Community Broadband

By Christopher Mitchell, Institute for Local Self-Reliance

Lobbyists for major cable and DSL companies (Comcast, Frontier, and others) already earned their pay in Washington state this year by killing a bill that would have allowed some public utility districts to offer retail services on broadband networks in rural areas that were unserved.

By Joshua Breitbart of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative

A compelling picture is definitely worth the proverbial thousand words for explaining new kinds of wireless networks – especially when that picture appears alongside comprehensible technical information. And yet our choices about visual and written language say a lot about just who we expect to participate in building, using and maintaining networks. Complex diagrams run the risk of confusing audiences of potential community network participants, especially if graphics are abstract or surrounded by technical details and jargon.