Bice C. Wilson's FCC National Broadband Strategy Testimony

Offered Dec. 11, 2009

At Columbia University

My Background

My name is Bice C. Wilson. I’m a 13th generation resident of the Hudson Valley Bio-region. I live in White Plains, NY, attended Architectural School in Brooklyn, and for nearly 30 years I’ve been one of the two Principals of Meridian Design Associates, Architects, P.C. based in Manhattan.

I am, by profession, a place maker - an architect, and urban planner.

Everything I do considers human interventions that affect the well-being and vitality of places. And so, my testimony today will concern the failure of our civic culture to appropriately plan how our nation's information and communications infrastructure could enhance Community, Cultural & Commercial Development in the neighborhoods of our nation.

Shortcomings in Current US ICT Planning Culture

In 2008 it became clear to me that those building our information and communications technology (ICT) were acting as though their technology was evolving in a parallel universe, separate from the civic culture I am a part of, of design, public policy, planning and place-making.

In response, our firm established a brain storming process to explore this emptiness; the space between the world of ICT visionaries and the world of place-making; with participants from around the country - from libraries, technology companies, academia, designers, and entrepreneurs. This process was called DESIGNING THE INVISIBLE PUBLIC WAY, because the Broadband infrastructure we are strategizing about today is the bones of a new INVISIBLE public right of way.

INVISIBLE because; even though it is a brand new nervous system connecting the sense organs of our communities and institutions, threading its way through the urban fabric,; UNLIKE our roads and railroads, it is invisible and we do not talk about it ,

we do not intentionalize it,

we do not design it,

Our civic culture does not shape it for the well-being of our communities which are SO in need of the vitality made possible only by using this the new source of power –

Not water power,

Not steam power,

Not carbon fuel power,

- Information power.

Where information flows, new futures can happen.

Where It's Not, You Can't

In the Designing the Invisible Public Way (DIPW) process we coined a simple phrase that says it all –

“Where it’s not, you can’t”.

Where there is not the ability to connect into the World Wide Web, you cannot

Do commerce,

Trade information,

Build skills,

Share ideas,

Build human networks,

Make Creative Content

Have fun

Do ALL the things that people do there,

You pretty much can’t do anything that is going to connect you to contemporary Community, Culture & Commerce.

Where it’s not, you can’t

In addition we realized that there is already a VAST EXISTING NETWORK OF CREATIVE ECONOMY, KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY AND HUMAN SERVICES INSTITUTIONS strewn through all the neighborhoods of our communities and cities,

(well, except for those dark spots, without access to the very institutions critical to the future success of their citizenry – but that’s for other testimony)

Each of these anchor institutions could, if provided with the vitality and potential that comes along with contemporary information and communications systems,

Could dramatically enhance the effectiveness of its core mission,

Could serve as a gateway for the skills building and subsequent use of these resources for its community and client groups, and

Could also serve as enhanced engines of community, cultural and commercial development.

Policy Recommendations:

• I suggest that community planners, economic development planners, concerned citizens and municipal officials should integrate this urban nervous system into the spectrum of concerns that are the focus of comprehensive community planning.

• The first step in accomplishing that integration will be to map the pattern of Anchor Institutions in our Community Geography, and to assess:



• the degree to which these institutions are served by world-class ICT resources and
• the capability of those institutions to utilize those resources that become available.

• One often hears the excuse that ICT network providers have to build towards reliable sources of revenue, such as buildings with paying customers or wealthy neighborhoods who can purchase premium entertainment products.For example, after 9/11/2001, Westchester COunty was contacted by myriads of potential businesses that wished to relocate to the county. There were many vacant office buildings without internet connectivity.
  
  Becuase they had no tenants, the local provider, who often had fiber passing the buildings, would not connect to them.
  
  
  Without connectivity, no business would locate there.
  
  
  This cost the county many jobs and much revenue.

• This argument is profoundly disturbing - such an argument would not be considered righteous in the context of the design of any other essential public right of way.
• I suggest that a policy should be established to:



• Incentivize the deployment of broadband resources broadly and universally to anchor institutions as an essential condition of granting franchises to the controlled monopolies for those services, and
• That strictly enforced penalties should ensue if providers fail to provide ubiquitous services - a failure that is woefully endemic in our nation.

