This is a sharing of my Last.Fm listening from August and September 2009. I never said it was going to be interesting but I really just wanted to see that it could be done and how. It was quite easy to set up in fact since I wrote this post in 2009, many more services have opened up to allow you to share your listening pleasures more easily.
I did have to check to see what this was after I reposted it here.
Chancing across new digital arts projects is what happens when you use Twitter, simply following a link can get you into all sort of places you would never have dreamed of. I stumbled across one of these places last month and followed the link through to a brand new project from Battersea Arts Centre, the Scratch online project.
Here is a little map of my wanderings across Liverpool, it actually shows me nipping to the shop and then doubling back before I get to my destination. But is a great way of showing a walking route between 2 points, say for display on your website. A foot route from the train station to an event for instance.
It’s created using GPS Draw for Android. Download and play
I had an interesting conversation the other day about the digital divide in North Liverpool. For those of you not in the know, North Liverpool is one of the most socially and economically poorest areas in the country, surprising I know as the city of Liverpool had 3/4 of a Billion pounds pumped into it in the last Ten years. But I digress
We were discussing the problem of giving people greater access to the internet, and how this could be done, one of the solutions we thought it would be good to look at was to “WiFi bridge the digital divide”.
You see there are businesses, community and voluntary organisations in the North Liverpool area who have Internet access, don’t get me wrong this is no backwoods but the take up of of the internet by the wider community is smaller.
So what you may well be saying- well the so and the what is that if the Government is looking to make all of it’s services (Digital by Default) all available on line then the population in this area are going to miss out on quick and easy access to government and council services – thereby hindering them even further. If you think that most jobs are available to apply for via the web, and then you don’t give people access to the web so they can apply for those jobs then you are disenfranchising them even more. And the last thing we need is to cut people off even more than they are already. So easy access to the Internet is a must for them.
So going back to the organisations I mentioned earlier the businesses, the community and voluntary organisations – it might and probably is possible for them to be able to offer a certain amount of their internet access available to the wider community via WiFi, this would of course need to be locked down and secure for the sake of the business but 10% could be made available to the wider community. This would involve setting up their routers to allow for this and also ensuring that the WiFi that was made available wasn’t just downloading vast quantities torrented data as this would make the companies that supplied the WiFi liable, but i am sure this could be done.
So what would it require…. This bit is over to you but some suggestions have been new routers for those involved in the project and some sort of funding to allow for the purchase of the routers. Also a good knowledge of how different Wifi signals could be combined to produce a cloud of WiFi – maybe it might be worth a chat with the Manchester WiFi people which I think was put together by Manchester Digital Development Agency (MDDA). Also a knowledge of what the uptake would be by both the organisations involved in contributing their WiFi (can they write it off as tax?) and the level of uptake amongst the residents.
If you are around in Liverpool and would like to get involved in a talk about the North Liverpool Digital Divide then we are hoping to have a discussion about it on Saturday 1st September in FACT Liverpool as part of their Mediated Garden project – it just means we get to sit in the sun on their roof while talking technical solutions to everyday problems. Mail me for more details.
Comments via Twitter
Via @MaxZadow @Defnetmedia did I ever tell you about a way of extending Wi-Fi to digitally excluded communities though mesh networking? This is possible. Mesh networking with Raspberry Pi s and Linux version called Byzantium. Implications for Dallas. We need to have a chat.
Via Facebook
Sawney Bean Means digital access is becoming a human right. I think the council should be providing this rather than businesses; there could be sponsorship of sorts but other countries are far further ahead in this type of thinking and I think perhaps businesses would be adverse to shelling out. So funding is an issue…
If I have rambled on about how good #Oggcamp is over the past couple of weeks but you still don’t get it, well here is an interview I conducted with Dan Lynch the last time Oggcamp was in Liverpool in 2010. This hopefully will be a little more enlightening than I ever could be.