Wired Magazine covers San Francisco’s the four-month-old Westside Wi-Fi Project. The Booker T Washington Community Service Center at West Side Court is a pilot project of San Francisco’s Tech Connect initiative.
Funded with $50,000 from the non-profit Community Technology Foundation of California, with an additional $45,000 provided by the city, the group is deploying a Meraki mesh network fed by a pair of 6-Mbps DSL lines and a 4-Mbps cable connection.
The Westside radios sit inside people’s apartments and run Meraki’s firmware, based on MIT’s RoofNet, that self-configures the radios into an ad-hoc user-generated network. One Meraki can cover several apartments and they can be moved from one apartment to another without manual reconfiguration.
Not every resident has access to a PC, so the group set up refurbished machines in an empty apartment in the building to make a community computer center.
Through the Digital Storytelling Institute, the CTFC has teamed with the Bay Area Video Coalition to help amplify community voices through digital storytelling – addressing both the digital divide and the content divide that exists in underserved communities.
Here are some tips and resources to help create digital stories. Journalism resources are available at 360 Degrees, Poynter, Transom, This American Life, Columbia Journalism Review, Online Journalism Review, CRJ Daily, J-Lab, Paid Content and The Media Giraffe Conference.
Related DailyWireless articles include; Personal Telco Finds Portland WiFi Coverage Lacking, Meraki Rocks, Bridging the Digital Divide, Ruckus Tiers MuniFi with $200 WiFi Box, Ruckus Repeater for MetroFi, Event Blogging, Deep Wireless Festival, Newspaper Manifesto, WiFi Phone Uploading, Eye 2 Eye Webcam, Camphones for Journalists, Kevin Sites on Hot Spots, Interactive Journalism Awards, Event Blogging with WiFi/VoIP and Midnight in the Garden.
.gif)
