On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 11:35:55PM -0800, Russell Senior wrote: > > >>>>> "Tyler" == Tyler Booth <[email protected]> writes: > > Tyler> If PTP can put together a mesh along the route, Stephouse can > Tyler> donate the backhaul as the route passes right past our > Tyler> office. We can provide a 20Mbit circuit for the event. I'd be > Tyler> happy to donate more bandwidth but I doubt you'd come close to > Tyler> hitting 20. > > I know I shouldn't be negative during the brainstorming stage, and I > am grateful for Tyler's bandwidth offer, but ... frankly, we'll be > lucky to pull off the float.
That is true, which is why I suggested getting help from other free technology communities around town. When we promote each other, we promote ourselves. I love youse guys, but ya ain't arteests. Involve some artists (and Dorkbots and Free Geek have many) or risk embarassment. > Getting Tracy Berry to read our self-serving paragraph of propaganda > on the air is really the primary goal here, as well as sashaying down > the street in front of thousands of onlookers. And that is the most important reason to do the mesh. If we tell the media folk about it, they will bring THEIR laptops. In fact, if all we can manage is wireless around the broadcasting booths, and one or two other places where we suggest that bloggers congregate, we can get excellent ( and lasting ) buzz, not restricted to a brief mention buried in hundreds of other descriptions of other (likely more artistic and memorable) floats. Heck, with Tyler providing a feed, we could webcast the parade, and reach a lot of our audience without filtering it through the established media. > I really doubt that there is a significant intersection between the > people willing to stand around for hours to watch a parade and people > desperate enough for tubes to even look for a wireless network, much > less expect it to work, and then much less to actually do anything to > help the organization realize its goals. That population is (in my > humble estimation) likely to be quite small. Ah, but that small population is the most likely to spread the word. The first "free wifi-ed parade", even if it is for 10% of the route and used by 0.2% of the people that congregate there, could get national attention, and that reflects back to local attention. It may turn out that many people who didn't bring their laptops to the parade will claim they did, so that they can brag to others about being at a historical event. 300 followers of Mohammed at the first battle of Medina engaged the imagination of tribes throughout the Arabian peninsula, leading to 1.4 billion Muslims today. Size is not the issue, finding ways to multiply the message exponentially is. A decade ago, during a visit to San Francisco, I went to an EFF fundraising concert at Golden Gate Park. Many people remember nothing about the musicians (except that they were loud) but most remember the 3 or 4 übernerds in the audience who unfolded their brightly colored cloth, foil, and velcro satellite dishes, and surfed the web. Much of the bleeding-ear crowd envied them. > The reason to do the parade is to worm our way into the conciousness > of the Silent Majority of people who don't know who we are and what we > want them to do. Doing a techno-stunt like a mesh network is likely > to be fun to try to pull off, and rewarding in an interior sort of way > and to demonstrate our techno-mastery (assuming it works), and I > recognize that, but ... again, I think the goal here is different. Well, think about competing messages, and how you plan to make the PTP message stand out in a positive, informative, and memorable way. The PTP message is, if anything, techno-mastery, which will be hard to convey with a float, or through talking heads like Tracy Berry. Frankly, without help from many right-brain artistic types, a PTP float is likely to attract ridicule, not support, and recruiting artists is essential, IMHO. Keith ( PS, go to snurl.com/anjkh for your own 5 second right/left brain test. If the dancer is spinning counterclockwise, you are left brain dominant and not an artist, and should get help from artists to do a float ). -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ The Personal Telco Project - http://www.personaltelco.net/ Donate to PTP: http://www.personaltelco.net/donate Archives: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.wireless.portland.general/ Etiquette: http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/MailingListEtiquette List information: http://lists.personaltelco.net To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
