Washington DC Broadband Bridge Regains Momentum

The Broadband Bridge is a community-based partnership seeking to bridge the digital divide in Washington DC’s Bloomingdale and Eckington neighborhoods. The Bridge is finding its way through the wilderness of reconciling the need for a community-based process with the corporate interests of some project partners.

The project’s participants are working on expanding the nascent mesh wireless network, currently servicing a small corridor on 1st St. NW in Bloomingdale, to cover the whole neighborhood in wireless broadband. A recent grant from the Internet Society, secured with the Open Technology Initiative’s help, will subsidize participation in the network by some local residents who would not otherwise be able to afford a computer and wireless router. The process of planning and executing this large expansion of the project’s service area and social justice mission brings no shortage of growing pains.

Some participants in the Bridge project have expressed the desire for several months to seek legal protection from any future possible action against them, stemming from their participation in the Bridge. Leading into the new year, the group discussed several possible solutions, ranging from individuals incorporating under an LLC to establishing a non-profit that would also govern the direction and action of the project itself.

The project volunteers faced a challenge in reconciling the desire to be protected through legal incorporation with maintaining an open community-based method for organizing the project. As one participant at a February 17 meeting described it, it is difficult to organize the project without creating a “table” to invite people to that doesn’t also cut some people out. The Bridge’s volunteers have recently invested more time discussing organizational structure than acting on project tasks, such as installing equipment.

By the end of that meeting many of those organizational hurdles had been cleared and the participants reached a compromise that sustained the open nature of the Bridge project. The team created three working groups - planning, technical, and social - and people allocated themselves to roles. The planning group will develop a more comprehensive proposal for organizational structure while the social group continues neighborhood outreach and the technical team proceeds with installations. The gathering ended with a positive sense of forward motion, buoyed by the release that same morning of a Washington City Paper post profiling the Bridge and its aspiration of bridging the digital divide in conjunction with the DC government’s fiber network, DC-Net.

Since the meeting on Thursday morning, the Bridge volunteer list has buzzed with plans for working group meetings to take place this week in Bloomingdale and project anchor members are on the verge of securing the first round of hardware to be purchased with the ISOC grant.