Posted on October 4, 2006 at 4:19 PM in @earthlink
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
As useful as blogs are for two-way communication, there's still something qualitatively different about face-to-face discussions. I've found this when I meet people at conferences who I've only known through their blogs, when I meet some of the bloggers from a particular area, and in conversations that eventually migrate from blog comments to phone calls or e-mails to in-person interactions. Blogs have other benefits that in-person conversations don't have, like findability, creating a lasting record, and the ability to have lots of geographically-impossible interactions. But the give-and-take is never quite the same mediated as it is live and direct. That's one of the reasons why I wanted to be a part of these community forums about the San Francisco Wi-Fi project.
Minnie and Cole at the 10/3 SF public Wi-Fi forum
More photos from last night in this Flickr set.
About 20 SF residents participated in last night's meeting. After VP Cole Reinwand for EarthLink and Product Manager Minnie Ingersoll for Google gave presentations about the origins and details of the project, members of the community asked a wide range of questions. People wanted to know about things like the specifics of how Google and EarthLink will work together, privacy, data, and security policies and procedures on each network, potential signal conflicts with other networks, the differences between a publicly-owned and privately-owned network project, and next steps in San Francisco. I have decent notes but not a verbatim transcript, and if anyone wants more information on how any of those points were addressed, let me know and I can go into more depth.
As far as privacy and security, on the EarthLink side Cole Reinwand emphasized our long track record as an ISP in this area and that we're in TRUSTe's top 10 list of most trusted companies for privacy. Cole and his team have been working directly with the city to accomodate their specific privacy concerns. You can read through all of EarthLink's privacy policies here or from the footer of www.earthlink.net.
On the Google side Chris Sacca explained that they build their networks to know as little as possible about individual users. He said that the setup deliberately remains naive about the who and how, and only keeps track of things like what device is connected, how long the session lasts, and how much data has been transmitted. They've set up a login page for their service both to prevent bots/automated scripts from abusing the network, and to allow users the convenience of access to all of Google's personalized tools on their main access page. But he suggested that users don't have to use their "real" information to create an account. On the security side, EarthLink's network is encrypted through 802.1X and AES both from the client device to the Wi-Fi node and from the node to the tower, and Google has developed its own free public VPN client for anyone who wants to use it.
There's been some discussion in the local press and blogs in the last week or two about the possibility of a municipal network owned and run completely by the city vs. the Google/EarthLink plan that was selected in the city's RFP process, and last night's forum gave SF residents a chance to ask those kinds of questions to the EarthLink and Google project teams in person.
Chris and Cole discussed some of the assumptions of a recent study on the subject. They made the point that although ultimately it's up to the city, it makes sense for companies with the Muni Wi-Fi, technology, and ISP expertise of Google and EarthLink to apply their smarts and assume the risks involved in building out and running the network. Cole also mentioned examples in Philadelphia, where the model began wholly city-owned but eventually shifted to the current EarthLink model, and Boston where what began as purely a public/not-for-profit initiative may be reaching out to private partners for support and expertise.
I did an informal poll of a few participants around the room afterwards and it sounded like the set-up and format of the forum worked well to get their particular questions and concerns voiced and discussed.
I'm interested in rounding up other coverage of the event, so if anyone else has written about it, please send me the URL and I'll add it to this blog entry. Here's a SF Chronicle article from today about it.
Tonight's meeting is at 6pm at the Southeast Community Facility, 1800 Oakdale Ave. at Phelps.
Update: Katie Fehrenbacher from GigaOm.com wrote up her thoughts on the event.
Mark Sullivan has some more details.