I would like to place in the public record the URL of the collaboration website used in what has now become named “Designing the INTELLIGENT Public Way” –

www.dipw.meridiandesign.com

You will also find a link there to a focused study the brain-trust pursued exploring the application of the ideas developed to the future of the borough of the Bronx.

Thank you very much.

Copyright: Meridian Design Associates, Architects, P.C.

Place / Moment Expressions

This site describes The Meridian Music Project,

http://sites.google.com/site/meridianmusicproject/

Have a look.

Comment, if the spirit moves you.

Enjoy

On Merriness,

Inspired by the Spirit of these times,

Seeking companions in remembering how to do it.

ON MERRINESS

BCW - Solstice 2004

  

Great Word, Merry.

Old english.

I'm told it has connections to a kind of magic -

A transformative, dancing deep gladness,

A conviviality that can't help but sing,

A refreshing connection with being as beautiful as you really are,

Among a circle of companions,

all bathed in a glamour,

Confident that unbridled joy in just what is,

just who we are, 

is enough,

At least for this while.

Merry –

Sadly,

A vestigial intention,

Now,  

A word with faint echoes of magic. 

We gather for the ceremony,

not knowing how to enter in,

not knowing how to disrobe and cleanse ourselves,

How to allow ourselves that Holy Day respite.

Wanting so badly the respite,

Recalling that food and drinking are involved,

that gathering has something to do with it.  

Scared to raise a toast,

to laugh uproariously. 

to forgive a slight,

to give grace in the moment,

Waiting for the rememberer of the ceremony to arrive and awake the magic for us

(forgetting that the remeberer was lost,

years ago,

and that with their last breaths

they hoped we now knew that

the ceremony was to be found inside us, among us,

could be sparked by the spirit and the trust the times need)

Knowing the need in these dark times to find beauty,

Even in our peril,

To trust the deepness of the cold nights,

Knowing that the cold fields patiently await the efforts of our springs

(Which are next - but not yet),

and meanwhile,

In these coldest moments,

Even still, Life stirs,

Deep beneath the creeping frost,

(Maybe not knowing that Life is

Strengthened by the sound of song and dancing feet –

Awaits this vital cue, ours to give,

Sometimes forgotten),

Meanwhile,

These days are right

for us to gather at hearths and tables,

Singing,

Telling our stories,

Finding lost love in the leaf litter of past life.

Beloved,

Trust yourself in this season. 

Seize the threads of merriment and

Patiently,

with the grace  YOU are,

Restore the magical fabric of joyous impulsive trust,

Start the singing,

Get up and dance,

Sit down and talk,

Welcome wanderers. 

It's that time.

Enjoy,

At the Very End of the Diamond Sutra

Slicing through all the rest, at the very end of the Diamond Sutra, in the 30-some odd chapter, after teaching about many subtle and challenging ideas,

The Tathagata suggests that - relative to a disciple who could understand all the profound complexities just described - if a worthy son or daughter merely REALLY understood the following lines, if they really lived BEING these lines, well they'd gotten it:

"So you should see this fleeting world:

- A star at dawn,

- A bubble in a stream,

- A flash of lightening in a summer cloud,

- A flickering light,

- A phantom and a dream"

Enjoy,

Bice C. Wilson

What Arose After First Studying the Genjo Koan

MYRIAD BECOMINGS

BCW Late Winter 2007

Becoming,

ephemeral collusion

Interweaving myriad dharma vectors

tendencies become transient actualities

At every scale of time a stillness

Is,

which,

seen differently

Is

simultaneously shape shifting –

never IS the same.

No thing HAS to be, one moment to the next,

We are given, in this fleeting form

gateways to mindfulness

senses animating our dance

And somewhere,

among the warp and woof of the

many becomings

we are just now

Sings this spark that knows and chooses,

conducting whatever wholeness we can find

step by step, dancing along the path.

