February 2020 People Centered Internet Update: Message from Mei Lin
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February Update: Message from Mei Lin
Dear Internauts:
It has been quite a month for PCI, as our new board has gotten up and running and activities within our six areas of focus for 2020 are beginning to take shape.
We are very pleased to announce a new quarterly series of “Virtual Fireside Chats” with our founding chairman, Vint Cerf, which kicks off this month on February 25, with special guest, Ian Bremmer.
I am also very happy to host the first in-person PCI salon of 2020 on “Native American Culture and Connectivity” at my home in Palo Alto on February 21, featuring speakers from our “Project Eagle Feather” community and Stanford Haas Distinguished Visitor, Gerald Vizenor. If you are in the Bay Area, I hope you will join us.
This month’s newsletter features contributions from the two presenters who recently spoke online with our PCI Community. Sascha Meinrath shared his decade of work to provide accurate data about internet availability around the world. M-Lab’s “Run Speed Test” logs 750,000 individual tests worldwide per day, producing the largest open repository of broadband data on the planet. Kristin Little, who has led evaluations for the World Bank for 15 years, and is an MIT- trained architect and urban planner, provides a wonderful look at how “People-Centered” approaches are the next phase in the evolution of “smart cities.”
We at PCI are thinking a lot about cities and how governments around the world can better engage with and respond to the needs of their residents. I was honored to be invited to speak at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) panel on “Governing and Managing Smart Sustainable Cities” at the 10th World Urban Forum in Abu Dhabi on Feb 8–13th, where I argued that “smart cities” should be about enabling the people in those cities “get smarter and smarter,” evolving a natural environment that fosters the thriving of all.
Mei Lin Fung with co-panelists, Kristian Mjöen, Robert Lewis-Lettington, Okan Geray, Martin Brynskov
Also this month, I was pleased to join a workshop connecting stakeholders who are working to realize the “GIGA” initiative convened by the United Nations, ITU, and UNICEF to connect every school to the Internet by 2030. Bringing along partners such as the IEEE’s Special Interest Group for Humanitarian Technology (SIGHT), PCI is helping to strengthen GIGA’s efforts to develop local sustainable business models for expanding opportunities for children and communities around the globe to meet the 2030 sustainable development goals (SDGs).
As a small-but-mighty network of people around the world working to ensure that the Internet works for people, our role at PCI is to bring people together to share good ideas, amplify good work, and provide paths of collaboration. Thank you for being a part of this effort.
As Vint says, “we’ll see you on the Internet!”
Sincerely,
Mei Lin Fung
Co-Founder and Chair
A People-Centered Look at Smart Cities
by: Kristin Little
What good is a “smart city,” if it doesn’t improve people’s lives?
The trajectory of smart cities has evolved from a purely technology-centered approach to a government-centered approach. It is now becoming increasingly clear that “smart” technologies must be implemented for and with the people they are meant to serve. While many initial attempts at building smart cities have not evolved past the technology-centered phase, there is growing understanding that a people-centered approach is the future. READ MORE>>
PCI Conversations: Sascha Meinrath, the M-Lab, and the need for reliable broadband maps
by: Eileen Clegg
Reliable information about access to broadband is essential to efforts designed to ensure equal access to broadband. The Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband map is missing the mark, however, because it relies on self-reporting by Internet service providers for information. That was the message of Sascha Meinrath, the Palmer Chair in Telecommunications at Pennsylvania State University, when he joined the January 19 PCI Community call. The reporting discrepancy exacerbates the digital divide and disadvantages rural communities. READ MORE>>
Share your work with the PCI Community! Send links to news@peoplecentered.net
PCI EVENTS
PCI Salon: A Conversation With Gerald Vizenor (February 21, 2020)
People-Centered Internet invites you to a salon dedicated to Native American culture and connectivity, featuring author Gerald Vizenor on February 21, 2020 at 6:00 PM in Palo Alto.
PCI Virtual Fireside Chat: A Conversation With Vint Cerf & Ian Bremmer (February 25, 2020)
People-Centered Internet invites you to a “virtual fireside chat,” featuring Ian Bremmer and PCI co-founder, Vint Cerf, at 2:00 PM ET on February 25, 2020.
In a 2016 paper produced for the International Monetary Fund, Ian predicted “G-Zero,” a time characterized by “a growing vacuum in global governance,” and asked “whether citizens across the world will remain passive throughout this process, or take on a proactive role in determining what future they want to live in.” In this (virtual) fireside chat, Vint and Ian will take stock of developments since then and ask: what is the Internet’s role?
Register for online event
OF INTEREST
EDITORIAL: Did the Early Internet Activists Blow It?
Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo/Slate
From Slate:
Author and former counsel for EFF and Wikimedia, Mike Godwin, looks back at thirty years of free speech on the Internet.
“When ordinary people are empowered to come together and work on a common, humanity-benefiting project like Wikipedia, unexpectedly great and positive things can happen. Wikipedia is not the anomaly my journalist friend thinks it is. Instead, it’s a promise of the good works that ordinary people freed by the internet can create.”
ARTICLE: FCC Approves $20 Billion Rural Broadband Funding Plan
Photo by Marci Harris
From RouteFifty:
The Federal Communications Commission voted to approve the $20.4 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund to subsidize the construction of high-speed broadband networks in rural America, in FCC Chairman, Ajit Pai, called the “biggest step the FCC has ever taken to close the rural digital divide.”
ARTICLE: DHS creates ‘tabletop in a box’ for local election security drills
From StateScoop:
The US Department of Homeland Security introduced “tabletop exercises” to give secretaries of state, election directors, IT leaders and other officials a war game-like environment simulating the threats posed by foreign governments and other adversaries that might try to disrupt an election.
ARTICLE: Quantum entanglement over 30 miles of fiber brings super secure internet closer
From MIT Technology Review:
“Albert Einstein wanted nothing to do with it: he mocked the strange concept of quantum entanglement as “spooky action at a distance.” But a hundred years on, Einstein’s bugbear could help create a more secure internet, thanks to the most reliable technique yet for entangling nodes along miles of fiber-optic cable. “
EVENT: FutureProof Conference from Ooda Loop (March 19, 2020)
PCI Community member, Bob Gourley’s Ooda Loop hosts the “FutureProof” conference on March 19, 2020 in Tysons Corner, VA “bringing[ing] together the hackers, thinkers, strategists, disruptors, leaders, technologists, and creators with one foot in the future to discuss the most pressing issues of the day and provide insight into the ways technology is evolving.”
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