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As you know, Oakgrove will have technology as it major theme and English
Partnerships are not only looking for a broadband infrastructure to be put
in place, but for a range of services to be offered over it. According to
their brochure, illustrative services envisaged include:
- Community websites and chat services to encourage interactions
between the recipients and the sharing of information.
- Email services to provide communication between residents and with
other Internet users.
- Community TV or video-conferencing over the network.
- Primary and/or backup data storage for residents or community
groups.
- The delivery of applications over the network (rather than having
local instances).
In addition to the above community services it is considered that,
subject to any applicable legal requirements, the network should be used
for services such as telephony and television distribution.
In terms of the procurement, English Partnerships is running two
parallel processes. It is procuring a Lead Developer to manage the
building and construction works and it is procuring a technology partner
to provide the technology services. I am the ICT consultant for one of
the short listed developers. My personal take is that the exact role of
the Lead Developer will depend on the range of expertise of the
Technology Provider and on the range of skills of the Lead Developer,
but that the Lead Developer will need to drive the technology side.
Eventually the plan is for a management company for the development to
be set up, initially run by the lead Developer, the housing association
involved, Milton Keynes Council and English Partnerships, with
increasing representation from residents as they move in, and that
eventually the telecommunications infrastructure will be gifted to this
management company. Basically this will involve in some senses setting
up a local telecommunications company.
The timescale for the decisions is that the prospective Lead Developers
need to get their proposals to English Partnerships by the 7th April.
Interviews will be on the 23rd April and EP will make a decision in the
first week of May. In the meantime 8 potential technology partners have
been short listed and they are busy getting their proposals together.
The successful Lead developer will then work with EP and MK council to
agree the technology partner, which should be completed sometime in June
or July. Once this has been done, then begins the work of defining the
services in detail, with a series of workshops representing all
stakeholders.
Should we be the successful Lead Developers, we would want to offer the
Oakgrove services to the surrounding area. This is partly because the
bigger scale would make the services more affordable. I think a more
important reason is that one of the key roles of the ICT aspect would be
to strengthen the local community by supporting discussion and debate
and by raising the profile of community events and activities. Back in
1998 I wrote:
'Every city, town, village or neighbourhood deserves to have:
- A well-organised 'gateway' web site, so that when we connect to
the internet the first thing we see is our own locality online. From
there, with a few clicks of the mouse, we will be able to find out
all we could possibly want to know about what is going on - from
local entertainment, to local businesses, local planning
applications, local clubs and societies, right through to the
catalogue at our local library.
- Electronic Public Space where we can discuss and debate issues
of local interest, and make our views known to local authorities,
the local MP, and other agencies. A place where we can be creative
and share our poetry, stories and art. A place where we can have
fun, tell jokes and make new friends, whom we could also meet face
to face because they live in the same community.
- Systems that make it easy for us to "do business" locally, not
only to shop online, but also to pay our Council Tax, book
appointments with our GP or the hairdresser, book to see local shows
and visit the cinema - or whatever else we need to do.
- Support for local small businesses, community and voluntary
organisations and special interest groups to enable them to use the
new technology effectively, so that the institutions that bind a
physical community together can also play that role in cyberspace.
- Access, training and support in using technology for everyone.'
This is still my picture of what is needed and why I am excited
about the potential of Oakgrove.
However, of course there is no community in Oakgrove and it will
only develop over a number of years. I therefore would like to see
all the developments around Oakgrove as part of the online community
and I would want to work closely with local people and local
organisations to scope out and build the community website. Given
the fact that the local IT infrastructure will be very high speed -
at least 10 Mb per second, and more likely 100 Mb or more, I would
want to capitalise on this by making it very multimedia based. For
instance I would want to work with the Media Trust (the not for
profit organisation that helps voluntary organisations with their
media needs) to develop a lot of short videos about the local area
and its activities, working with local people, and eventually having
the whole thing led by local people. (We have put money in the
budget for full time staff to support local volunteer web editors
and video producers in developing and maintaining the content.) In
this way we could develop together a website that would be very
useful to people of all the local area and which would provide an
active community space that the new residents of Oakgrove could join
in.
In terms of how we could provide connectivity to the Oakgrove
network to residents of surrounding developments, we would use a
mixture of loose lay fibre (running fibre through sewers!) wireless
and advanced DSL to provide residents with at least 4 Mb uncontended
access to the network and with better than BT offers access to the
Internet. Exact details would need to be worked out once all the
site surveys etc are done and more robust costing can be undertaken,
but, here again, I would want to involve local people in working out
what would be the right service offerings to make in terms of price,
bandwidth and contention.
If we are successful, then I look forward to working with you. Even
if not, I hope that the successful developers would work closely
with you and that things go well.
Michael Mulquin
michael@iscommunications.co.uk
www.iscommunications.co.uk |