Dancing in fields open, empty of must be,

constrained by conventions,

dancing degrees of volition

the sublime suchness

Open to our intention

Emptily

Rubble Beach, Pythagio, Samos, at the top of the Aegean Sea

Rubble Beach - Pythagorio,

Samos, at the Top of the Aegean

Usually,
Stones at this stage,
At the edge of the sea &
Tending towards sand,

The one's I'm used to seeing,

Usually,

They came here

Tumbling down streams,

From distant mountains

Or dropped far from home by Lazy glaciers

But these,

These were once this city -

Built and ravaged.
Rebuilt, ravaged,

The families who carried them Here
Hopeful for generations the

Beauty of this,

This
Glorious place,

Have seen,

Generation after generation,

Of warfare,

rape,

Endless cycles

Of enslavement,

liberation,

soldiery,

Victory of, by, to.

Now,

Lounge chairs
Carry all the tribes who once invaded,
now invited - if only for a while -

to relax on the Rubble
Of their Ancestors Making.

Frakking The Catskills - Or There Goes The Water We love So Much

Have you ever spent time by a brook in the Catskills, watching a spring drip out from the mossy edge of a shale cliff? Do you drink the water collected in the Catskill Aqueduct System? Does the re-forestation of the Catskills and the return of so many life forms that had been absent since the last deforestation of the region, well does that inspire you with hope for the future of the planet?



Does your idea of a fine afternoon in the mountains exclude the sound of "Frakking" - the rhythmic din of massive industrial compressors pumping high pressure bursts of pristine surface water into shafts dug into the Marcellus Shale Beds under your feet, accompanied by the outflow of toxic, now-former, process water bubbling up from the wellhead and seeping along the many fissures into the water feeding that mossy spring and your wells and reservoirs?



Well, if you answered yes to ANY of these questions, well, you have a new cause to get active about, because that is the future being developed right now in the Catskills you know and love.

Here is the most recent post from the Catskill MountainKeeper on the subject.

And here's VERLYN KLINKENBORG's NYT Editorial on the subject from today: Walking the Land Where The Drilling Rigs Will Go.



Coincidentally, today's Science Times had an article about the sensitivity of songbirds to incessant loud noise - they did their field work among the frakking rigs in the Colorado Gas Shale. Hey, some birds liked it.

Some Birds Thrive in Noisy Neighborhoods

So, what do you think? Should this be done in your name??

What can we do to stop this insanity?

I'll post more when I find some suggestions. Please pitch in with your suggestions in the comments space.

This is kind of important.

So, who's Designing Cyberspace anyway?

• Cyberspace is evolving among our culture just now. Are there intelligent designers intentionally devising this new extension of the public domain?
• Is it public? Should it be? Up to where?
• Does it have formative Community Master Plans, Cyberspace Use Regulations and Construction Codes?
• Who says?
• Who can do what where how to whom there, and when will they be able to?
• Who else can or will be able to?

Space happens as dimensions and forces interact - a constantly evolving and morphing expression of interdependent origination.

Our culture has, throughout its evolution, regularly devised new dimensions of space.

• The distance of our hearing and the sweep of our vision.
• 
  
• The circle of light cast by a campfire, and the greater circle cast by a giant bonfire.
• 
  
• The racing edge of fire gone wild, and the dimensions of the smoky wind foretelling catastrophe.
• 
  
• The sound of bells cast of hard won ore, echoing and de-crescendoing down our valleys.
• 
  
• The brief bulletins of beacon fires and the mountain-speak of yodeling.
• 
  
• The directives of semaphore, and the inklings of intuition.
• 
  
• The distance a courier can run from the sea into the nearby mountains and say why he ran here before expiring.
• 
  
• How far a horse can run before you need to trade him off before proceeding.
• 
  
• And how many way stations it takes to reach the edges of safe domain.

I'll leave the reader to fill in the increments of new dimensions our predecessors left for us to inhabit, right up into the space we are currently devising among us - cyberspace.

Wise persons from ancient animists to Kevin Kelly, Thomas Berry, E. O. Wilson and Juan Enriquez have, each in their own spheres of interest, suggested that beings participate in their own evolution by acts of volition, creative synthesis and the cultural processes that shape habits, expectations and developments.

Kelly and Enriquez suggest that the technologies we have for ever been developing are evolutionary extensions of our selves.

Skeptical? Remember the last time you forgot your smart phone, were disconnected from the possibilities that exist only in cyberspace and felt incomplete? Ever experienced the technological equivalent of "phantom limb syndrome" - felt the vibration of a cell phone that wasn't in your pocket?

How much time do you spend in Mediaspace? Have you ever, of an afternoon, decided not to go stroll in the park, but to spend time visiting with friends in cyberspace?

