II-07-01-Lenczner-Free-WiFi 433-440

II-07-01-Lenczner-Free-WiFi 433-440

Île Sans Fil: Montréal community Wi-Fi: Interview with Michael Lenczner¹

Mark Tovey² and Michael Lenczer

Mark Tovey: Can you tell me a little bit about the project you have to bring wireless to downtown Montréal? You’re really one of the founders of that.

Michael Lenczner: I’m one of the founders of Île Sans Fil, which basically means Wireless Island. It's a community wireless networking group, inspired by the likes of Seattle Wireless, and NYC Wireless and others. We started it up in the Summer of 2003. And the goal was to promote free public wireless and internet access in Montréal's public spaces. And to use that infrastructure to create and support local community.

MT: And, can you tell me about the ways in which it, in fact, does create and support local community—the kinds of things it enables that simply weren't possible before?

ML: That's the second mission, it’s actually what's a bit different about our community wireless networking group.

There have been about 300 of these worldwide. I'm sorry, just in Europe and North America, it'd be about 300. And most of the focus there was really either on creating a mesh network that was a kind of an autonomous local internet, or municipal network, owned by citizens, or it was to have this free wireless in public spaces thing.

But this kind of social aspect is a bit something that we've brought to the mix. Done also by NYC Wireless a bit. They had some art stuff with their network, and had a bit broader vision, but we really focused on that second goal. So what we did is created Wifidog, which is an open source software project, that's wifidog.org. And that manages our hotspots. And that sits on the router, and on all of our hotspots. And when users connect through wireless networking, they are brought to a web page specifically. They are made to log in, create their own account—we don't care what. You don't have to have a verified email address or anything like that. We don't have to know who you are really.

But they're brought to a web-page specific to that location. And what we do with that location, with that web-page, is that we try to aggregate information from the Internet, try to show people what Internet content is available—what the Internet should look like from that location, including a kind of profile of who else is on line, and who has recently been online.

MT: Wow. So if they have knowledge of who else is online or recently been online, how can that be used to build community, or even build a sense of community?

ML: I guess the first one is getting people into those public spaces. So it's not just trying to share free Internet access. Because you know that most of our clients have Internet access, because they have laptops. And Internet access is actually relatively inexpensive and ubiquitous in Canada, because we have had good government involvement in that way.

So, one is getting them to come from the homes into public spaces. First places where you live, second, places where you work. Third, places where we gather. So just by offering this to independent cafés is promoting these people spending time in third places, instead of first or second places.

And then, one example of what we do right now, is we grab Flickr images from Flickr's API, and make them show up on the portal page. So you can interact that way with each-other.

And the goal is actually get rid of the computer, and have people talking, talking to each-other, and hearing stories about this space that they're in, about feeling connected with that space that they're in. Trying to use computers to lower the barrier, to get to that sense of belonging, and sense of interaction between people.

MT: Can you give me a practical example might be like? Like: I'm sitting in a café that's decided that has said, “OK, we'll join this free wireless internet”. And I can see who's around me, and who's also using the wireless internet, I suppose? What would that actually look like on the ground?

ML: When you log in, we would aggregate information to that portal page, from the blog of the owner of that shop who has a blog, and create an aggregate of posts using trackbacks, so that people can send trackbacks to a portal page to have their blog entry show up on that portal page [and] having Flickr content show up on there, if we tell them what tag to use. Have Flickr content show up there, and also have art by local artists and photographers show up on those portal pages. So we're still a long way to go in terms of having a really usable, dynamic place, but that's what we're really working on right now.

It’s so interesting because it's outside of the normal open source software, and it's outside of the ordinary community networking kind of goals—really having that focus on user interaction and physical location, and trying to nail that as close as possible.

But also what's also interesting is that our model has been picked up by four other groups now. Three other groups in Canada right around us—so Toronto, Ottawa-Gatineau Wireless, and Québec Sans Fil is just starting up.

And they're all using our software, wifidog, and using our model of charging café owners $50 a year, and having them buy the equipment. And having this all be volunteer run.

MT: OK, so if there was something missing from your current toolkit, what would that thing, or way of doing things be? What would sort of like to see come into existence, above and beyond, as a sort of upgrade to what you're doing now?

ML: I'd like to see kind of what it is that you're working on—which is a better sense of how these projects work together, have a better guideline for open source methodology. So that would be the real request: to have the community of people that are online, involved in these kinds of projects, to really have a more mature, and more spread-out understanding of the methodology of these projects. So why does Wikipedia work, why do open source projects work?

Community wireless networking is very interesting specifically because it takes open source methodology and applies it to grassroots location-based, local community projects, in a way that no other groups do.

So that's what I think is really interesting about community wireless networking, is that if you have 300 groups across Europe and North America, that are taking these methodologies that are being developed online, and finding ways to apply them to local community. So how do you use them to apply to city council? How do you use them to apply to local business partners? To interact with local constituents?

That's one thing. A tool I'd love to have would be people studying, for example, how community wireless networking groups are applying open source methodology, and how are they modifying it, importantly, to have it work in local organizing.

MT: So you've talked a little about how to bring people in very local areas together. Do you have any thoughts about how you could bring people from disparate parts of the world to talk about things? Somebody in a café in Jakarta, and somebody in a café in Sydney, and somebody in a café in Tokyo, and somebody in a café in Montréal?

ML: I think there's a lot of work being done on that, and I'm explicitly working against that.

That's one of the reasons I started up Île Sans Fil—was that I don't like the fact that it's as easy to talk to someone across the world as it is to talk to somebody next door. I'm trying to find ways, as are many other people, to use the Internet to priviledge local interaction.

And that doesn't mean making farther interaction impossible. But the idea of having everything being on the same sense of ease—not one being privileged over the other, is something I kind of dislike.

