The Decentralized Web Summit: Locking the Web Open will happen on June 8th and 9th at Internet Archive in San Francisco. The event will be live streamed if you can’t attend in person.

The event is a discussion of the future of the web. From the Summit website:

The World Wide Web is fragile. Links break and website content can disappear forever. The Web is not universally accessible. It is too easy for outside entities to censor connections, controlling what people can and cannot view on the Web. The Web is also not very private, exposing users to mass surveillance by corporations and governments. A Decentralized Web can address all of these problems by building in privacy, security and preservation by default, ensuring that websites are easily accessible to all as long as at least one person somewhere in the world is hosting a copy.

Keynote speakers will be Vint Cerf, considered one of the “Fathers of the Internet” and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google; Cory Doctorow, Special Advisor at the Electronic Frontier Foundation; and Brewster Kahle, Founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive.

The list of presenters includes a number of innovators, tech leaders, and journalists. Panel discussions cover a range of relevant topics, including innovation, privacy, and security. There will also be workshops and Q & A to address your specific concerns.

You can check out the schedule, register to attend online, and learn more about the decentralized web by reviewing some of the resources the team has made available. The event is sponsored by the Internet Archive, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Google, and Mozilla.

In April we wrote about the Mid-Atlantic Gigabit Innovation Collaboratory (MAGIC), an innovative new educational program in Westminster, Maryland, that gives local high school students opportunities to learn new technology skills through hands-on, real world projects. After the success of the program’s first project, the MAGIC program created a temporary wireless network for a second project -- this time for the city’s annual Westminster Flower and Jazz Festival held during Mother's Day weekend.

The MAGIC program is a collaborative effort between Ting Internet and Freedom Broadband, with Ting offering networking equipment and Freedom supervising the project. Ting is the private partner and operator of the City of Westminster’s open access municipal fiber network. Freedom Broadband is the leading provider of wireless Internet in the surrounding Carroll County region.

Festivals and Fiber

The temporary network gave festivalgoers access to extremely fast, high bandwidth wireless connections that connected to Westminster's fiber network. While strolling through the festival to see local jazz musicians and sampling from hundreds of vendors offering food, flowers, and crafts, attendees were be able to wirelessly connect their phones, tablets, and other devices to the city's fiber network during the one day event.

For the program’s first “Tech Incubation” project in April, the MAGIC program’s 15 students also created and operated a temporary wireless network that the City of Westminster used at its annual Celtic Canter and Downtown Irish Celebration. These first two projects are part of a continuous series in which the students have opportunities to further expand and refine their technology knowledge.

Leveraging Municipal Fiber for Economic and Cultural Benefits

Next Century Cities recently hosted "Digital Northwest," a summit for regional broadband leaders. Leaders from member cities all over the country gathered together to learn from one another and discuss digital inclusion, models for success, partnerships, and much more. 

Chris led a panel of mayors and city council leaders from cities with well-known municipal networks in a discussion of their networks and how their communities have benefitted. 

The panel featured: 

• Mayor Jill Boudreau, Mt. Vernon, WA
• Mayor Wade Troxell, Fort Collins, CO
• City Council President Jeremy Pietzold, , Sandy OR
• Councilmember David Terrazas, Santa Cruz, CA

Every day, community leaders are working to overcome barriers to developing Internet networks. On Monday, April 4, 2016, Chris took part in the Coalition for Local Internet Choice (CLIC) pre-conference panel on Public Perspectives to Partnerships at the Broadband Communities Summit in Austin, Texas. Chris was joined by Gabriel Garcia, Bill Vallee, Jon Gant, and Drew Clark. The panel was moderated by Catherine Rice.

The group discussed strategies, business models, and lessons learned when building a successful public-private partnership (PPP).

Public Perspectives on Partnerships: Lessons Learned and Best Practices

Moderator:

Catharine Rice – Project Director, CLIC

Speakers:

Bill Vallee – Office of Consumer Counsel, State of Connecticut, New Britain, CT

Jon Gant – Director, UC2B

Christopher Mitchell – Community Networks Director, ILSR

Gabriel Garcia – Director, Senior Counsel, General Counsel, Legal Services, CPS Energy, San Antonio, TX

Drew Clark – Chairman and Publisher, BroadbandBreakfast.com

“The Gateway to Scenic Southern Indiana” could soon be the gateway to high-speed Internet access in Indiana.  The city of Bloomington, Indiana, has undertaken several projects and events in order to empower the community to find solutions to its connectivity problems.

The city of Bloomington issued a Request For Information (RFI) for a Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) network on March 31, 2016. City leaders have taken this next step in order to make high-speed Internet access affordable and available to all of the city’s 80,000 people.

A Bull’s Eye: The RFI

Unlike the often-mentioned Request For Proposal (RFP), an RFI does not establish a plan of action. Instead, the RFI creates a procedure for Internet service providers (ISPs), contractors, and other companies to provide information on how they would create a network to best meet the needs of the city. The city's deadline to answer any questions from interested firms is April 28th and RFI responses are due on May 12th.

Rick Dietz spoke with us the day after the city released the RFI. Dietz is the Director of ITS for the city of Bloomington. He described how the city had come to its decision to pursue a community network. The mayor and city council hired a consultant and held a symposium on high-speed networks, before releasing the RFI.

Dietz repeated the three key components that are integral to the RFI:

• Community-wide connectivity, to enable everyone to use the network.
• Community-control, to ensure the network meets the community’s needs.
• Financial sustainability to the community in the future.

Without these principles, a new network will likely not be right for Bloomington. The RFI calls for any incumbent providers, local providers, or others to describe their ideas to achieve these goals, whether through a private public partnership or not. The City has taken a number of steps to enable this process to go smoothly.