What animal functions do you accomplish in cyberspace? Find community? Pursue politics? Make business? Store valuables? Have sex? How many generations of avatars have you spawned? How many web alter egos do you have? Has anything happened to any of them while you were distracted by reading this?

Hadn't you better go look in on the place where you can find them? Is your financial portfolio still where you left it? Has anyone kidnapped your identity while it was being conveyed from here to there?

What intrigues me is - Who's designing cyberspace anyway? Who decides where the new rivers of data will flow, and who can build on their banks and harvest their cataracts?

How is the pollution of those man-made natural resources noticed, defined and ameliorated?

Isn't cyberspace part of the Commons, that space too valuable to be owned, the life making place, the 3rd Place, the Great Good Place, depended on by all for the well being of this and future generations?

Who has the right to fence it? What constrains the behavior of those given the franchise to realize cyberspace? Does it become theirs? Am I trespassing if I find myself there?

Who told that troll he could make me pay to enter that commons?

Did you know that the USA has, even up until today, lacked a national broadband policy? The FCC is embarking on crafting one just now.

What ways do your communities shape the development of this new public right of way, the web commons?

Do you have access to its benefits? How would you have a say about it, as you expect to have a say about your meatspace Master Plan and Development regulations?

And are the answers to these questions acceptable to you?

Here are some links to web places where these issues are being grappled with:

• Designing the Intelligent Public Way
• 
  
• Designing the Intelligent Public Way - Bronx White Paper
• 
  
• National Broadband Strategy Call to Action

Our National Knowledge Infrastructure at Work Producing a National Healthcare Day of Service at the digital behest of our President

Today, June 26 is National Health Care Day of Service. Throughout the
nation, in public places, both "tangible" and "virtual", folk have
been organizing for weeks at the behest of Organizing for America (www.my.barackobama.com) - and for the benefit of the public commons.

Me, I'm writing the first draft of this at Kinko's, while copying flyers for distribution at a Health Care Reform Teach-in in my home town, White Plains, NY. I write this on my iPhone, which will
wirelessly post this for you to see.

This event was produced largely in cyberspace, and likely wouldn't have happened if I did not have ubiquitous access to information technology and the world-wide-web.

That we could do so is quite remarkable.

Having initiated an initial mobilizatipn meeting of 15 persons at my house on June 16th, in response to an email recieved from OFA, I networked, largely online and discovered the Westchester Health Care Reform Task Force (westchesterhealthcarereform.org).

I've met once in person with a small fragment of the membership, and we subsequently collaborated using our nation's Infomation and Communications Technology (ITC) systems with dozens locally and around the nation to produce this event

Most of our time together organizing has been spent in the nation's newest Public Commons, what I call "The Intelligent Public Way" (dipw.merdiandesign.com). I obtained a permit to set up our booth ina public park at the heart of White Plains' commercial district - with two phone calls and 5 emails - the permit was sent to me by email. The organizers developed hand out documents in an exchange of emails.

We've set up a google sites web collaboration site, and purchased a more elegant URL from register.com, from which traffic is forwarded to google. Go visit -www.westchesterhealthcarereform.org.

Well, handouts are printed, debit card retrieved from the walk-in copy machine.

I'll send this off (over radio waves that comprise part of that Intelligent Public Way)

[Just got home and editted the typos too challenging to correct on my iphone. The day was a success - 25 volunteers handed out 175 fact sheets, sold 12 bumper stickers, and got 113 postcards written out which will delivered by hand to Senator Schumer. We engaged about 250 people in discussions on health care reform, including one gentleman who felt it a foolish undertaking.]

Teillard De Chardin suggested that our species would build the "noosphere", the global sense organ / nervous system / space in which the earth would know herself, allowing us to inhabit her more wisely. And so we have. That nervous system, the Intelligent Public Way, the Web Space Commons, made this event possible.

How cool is that?

People in Iran, China and other nations are seeing this commons being proscribed by authoritarian governments. Many of us take our access to these systems for granted. Still others among us have no access to this public space where most information flows and transactions are effected in our time.

We can do better.

