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My Fellow Internet Engineers, In 1963, JCR Licklider wrote his famous "Memorandum For Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network" - calling together what ultimately evolved into the IETF - and bringing the Internet into existence, largely by demand pull. A few years later, in 1968, he and Bob Taylor wrote "In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face" and Stewart Brand opened the Whole Earth Catalog with the words, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it" - and then we proceeded to wire the world, and build ourselves the beginnings of a hive of minds. Now it's time to put both the net, and what we learned while building it, to work, rebuilding all of our other infrastructure. Today, I call for a Community Engineering Task Force, and community-level Engineering Working Groups - with the goal of launching a wave of infrastructure overhaul in our communities, from the ground up, akin to the transformation of campus & enterprise networks that stemmed from our work, building & deploying the Internet. And I ask that you join me in launching Civic.Net, as a network of local working groups. --- Background --- A little history: In 1992, the net opened to the public, people started calling for "Electronic Democracy" and "Electronic Town Halls" - and l left BBN, recruited a few intrepid souls to launch The Center for Civic Networking, with the notion of bringing IETF-style "rough consensus & running code" to bear, as a way to reinvent town meeting government (thank you to the Boston Computer Society, and then President Tracy Licklider, Lick's son, for our initial funding). We ran some experiments - supporting a series of hybrid town meetings, in Cambridge, on "sustainability & growth planning" - and ended up focusing on infrastructure development - the first high-speed Internet in a public library (courtesy of Steve Cisler & Apple's Library of Tomorrow Program, Continental Cablevision, and PSInet - thank you Bill Schrader). Then the USDA paid us to build one of the first e-markets, and then came the Telecom Act - and I was off helping local governments defend their rights-of-way from rampant construction, and launching municipal broadband networks. Now, I find myself on the Board & Long-Range Capital Planning committee of an aging condominium complex - as we struggle to find a model for comprehensive overhaul and upgrade for our buildings, grounds, utilties - in concert with our immediate neighbors. 60 years ago, William Levitt developed the model for building, and financing, suburban subdivisions - now a lot of our communities are falling apart, and we face the challenge of "fleet modernization" for subdivisions of multi-family buildings. And if you think herding cats to build the Internet was (& remains) a challenge, just try getting a condo board to think about a "big dig" in miniature (a "tiny dig"), and motivating lots of players towards a "Flag Day." I've come to believe that following the Internet model, creating "demand pull" from the edges (owners, residents), and crowdsourcing, are the only viable way forward, for rebuilding suburban America, before we see more catastrophic system failures like Flint MI's water system, North Andover's exploding gas mains, Miami's Champlain Towers crumbling into the Atlantic while their board rearranged deck chairs by the pool. And the need is urgent - I've been hearing more and more horror stories about skyrocketing operations & maintenance costs, people getting socked by multiplying condo fees, and of insane assessments to cover major renovations. --- Current Activities --- We've launched a fledgling Community Engineering Working Group, here on Nagog Hill, in Acton, MA - and are busily recruiting participants from our condo complex, our neighbors, and the shopping and office park adjacent to us. Our goal is to run a serious infrastructure planning exercise - the kind that cities, towns, college campuses, military bases perform - but that stop at the borders of private developments. Inside, the task falls to condominium boards, property managers, homeowners associations - groups that function as local governments & public works departments, without the know-how, staff, or vendor support to carry out the job. I'm bringing my experience in big-system business development, and community development, to bear, and seeking help from the broader community. Our goal is to run a prototype planning & acquisitions experiment - starting with soliciting vendor demonstrations (can you say "bidders' conference" or "Interop-like trade show & shownet exercise." The goal is to figure out how to solve our problems, and finance the exercise - building on our experience in building the Internet, and more recent experience in volunteer crisis response (crisis mapping, fire jumping), grass-roots driven community development (Community Foundations, Community Development Corporations & Initiatives, Habitat for Humanity, Burning Man), do it all "on camera" a la "This Old House" ("This Old Subdivision"), and develop an ecosystem to support other communities seeking to replicate our work (think a cross between the Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL, the IETF Secretariat, crowdsourcing platforms, and "grand challenge" exercises). --- And We Need Your Help --- Right now, I'm an Army of one - as organizer of our local working group, project engineer, and a cross between John Postel & the folks at CNRI in supporting an ad hoc engineering & planning process. I've been busily recruiting some advisors & academic support (an IAB equivalent), and now I'm trying to pull together a larger base of supporters - an audience for "This Old Subdivision," collaborators, vendors, sponsors, organizers & working groups in other communities. It's all very amorphous right now - as when Lick first issued his Memorandum - or when Torvalds posted his "I'm building a unix clone" news post. I've launched a Kickstarter - mostly as a focal point from which to launch a blog, podcast, journal, membership network - and generate some seed money. [I've been funding this out of my pocket - but I'm all in - going full time, and hiring some staff, is beyond my resources. I figure that 2500 "subscribers" or "members" - at $10/month will go a long way (as would a few corporate sponsors, a la the IETF or W3C).] So... I encourage folks to visit civic.net - which redirects to https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mfidelman/civicnet-network-we-must-to-fix-our-future - read about what we're doing, tune in, turn on, sign up, get on the bus, get with the program. NETWORK WE MUST, if we hope to survive in this new millenium of ours! And... if you're seriously interested - want to get something going in your community, have a solution to offer to communities, want to help me make this whole thing happen, are in a position to get us some press or other visibility - please contact me directly! Miles Fidelman Civic.Net -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra Theory is when you know everything but nothing works. Practice is when everything works but no one knows why. In our lab, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and no one knows why. ... unknown |
