Smart Russell: Public Wifi Community Engagement
NOTE: In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have shifted more funding to this project.
Residents of the Russell Neighborhood experience the consequences of the digital divide firsthand. Based on FCC data, up to 80% do not have a home internet connection. A lack of connectivity at home prevents kids from doing homework, adults from finding employment and even families from getting access to government services. Life is moving online and if you don’t have connection at home, you are at a disadvantage.
Learn how Louisville Metro is bridging the digital divide
The Vision Russell Transformation Plan identifies the lack of connectivity to information as a barrier for the neighborhood. With that in mind, Louisville Metro is building a public Wi-Fi network in the Russell neighborhood to provide basic internet access to residents. We do not think this solves the digital divide in Russell, but we do think it’s important to have a multi-prong approach. This network will connect Russell residents and visitors to relevant information about their community and opportunities to improve their lives and neighborhood.
Background
This isn’t the first time that we’ve launched a public WiFi network in Russell. We were able to get a small network up in 2015, but had to shut it down a couple years later due to challenges with maintaining it. The network consisted of five hotspots located on or near Market St between 25th and 31st. While it was a Metro managed network, we relied on private businesses to provide the infrastructure to house the network equipment. Housing it on private property made it easier to deploy, but also made it harder to maintain. In the end, we closed the pilot because it became too difficult to maintain the network infrastructure without having consistent access to the equipment. However, we saw demand in the network that made us want to build it again, but bigger and in a more sustainable manner.
While the network’s footprint was small and the network connection was inconsistent at times, many people used it. Between February and December 2016, when the network was most reliable, an average of 596 people connected to the network each month.
We learned the community wanted a Wi-Fi network, based on the demand, but knew that we had to build it differently. The Choice Neighborhood Grant program gave us the opportunity to build the Russell Public Wi-Fi 2.0 as part of the Smart Russell project. With the grant, we will be able to apply the lessons learned from the pilot to build a better public Wi-Fi network for the neighborhood.
Process to select the sites
We worked with residents and community partners to identify good locations for the hotspots. Based on our conversations with the community, we selected sites they believed would get the most use and have the most impact. Our strategy was basic: analyze available data and strategies; listen to and learn from the community; and walk the neighborhood.
Review Vision Russell Transformation Plan & data analysis
The Vision Russell transformation plan has guided our Smart Russell planning since day one. We have looked to the document, created with extensive community engagement, to find the challenges and areas to focus our work. In this plan, it identifies key development areas, so we started by clustering our projected Wi-Fi hotspots at the development zones identified in the Vision Russell Transformation Plan. We also looked at neighborhood data including locations of business, TARC ridership, and daily traffic on roads to see if there were potential high usage areas in the neighborhood that we missed.
Community Conversations
After putting some potential locations down on a map, we talked with numerous people involved in the Russell neighborhood about the locations and got their feedback. Based on our conversations, we adjusted the hotspots, added new locations and requirements for the network. For one, we hadn’t thought about the requirement for seating. We were too focused on getting coverage and putting them in highly trafficked areas and missed the need for people to be able to sit down and access the internet. An early conversation highlighted that blind spot, and we have focused our location based on the convergence of likelihood of use and the availability of seating or opportunity to put seating in.
Walk the neighborhood
After refining the hotspot locations, we walked each one to ensure that it would fit with the area around it. We expect people will congregate at the hotspot locations, so we wanted to create a community meeting point in an area that had space for people. By walking the neighborhood, we were able to identify vacant lots as a potential site for Wi-Fi parklets. Working with the Community Development, we were able to identify five vacant lots as potential Wi-Fi parklets. These parklets will have a hotspot near them and will have seating available. Without walking the neighborhood and seeing exactly where these would go, we would not have identified that opportunity.
Going through this process, we must have created 75 or more different hotspot locations for the 30 we have currently. It was an iterative co-creation process that not only helped us identify locations that could have the most impact, but also helped us build our co-creation skills, a guiding principle for our Smart City work. For traditionally inward facing departments like IT, these are new skills that need to be developed to support the growing amount of community technology work being done by Louisville Metro. We appreciate all the time, energy, patience and passion the residents and community organizations have put into this project to help us develop the public Wi-Fi network, a tool to bridge the digital divide in Russell.
Map of Locations
If you have questions about this project or Smart Russell, please reach out to Ed Blayney at ed.blayney@louisvilleky.gov.
