[ogWiFi] Creative Neighbourhood Pavillion + ogWiFi table

[Tracey P. Lauriault]

(please tranfer to the new list - 
http://list.flora.ca/mailman/listinfo/ogwifi) sorry for cross posting!

Hey Gang!

We had a table today with Creative Neighbourhoods 
(http://www.creativeneighbourhoods.ca/) folks. 

See the photos here - http://www.bubbleshare.com/album/128455

The Pavillion was part of the new City of Ottawa community urban 
planning outreach program.  Maps all over the place and tons of people 
milling about and participating in the activities.

Creative Neighbourhoods included ogWiFi, PodCo and a great community 
mapping exercise lead by Vicky Smallman (http://www.offhand.ca/).  Evan 
from PodCo interviewed tons of people and got some excellent clips!

Emil set up my new Buffalo Air Station Wirelless G router to connect 2 
laptops (the extra router is to give me extra security at home). He then 
had two web cams capturing images and sent them to the two screens.  The 
City would not let us use their internet connection so this was the best 
we could do!  People had fun with it though and it was a quick and easy 
demo!  We also had a small display with the linksys wgrt, a small poster 
and a presentation that included some screen captures of the portal 
pages and the hotspot map!  This was just enough to tell the story.

We have done this a couple of times, and i am getting the feeling, that 
the Ottawa model will be private homes with antennas providing wifi to 
their neighbours and maybe some parks.  And these will be in parts of 
town where engineers and software designers live.  We just do not have 
really interesting cafes.  That or i may have to go on a walkabout and 
just randomly talk to restaurant and put owners.

The conversations were pretty good, but again, fascinating to note that 
the demographic at the planning meeting was the over 30 crowd.  We did 
meet a radio ham expert who is interested in getting me to come to his 
community association and chat, a gent moving into his new condo on 
parkdale who wants to get his Condo association on board, a gent who 
does basic computer training to bridge the digital divide wants to make 
his work more mobile, and another gentleman who has some super fast 
fibre going right to his door who would love to offer have an antenna 
and share the pipes in his hood!  Very few women were interested in this 
part of community development.

We'll see!
Cheers
t