Seattle Neighborhood Networks Project
Background
The City of Seattle has a body called CTAB, the Citizens' Technology Advisory Board. http://www.seattle.gov/community-technology-advisory-board
CTAB advises the municipal government on technical matters. http://www.seattle.gov/community-technology-advisory-board/what-we-docommittees
Since this is Seattle, they mainly seem to advise "buy something from $VENDOR" where VENDOR is one of Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing, et al.
CTAB has a list of 4 remits listed on their web page navigation sidebar, one of which is Digital Inclusion. Synthesizing http://www.seattle.gov/community-technology-advisory-board/what-we-docommittees/digital-inclusion and the contents of a paper document (source apparently unavailable) distributed at a recent PechaKucha event (no link, because their website is toxic) Digital Inclusion emcompasses:
- digital equity
- broadband adoption efforts on connectivity
- skills and devices and technical support
- device recycling and refurbishment
At a recent Group:LibrePlanet_Washington meeting, koanhead proposed a set of overlapping projects which can meet all these goals in a Freedom-respecting manner. Hopefully CTAB and the municipality can be persuaded to buy-in, as some initial funding will be required to make these projects possible; afterwards they can become self-supporting if properly managed. Buy-in from the City might not be easy as CTAB membership has some entanglement with Microsoft. If the City will not help then we can approach individual neighborhoods, or even smaller groups if we can muster the necessary bodies to do that leg-work. We can hope that it will not come to that.
Recycling
Since the recent debacle with Total Reclaim,
