain this network without any monopoly or dominant and proprietary positions. The small solution we're suggesting here is to start in our suburb, Colli Aniene, an experiment completely covering it with this wireless signal, and in a immediately subsequent time to build on this network free tools and services for citizens. The coverage phase will be on Municipio V, with hardware and work supplies, while the services phase would be on us. Here comes Drumbeat, indeed. Starting with a crowdsourcing tool for time sharing for Colli Aniene's inhabitants (Timebank – Banca del Tempo [5]), through the possibility to browse and read all e-books from our newly opened public library, to a virtual marketplace for job opportunities where local job offering and job request can meet up. All of this it's going to happen phisically in the suburb having some specific meeting points linked to some possible social activities, so that community chances may increase not only connecting people virtually, but also between human beings, in flesh, blood and their relationships.

Some tags. To help people find your idea.

Wireless human beings, social, timesharing, open, free

An image (maybe). Something that represents your idea and will help draw people to it.

cloud society

Links: [1] http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colli_Aniene [2] http://baobar.it [3] http://www.provincia.roma.it/percorsitematici/innovazione-tecnologica/progetti/4035 [4] http://www.zerodigitaldivide.it/ [5] http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banca_del_Tempo