Oops! Ha habido un error en el envío. Por favor, inténtelo de nuevo
Howard Rheingold acaba de publicar Mobile and Open: Manifesto en The Feature. Este Manifiesto tiene por objeto ser un documento vivo en el cual se expresen los requisitos para que el futuro de la media móvil alcance un pleno desarrollo económico y cultural. Howard ha comenzado con 4 requisitos básicos: * Los ciudadanos son usuarios no consumidores * Patrimonio Común de Innovación Abierto * Redes que se organizan ad hoc y de una manera autónoma * Libertad para asociar información con ideas y lugares Nos hemos permitido enviar un extenso comentario sobre algún requisito que comentamos por aquí en alguna ocasión, como la liberación del contenido y el derecho del acceso a las infraestructuras wireless por parte de la sociedad local. Right of Use and Share of Public Wireless Wireless Infraestructure and Content As usual, wonderful stuff from Howard. I would add up a new right for citizens. The right of use and share local public content and wireless infraestructure. I strongly think these two rights are not only rights but ones of the smartest moves a city could take to embrace the future because of its locally-wide return on investment. I just finished up a write-up on the the ROI on Municipal Wireless Networks. My thesis is that return on investment on WiFi networks cannot be seen as a simple addition of savings that a public entity has over the cost of the investment made. We often read about the savings cities have over the years because of the usage of an owned network in comparison to private-owned network. I strongly believe that these types of networks need to be analyzed adding all the economic returns that a public network would have in the whole city, including citizens, local businesses, public institutions, and son on. If public networks would be open to be used by anyone, entry's barriers to all type of actions would be dramatically reduced. For instance, if any company could use the public network at the minimum charge, lots of mobile business models would emerge. Mobile Access price would not be anymore an issue to deal with in any scenario allowing local governments and citizens to communicate each other in tons of different ways. Let me be more specific. Cadiz, a mid-size city in South Spain is delaying an SMS notification service for its citizes because of the price of the sending. Price is around €0,15 ($0,20) for every SMS sent. If the local government has 20.000 citizens on its notification list, every message sent will have a cost of €3000 ($4.050). With theses costs not a lot of cities will embrace this new channel of communication, just a few of them. We all know that future mobile phones will have systems to access any network (GSM, GPRS, UMTS, WiFi, WiMax, etc) in the environment. Citizens have the right to receive public communications from its local government in open standards and using open and free wireless infraestructure like WiFi or WiMax. Its usage implies large savings for the local government, but also to ensure the communication service. On the other hand, businesses should be able to use the same infraestructure as a way to reduce theis operating costs. In that way, a public infraestructure would allow to promote the creation of new business models, hence, the creation of lots of new companies providing different awesome services. Hence, the local goverment would increase its tax income because of the new companies being established in the city which could lead to a reduce in local taxes. For companies, the use of this open infraestructure would be very profitable. Imagine the next scenario: a company develops a product to monitor products' delivery in real time like press, media, drugs, etc. In order to position any product, the electronic dispositive based in the delivery vehicle, should send a SMS message reporting on its GPS position. If the average route has 20 delivery points , real-time information in any route would cost at least $4 a day. If the company has 20 different vehicles and delivers items 365 day, the company would have a cost of $29.200. With open infraestructure, these costs would be reduced to around $1.500 (assume$0,01 per SMS using a WiFi network). Now, multiply this savings by all the local companies who would like to use this type of service. Now takes the case for content. Spanish local governments ususally subsidy local content creation. Politicians tend to agree that creation and promotion of local content is necessary to ensure that lived memories of the city do not die. Lot of this content is published under traditional copyright laws, so, content cannot be copied, distributed and modified. Published books padi with our money rapidly becomes out-of-print vanishing the public investment. Since this content has been paid by all the taxpayers, this content should not be placed under these terms. All of us have a right over them since we paid with our taxes. In this way, any type of content could be taken to be distributed to citizens and businesses like we saw before. Citizens could copy, distribute and share local content in a legal way, using P2P and not having to think on restricting laws like current copyrights laws are. On the other hand, business could take all this content and pack it in all type of new products to be offered to their customers. For instance, local restaurants could give to its customers a local recipes book as added-value as a present; museums could sell CDs with all the museum material available. Again, barriers' entries would dramatically decreased to any business offering new services. New businesses mean more local revenues that could translate into less personal taxes. My understanding is that local government should release any type of content they have under a Creative Commons license to ensure open knowledge and to promote new services around the content. Best regards to all, and especially to Rheingold for his wonderful thoughts. Happy new year from Cordoba (Spain)