So a lot of people are working on the other side of things, of reducing barriers, of getting rid of geographic barriers. But I think there's some important work to be done on how you can use these tools to privilege local problem solving, privilege local interaction, and privilege local cohesion.

MT: Can you give me a sense of some of the reasons that it is desirable to encourage local interaction and local participation?

ML: I guess a lot of it is motivated by a gut feeling of a sense of not belonging—or not feeling very much attachment to the places that I live—so not knowing neighbors very well. Just this idea of city living. Being a mass of anonymous individuals passing each other every day. So that's part of the reaction—that kind of emotional feeling.

In terms of why should local connections be privileged over global ones? I think that you can make an argument that people are better caretakers when they feel an attachment to their local community. So, to care about environmental matters, to care about political matters, political and civic matters—you know, simple acts of reciprocation and generosity, I think that happens when you feel like you know—and you belong to—your local community.

MT: And I remember, for instance, when meetups.com came into existence, I thought, 'wow, this could allow me to get to know people in my community in a way that was very easy'. And, in fact, it would mean that if I moved to another community I could start putting down roots in that other community pretty quickly. Get to know people who were interested in the same things as me.

And so I really can sense the possibilities in community wi-fi as you’ve described for meeting new people, and meeting people right around your area, and all of those kinds of things.

And perhaps, what I'd like to do is get a picture of somebody who is moving to a new area—who is moving to a new house, or a new apartment, and has got a wireless hotspot near them, and doesn't know anybody—and how would they come to start getting to know their neighbors?

Obviously there are the usual ways of just going and introducing yourself to people, but it seems that this could enable some extra possibilities and again, how would you advise that person, what would you say—look—this is what you would go and do.

ML: So, this is where you're not just going from step one to step [two]. It's a little more convoluted this stuff that we're working on. We have 22,000 users right now after three years and 115 hotspots. We're increasing at four or five hotspots a month, and a thousand users a month. We are getting a sizable piece of the early adopters in Montréal. And those people have a fair amount of influence in their groups around them of getting people to use different technologies, and comfortable with different technologies.

So the idea is to get profiles for those 20,000 users, and have it be usable in a way that makes them actually be interested in terms of giving them some features that they'll like, to be able to find out—if people choose to make this information public—who's online, and where, kind of thing, ala Dodgeball, which is a cell phone friend-location-service that was recently bought by Google. To have those kind of things happen. But then get them using these services, using these profiles, and once calendar syndication gets itself sorted out, that would be—you know, we're all waiting for that to happen.

Get these people using these services at home. So it's not about, necessarily, wireless use at all. It's turned into a location-based portal that you can use for your home that's, yes, you can see what information is relevant to what café you're at, but then if you want to go home, you can go up a level and see what information is relevant to your quartier. And the information we're going to privilege is cultural information, environmental information, specific information, and user-generated information—user-generated content. So it's not just any information. We know that we're playing a kind of editorial role in the content we're promoting.

So that would be the idea: in your profile you would have the first three digits of your postal code, which doesn't say where you live, but it say approximately what block or two you're in. And when you come into a new area, you'll be able to look on that—it wouldn't necessarily mean going to the local café at all. But looking on there and saying, well, these are the environmental resources that are close to me. These are the civic information things.

Working with services like howdtheyvote which is a service which scrapes the Hansards, the parliamentary record, it scrapes that, and then separates it [by] MP, and then we would work with them to aggregate that content on a location basis and make that available—promote that content to our users.

So, that's the way we're trying to work things. We have these users, we have this captive audience right now. And we're not going to try to make our own calendar syndication, make our own civic information, make our own environmental information, but tying to outside sources—ala Web 2.0.

We don't have the resources to make all these different features. So use other people's features, Flickr, Eventful, Upcoming, whoever figures out calendar syndication, and then introduce that content to our users.

MT: What is calendar syndication?

ML: Calendar syndication is when I can have a blog, and I have a calendar on my blog or on my CMS, be able to post events, and people would be able to subscribe to certain of those events, and they would go automatically in their calendar, and they would be able to pass those on. So right now there's calendars that spit out RSS, but RSS doesn't go into mycalendar. There's iCal[endar] formats, but that's not sent back and forth, calendars don't talk very well. So when they do that'll be a really big thing, and there's different people working on it, but so far it hasn't come together yet.

MT: What do you see as the possibilities if many parts of the world start doing as these four cities have started doing in terms of localizing? In terms of showing people what’s available right in their neighbourhood, in terms of allowing them to participate online, in terms of very local neighbourhood activities. Both in terms of calendaring, and presumably in terms of blogging about what's going on right where they are. Being able to share information about local—not only events, but cultural hotspots—restaurants—what's really going on where they are. What do you see as the possibilities for the world if everybody got more in touch with their local community?

ML: Yeah, that's a great question. I don't think I've thought about that all that that much. I've been really focussed on my own city.

But I think there's a lot of information about people's local environments that isn't necessarily not public, or private, but it's just in the way that people run into it daily. You can imagine what would happen in terms of government, if there was more transparency and accountability, and feeling like people knew what was going on. If I get an email every week—what my MP was saying in parliament—I think that's a powerful way to get people to be more informed voters. You know, what happens when you get more informed voters?

We at Île Sans Fil have somebody else, a guy out in B.C., that's working on a website which scrapes parliamentary information, and makes that available to people. And then Île Sans Fil has the stuff where we can tell people about that content.

So we have the eyeballs. Because we're putting our time maintaining this infrastructure, and building this infrastructure, and getting users who don't necessarily care about this information. But we can force them to see it, with a captive audience.

I think you can have a more informed democracy. I think you can have all the serendipity that happens when information about your local environment is more available. But, I don't know—that's a great question. I'll leave it to other people to puzzle through that.