Dispatches from
the Digital Frontier

A Blog from New America's Open Technology Institute

Online or Offline, Trust Still Matters

  • By
  • Preston Rhea
November 3, 2011
The British Council’s “Connected” performing arts showcase

 

The following is cross-posted from the British Council Voices blog. On November 9, the Open Technology Initiative and the British Council will co-host the event "Trust 2.0: Building Trust Through Technology" at the New America Foundation as part of the Washington, DC, festival Digital Capital Week.

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New Tools for Today's Investigative Journalist

  • By
  • Dan Meredith
October 14, 2011
Publication Image

Originally posted on DanBlah.com

While I am by no means a seasoned investigative journalist, I have the good fortune to work with some. Looking ten years back I couldn't imagine a media organization considering geek qualifications a core part of an investigative team. In 2011, turning a geek into an investigative journalist is a no-brainer.

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Name that Tech – Collaborative Design Challenge Workshop

September 6, 2011

NOTE: This article was originally posted by Nina Bianchi at the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition site.

Twitter by Drew Gordon

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Broadband Build-Out from a Planner's Perspective: Why Local Communities Should Continue to Manage Local Rights-of-Way

  • By
  • Greta Byrum
August 22, 2011
Mobile Telecommunications Tower. Photo: flickr/Mike Cattell

If you believe people should have a say about what gets built where in their communities, you should be weighing in on the Federal Communication Commission's recently announced intention to review management of public rights-of-way. Unfortunately, this issue gets bogged down in discussion of some of the driest and most technical topics in governance: land use, zoning, and fee regulation. Yet the implications are anything but esoteric, since right-of-way practices have a very real and lasting impact on local communities.

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Kiwi Connected: Lessons from the New Zealand Broadband Plan

  • By
  • Aalok Mehta
July 29, 2011

For many people in the U.S., New Zealand isn’t just on the other side of the globe--its pristine landscapes and scenic beauty (made famous by the Lord of the Rings movies) make it feel like another world entirely. So it goes too with broadband.

Although the United States and New Zealand share the goal of bringing 100 megabit-per-second (Mbps) connections to three-quarters of their citizens, New Zealand is trying a different strategy from the one outlined in the U.S. National Broadband Plan. Whereas the U.S. policy is relying heavily on private companies to lead expansion, the New Zealand government is directly investing more than a billion public dollars--a significant chunk of its total economy--into telecommunications firms to spur construction of a new, open fiber network.<--break->

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Data Caps Could Cut Artists off from the Cloud

  • By
  • Aalok Mehta
July 26, 2011

Cross-posted from the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC)

The case of André Vrignaud highlights the serious issues that artists, photographers and musicians might face as both data caps and cloud computing become increasingly common—and contradictory. Vrignaud, writing under the name Oxymandias, earlier this month outlined how Comcast had cut off his Internet connection for a year after he exceeded their monthly usage cap of 250 GB for back to back months.

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The Community Wireless Engineering Game: "Every Network Tells a Story"

  • By
  • Joshua Breitbart
July 20, 2011

When the Open Technology Initiative presented at the Allied Media Conference in June, many of the participants documented it with posts to Twitter and Flickr. We used Storify, an online tool for compiling social media, to arrange those pics and tweets into a narrative of our workshop and a tour of local wireless networks.

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In Attacking Tethering, Verizon Isn’t Playing by the Rules

  • By
  • Aalok Mehta
July 12, 2011

In pushing to remove access to tethering applications on some phones, Verizon Wireless may be violating openness rules attached to spectrum licenses that the company purchased in 2008. But weeks later, federal regulators have still not ruled on the alleged violation or taken action against the cell phone company.

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National Broadband Maps Must Be in Vogue, Actual Speeds Are Not

  • By
  • James Losey
July 7, 2011
Screenshot of UK Fixed Broadband Map

This week Ofcom, the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industry, launched a Fixed Broadband Map. The map displays a 1-5 ranking for 5 different metrics: overall performance, average broadband take up, percentage of users receiving less than 2 Megabits per second (Mbps), super-fast broadband (speeds over 24 Mbps) availability and average modem sync speed.

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Call for Paper Proposals: New ICTs + New Media = New Democracy? Communications policy and public life in the age of broadband

July 1, 2011
New America Foundation Open Technology Initiative and Penn State

Updated Call for Paper Proposals

New ICTs + New Media = New Democracy? Communications policy and public life in the age of broadband

A by-invitation experts’ workshop

New America Foundation, September 20-22, 2011

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