These ICT resources are largely in private hands, and those private owners do not have the same interests as the commons do in terms of the shape of this new nervous system. It's not that the incumbent owners are venal - the public realm has also failed to devise the cultural and political means to tell them what is needed, and how these systems should be integrated into our cities as an infrastructure to enable Community, Cultural & Commercial development.

Can't blame the marketplace for not having sold us what we haven't, as a national culture, told them we want.

Here in the USA, we're just beginning to craft a national broadband strategy (www.bb4us.net). We're the only developed nation in the world without one.

How silly is that?

Enjoy,

Bice C. Wilson

Beginnings - Teaching Kiteflying in Bed Stuy, 1977

The most formative experience underlying my life-practice occured on a blustery March afternoon in 1977.

I was crossing the one big lawn on the campus of Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.

I saw 2 young boys attempting to fly a kite.

Unsuccessfully.

Walking over to them I noted that they had come from the nearby neighborhood (whose residents were largely structurally poor or working class and neglected) and were wearing those imitation Artic Jackets, blue with orange lining in the hood, and fake wolverine fur trim. Both were black, maybe 7, or underdeveloped for 12.

They were playing with one of those diamond shaped, wax paper kites on a balsa wood cross that many of us know - the ones with a space ship image on them. It was put together in ways not shown on the directions, and not flying.

I offered to help. They gave me the kite. I put it together correctly, and found some trash paper nearby to use as a tail to counter the gusty winds.

The string they had was a spool of industrial thread from their mother's piece work sewing at home. It was strong enough. I made a yoke, tied on the tail and the spool to the yoke and handed it to them.

Now, for anyone who knew kites and the wind, this was a day that required no running to get a kite skyborne. Merely holding it facing the wind and letting go would suffice.

They were unable to loft the kite. They had no idea how to address the wind.

I showed them, and walked away to the sound of their excited directions to each other as the kite danced above them.

As I left them I was mindful of how much I had learned in my childhood about the fundamental interactions of the pattern of life by flying kites, sailing, playing with snow runoff rivulets on the hills of White Plains, spending days knee deep in living streams, days watching wildlife in the saltgrass marshes and exploring the dwindling woodlands for ponds full of reptiles, and similar playful activities.

Fluid dynamics, flows, dams and catastrophic failures of blockages, how the invisible wind can change the fate of kites. Cycles of life, struggles, birdsongs marking boundaries, fish sheltering in the eddies behind boulders.

I expected that the boys had not lived in places and cultures where those lessons came readily to hand. And yet, I knew that they had internalized other aspects of the pattern of life that I could not imagine.

I reflected on the fact that our urban environment often fails to celebrate the very forces that can teach us, vicerally, how life works: The storm runoff I spent days knee deep in, treated as waste, and shunted into a pipe as soon as possible to be mingled with our effluents and expedited into our waterways to cause rapid flooding, and close beaches when the underground rivers were in spate.

Places barren of life other than human and our domesticated companions.

The plazas where invisible winds undress people, blow over furniture and make kites of abandonned plastic bags.

Having studied the incremental development of NYC, I knew that, as each farm was monetized and sub-divided, it was assumed that there was no need to celebrate the pattern of life - one was surrounded by ever dwindling but reliable living systems, and besides, it was miracle enough to gather millions of folk into a city and have toilets and under ground sewers to eliminate epidemics.

Life, in that sense, was a problem we had solved successfully.

Before I arrived a block away at my apartment, I had picked up kite string at the art supply store, and I'd made several commitments to myself:

1. To always have kite string at hand in case the next boys did not have adequate thread (and I have done so to this day - it's just down stairs)
2. To devote my practice to re-integrating the passive didactic learning that arises from the celebration and mindful enhancement of the pattern of life, which we are each of us always an ephemeral expression of.

And I have done so to this day, in everything I have done since.

• Building Meridian Design Associates, Architects (www.meridiandesign.com)
• Living an integrated life in my communities. (www.westchesterhealthcarereform.org)
• Pursuing the practical application of powerful ideas, such as:
• Bio-regionalism (http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1561&context=ced/places)
• Archeoastronomy (http://sites.google.com/site/meridianmusicproject/)
  
• Evolutionary Urbanism (http://dipw.meridiandesign.com/, http://sites.google.com/site/dipwbronxwhitepaper/)
  
• Living in Long Time (sustaining family, marriage, partnerships, community, places)
  

That is what I do.