Île Sans Fil (ISF) is a group of volunteers that provides free wireless internet access in public and semi-public locations in Montreal. They are also the original developers of the WiFiDog wireless router software that has become the basis for many similar community groups around the world. David McCallum had a chat with ISF co-founder Michael Lenczner about the project's location-specific portal pages, and the organization's emphasis on place. David McCallum: What was the motivation for starting Île Sans Fil? Michael Lenczner: I learned about community wireless networking groups when I was volunteering in Burkina Faso, working with information and communication technologies. Basically, technology didn't work very well over there. We were trying to run 30 computers that each had between 4 to 8 MB of RAM, and our internet connection for the entire network was 14 kB/s. It was a really frustrating experience and I think it motivated me to find ways to make a difference in the way that technology was developed. At the same time, I was always really interested in community and finding ways to feel that I belonged in a community. So I decided to start a community wireless network group when I returned, and I wanted to find ways to use it to create community in a large city. My first idea for the group's name was TamTams Sans Fil [Wireless TamTams], because that was a wonderful, inclusive, creative community that I really enjoyed (the tamtam drum-circle gathering on the side of Mount Royal every Sunday). The initial idea was to have two groups: one volunteer group that copied the work of other community wireless networks like Seattle Wireless and NYCwireless in setting up hotspots, and a smaller group that would find ways to use those hotspots to increase sociality in third spaces. It turned out that the people who came to work on free WiFi were also interested in working on the issue of public spaces, so we ended up with only one group. DM: So this was about more than just free WiFi right from the start? ML: Bringing people to public spaces for events in their neighbourhood was always important. The other name I thought of for that smaller group was MTL3P, for Montreal Third Place, after sociologist Ray Oldenburg's conception of third places—spaces for community and gathering. It ended up becoming the name of my blog. DM: How are you constructing the hotspots to encourage and create community and the third place? ML: One of the wonderful things we realized at ISF is that location does not equal geography. Probably that's not news for most people, but we had to discover it for ourselves in terms of designing locative technology. Location-based calendars are a good example. If I'm at Laïka—one my favourite hotspots—I don't want to see a calendar of the closest events; I want to see a calendar of all the events that people in the Laïka community are attending, because otherwise a user from Laïka would see the exact same calendar as a user from Café Pi across the street. But clients at those two locations are totally different: one's an electro/web Euro hangout and the other is a chess café. So if I'm at Laïka, I'm probably less interested in the Spanish language event across the street as I am in the DJ spinning at the SAT that night. It's challenging to develop technology that understands that distinction. We are very good at using out hotspots to advertise incidental information to our users. One of our smaller projects was to attach a Laïka regular's photo feed to the portal page. Every day she would send different pictures of hers to the portal page and the rest of the users in the café would be forced to see them before they would have access to the rest of the Internet. It allowed for members of that community to learn something about one of their members that they might not have already known. Even more importantly, it gave members of that community a shared media experience that allows them to relate to each other. That's a very important part of the idea of the intervention of the portal pages: to fight against the negative effects of the million channel media universe. It's important to read the city newspaper—not only to be informed, but to share an experience and information with fellow citizens so that you can relate to them. DM: It brings up a lot of interesting ideas about how it is that people group themselves, where a certain physical hub is actually only a focus point for a network of people that extends throughout the city. I suppose we have to reconsider what kind of importance we attach to place. ML: That's it: places as meeting points of networks. For the most part everyone at ISF would agree that the portal pages haven't worked in the way that we want them to; we are still trying to get there. Here's a mock-up of what we're going for. But what has worked is proving that information infrastructure is as influential as any other form of infrastructure in terms of social effect, that different interests design and build infrastructure differently. If a group of citizens like ISF design and operate an information infrastructure, it will privilege the local over the non-local. It's possible to use wireless networks to push civic and cultural information instead of selling advertisements, sports highlights, or porn. DM: What social effect have you seen as a result of the portal pages? ML: Well, the clearest example is one that we didn't build for, but isn't that always the case. People are checking the portal pages of their favourite hotspot to see who's there. If you go to the Laïka portal page it shows who's online. Once you know the person's nickname, you can just go check it out whenever to see if they're in the café. So, for example, right now these people are online at Laïka:
Mackinaw is my friend Hugh. DM: So people checking portal pages for their friends. You found this out anecdotally? ML: Yeah. Well, actually I just started doing it myself as well as a bunch of the other web nerds that habituate Laïka. What's really fun/funny about ISF is that we don't have to appease our users' whims. It's an intervention—a social and cultural one. If they had their way, there would be no portal page and they wouldn't have to sign on. But since we provide this service, we can say that the cost of using it is finding out about the local community. For example, we don't allow people to log in anonymously. We force you to interact with the system as known persons. Not that we want to know your Social Insurance Number or any personal info, but we want to oblige you in some way to engage in the local community whether you like it or not. It totally changes the mindset behind designing the system. We're just getting ready to show RSS feeds from all of the provincial political parties. We're not sure if users will like it, but interacting with civic information will be the cost of using the network during that election period. Here's one way that users interact with each other: if anyone tags a photo in flickr as ISFlaika it gets picked up by our software and displayed on the Laïka portal page. People definitely use it, but it's not always the most interesting content—lots of pictures of lattes. That tag is unique to the Laïka portal page; no one else uses it for any purpose. This is really minor compared to where we want to go with the network. Here's an example of a Montrealer temporarily in Japan using it to send a picture to his friends at Laïka. DM: What are the future plans for ISF, and what kinds of interactions do you want to foster? ML: Well, what's hard for people to understand is that this isn't your typical wireless art installation. We haven't done this to illustrate a point. We have created an infrastructure of 110 hotspots with 30,000 users used by 700 Montrealers a day. We have changed the city. We want to continue to use that infrastructure to change the city. To help Montreal be a city that values art as a part of life for everyone, to help our citizens feel a part of the physical communities they live and play in. That's the scope of our mission. For more information on Michael Lenczner please note his blog at mtl3p.ilesansfil.org. |
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