Marc's Voice

The Case Connection Zone dashboard

Its fun to watch Google play-the-country by dangling Gigabit connectivity under our collective noses, and then witness the kind of municipal frothing at the mouth over the opportunity of participating with Google on this project.  Google has received over 600 applications from cities and over 190,000 responses from individuals.

Yah gotta love it! Everybody wants free bandwidth! That shouldn’t be a surprise.

But Google won’t even determine where they’re going to build anything until the end of 2010.  Needless to say we’re not waiting for Google here in Cleveland.

CWRU’s “Case Connection Zone” launched their effort yesterday with a ‘Gigabit breakfast’ to introduce the community to what we’re doing. CWRU plans on providing free gigabit networking to 104 homes and apartments on Hessler St. - by May 23rd, which is when the annual Hessler St. fair occurs.

The issue of providing free bandwidth to communities is a juicy one. We certainly need urban infrastructure here in Cleveland.  Some cities have created their own fiber infrastructure such as SF or are offering fiber via traditional ‘triple play’ contracts, such as LUSfiber does in Lafayette, LA.

But the bigger issue than fiber access is “what are people gonna do with all this bandwidth?”

And that’s what we’re attempting to answer here in Cleveland.

My class has been working on building a dashboard for the Beta Block test.  We don’t really know what the health, energy or safety will be.  We don’t even know what they mean by education.  But we do know that we need to put up a survey, link to all these great web services and provide a way for users to log-on and register.

So our class has built this environment using PeopleAggregator.  We’ve got a News page, which is built with Pages Plus and we’re linking in videos from an Amazon web services based CDN called TekMedia.  We’re importing Facebook profiles, watching activity streams and RSS feeds, enabling neighbors to form groups, share media or private message to each other.

We’re imagining all sorts of ‘family oriented’ activities and useful apps and services that students can use - as 60% of Hessler St. are students at CWRU.  Building a gateway to a Gigabit network means you’d better be open, agile and ready to adopt to whatever shows up.

Our ‘Citizen Dashboard’ is a social network, blogging tool, activity streams and groups based open source environment - where any developer can download the source code and setup up their own dashboard environment or interface in with ours (or anybody else’s.)  Our dashboard interface is completely malleable and customizable by simply modifying it’s CSS.

We hope that  by coupling a dashboard with compelling news, content, social media and blogging features, with state-of-the-art health, energy and public safety functionality we can create a model for the ‘Digital City’ experience of the future.

That’s what our Digital project is, and what my Phd. is all about.  I think we can create new kinds of jobs with our Citizen Dashboard and an open Digital City platform.  We’re going to create local community ‘digital bureaus’ where we can study and document quantitatively and qualitatively that our method CAN create 5,000 jobs in five years.

We’ll offer a ‘virtuous circle’ process of training and volunteerism and utilize on-line multimedia projects to keep our workers busy, training and creative.  I believe that there’s a huge MOUNTAIN of multimedia production work that needs to get created, to upgrade the centralized wikipedia we have today - into interactive multimedia encyclopedias - of the future.  That need for $1T worth of on-line multimedia will be the fuel that will feed our sustainable engine. And a whole lotta jobs!@$@$#^$%$%

So yesterday was the birth of my Phd. study, our project and my hope that we can PROVE that new jobs of the future aren’t 40 hours a week, full-time traditional office jobs.  Lots has been said about the job of the future, we’re out to prove it.

5,000 jobs in 5 years is my goal.  Starting yesterday.

I’m one of those ‘developers’ that Lev is talking about, working on what’s called ‘an application’.

Big shout-out to my freshman students Owen Bell, Tom Dooner and Brian Stack.  They’re signed up for the duration, even moving in with me and my family this summer to dive into the code.