The February Symposium

The 2016 Municipal Technology Conference is coming up on Thursday, May 5th, 2016 at the Augusta Civic Center in the state capital. The conference is sponsored by the Maine Municipal Association (MMA) and the Maine GIS UserGroup (MEGUG) in cooperation with Maine’s ConnectME Authority. 

The conference title - “Ready. Set. Grow!” - captures one of the major themes of the conference, where several panel sessions will focus on the topic of municipal networks. Several Maine communities, including Rockport, Sanford, Orono and Old Town, and Bar Harbor, have made progress in the past couple of years toward creating locally-grown fiber networks. 

Some notable people appearing as panelists and presenters at the conference include:

Jeff Letourneau - As the Executive Director of Networkmaine, Mr. Letourneau oversees the University of Maine’s cyber-infrastructure. He has been involved in numerous network initiatives in Maine including the first Internet connection project in Maine in the 1980s, the first K-12 school and public library network (MSLN) in the US in the 1990s, and he co-authored a federal Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) grant that led to a $25 million loan for Maine’s middle-mile network, the Three Ring Binder. Letourneau is also a member of the ConnectMaine Authority Advisory Board and a former member of the Maine State Legislature’s Broadband Strategy Council.

At the end of March, city leaders across the state of Connecticut converged on a conference to discuss the deficiencies of Internet access and ways to move forward such as a regional network, municipal networks, and public private partnerships. Over the past year, the communities of New Haven, Hartford, and Manchester, have explored several of these possibilities. What pathway they choose depends in part on the outcome of the conference.

The Conference: A Long Time Coming

The conference High-Speed Broadband Infrastructure: A Toolbox for Municipalities took place the state capital Hartford, Connecticut, on March 23, 2016. The presenters, featuring the mayors of New Haven and Hartford, addressed the diverse needs of Connecticut’s communities.

And those needs are many. The Office of Consumer Counsel just released two reports on Connecticut’s connectivity. The first report describes the deficiencies of Internet access in Connecticut. It narrates many of the struggles small, local institutions face in trying to receive adequate Internet service from incumbent providers. The second report recommends a matching grant program for pilot projects based on lessons learned from other states’ programs. 

The Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition (SHLB) is hosting its sixth annual conference from April 27 - 29 at the Hyatt Regency in Crystal City, VA (near Reagan National Airport in Washington DC).

From the SHLB website:

Every year SHLB's Annual Conference attracts 200-300 people from across the country to discuss key broadband policy issues that are important to anchor institutions and their communities. This year's sixth Annual Conference will focus on E-rate Compliance, Lifeline Reform, Telehealth, and Fiber Build Out, as well as other policies and funding programs that will impact broadband deployment for anchor institutions and communities.

The conference officially kicks off at 12 p.m. noon on Wednesday, April 27th.

Notable plenary speakers at the conference will include US Senator Angus King (I-Maine) and Valerie Truesdale, the Chief Technology, Personalized Learning & Engagement Officer for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina. In addition, representatives from the Broadband Opportunities Council (BOC) will also participate on a lunch panel on the last day of the conference.

Senator King has been a strong proponent of universal broadband access and municipal broadband initiatives. Valerie Truesdale is an advocate for using improved access to broadband and other technologies to transform learning in schools. The Broadband Opportunities Council, established by President Obama, works to understand how the Executive Branch can support communities around the nation seeking to invest in local broadband networks.

The full list of conference speakers includes a link to information about each speaker. The complete conference agenda also provides information about the different sessions and workshops to be held throughout the three day conference.

Light Reading is hosting “Gigabit Cities Live” next week.

The conference will take place on Tuesday, April 5th at the Ritz Carlton in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

It’s an all-day event bringing together city and industry leaders to explore the opportunities of Gigabit networks. The conference will cover topics such as Gigabit technologies, business models, and smart-city applications. 

The Keynote Speakers are: 

• Gigi Sohn, Counselor to the Chairman, the Federal Communications Commission
• Jeff Stoval, the Chief Information Officer, the City of Charlotte
• Robert Howald, VP of Network Architecture, Comcast
• Michael Slinger, Director of Fiber Cities Team, Google Fiber

For more information or to register, go to the conference’s website. 

(Note: “Only individuals using qualified work email addresses will be considered for admission”)

Are you going to the Austin Broadband Communities Conference this spring? If you plan on attending the April 5 - 7 event, you may want to head out one day early so you can check out the Coalition for Local Internet Choice (CLIC) Preconference Day event on April 4.

From the CLIC email invite:

CLIC's pre-conference day will focus on how communities can facilitate the development of local gigabit networks. Our interactive panel of experts will share best practices and how successful community-led networks have responded to various fiber deployment hurdles, including political, legal, financial, market or resource barriers. You will be able to meet in-person and hear from the public officials who are facilitating, and the private companies who are engaged in and seeking, local public-private broadband partnerships.

The event will be open to all conference attendees and will start at 8:45 a.m. Some of the presentations include: 

A Discussion of How Successful Community-Led Networks Have Responded to Barriers and Challenges

• Overcoming Legal and Political Barriers: Strategies to Advocate for Your Community’s Authority
• Overcoming Financial Barriers: Strategies to Identify and Use Funding Sources to Finance Networks from Build-outs to Upgrades
• Overcoming Market Barriers: Strategies to Maximize the Use and Benefits of the Network Once You Have It 

Public-Private Partnerships

• An Introductory Survey of Business Models and Legal Considerations in Building Broadband Public-Private Partnerships
• Private Perspectives on Partnerships: Meet the Private Sector Gigabit Partners
• Public Perspectives on Partnerships: Lessons Learned and Best Practices (Chris will speak on this topic)

For more information on speakers, you can review the full agenda here.