i-Harlem

HARLEM BUSINESS ECONOMIC SUMMIT 2005
Draft by Professor Thomas Vietorisz , September 30, 2005

TECHNOLOGY PANEL WRAPUP & MANIFESTO

MORNING SESSION
TECHNOLOGY I: DEMYSTIFYING BROADBAND

The session was taken up largely by discussing the tension between two social and economic forces:

(i) First is the push, in keeping with the introductory round table discussion of the Summit about The Future of Harlem, to provide the Harlem community with an advanced broadband technological infrastructure.
The latter must offer universal access to the Internet throughout the Greater Harlem area, for delivering the triple service of voice, data, and television on the basis of open, competitive access by all service providers, and doing so at a cost affordable to all. Such an infrastructure was deemed indispensable for raising standards of public education, public health, and small-business competitiveness to the level where the Harlem community could hold its own against challenges of the most advanced sectors in New York City and beyond.

(ii) The second is the force of inertia opposing the above push, grounded in the lack of comprehension, by broad segments of the public, of the enormous potential for social and economic progress inherent in such a broadband infrastructure.
Iinertia is the chief reliance of the interests opposed to change in the status quo of communication technologies, including telephone and cable. Some of these technologies go back a century or more. Broad public inertia is probably more important in preserving the status quo in communications than active opposition by vested interests.

AFTERNOON SESSION:
TECHNOLOGY II: BROADBAND AND THE FUTURE OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

In this session the discussion about ways of addressing the tension between the above two forces and leapfrogging obstacles to the development of the Harlem community, can be said to have caught fire. The result was unanimous agreement about the need for drafting and giving the widest possible circulation to a Harlem Manifesto dealing with the issue defined by the session’s title. The discussion incorporated some of the conclusions from the Summit’s plenary introductory session.

As an aid to participation in the drafting of the Manifesto by all Summit participants and by as many voices from the Harlem Community as possible, it was agreed that a special website (of a type known as a “WIKI”) should be created where individual contributions to the draft could be posted and debated. (Such a WIKI is by now up and running.)

The following paragraphs pertain to the outline of the Harlem Manifesto as understood and presented by the Technology rapporteur at the Wrapup Session, immediately following the afternoon Technology session. In the spirit of the agreement among the participants of that Technology session, this outline should be regarded as an early personal view that is subject to debate, change, and redefinition by subsequent discussions, expected to take place on the WIKI and at other appropriate Harlem community fora.

Harlem Manifesto: Provisional Outline

The purpose of the Harlem Manifesto is to bring together the Harlem community for the preservation and strengthening of the character of Harlem as a well-functioning, close-knit human community, in opposition to the economic trends that threaten to tear it apart.

This threat operates despite the prospect of rapid economic development within the Harlem geographical area, indeed, precisely because of this prospect. Development as usual will raise land values, real estate rentals, and the cost of living in the area. It will ruin more and more small businesses and will drive out lower income residents.

Harlem as a community, as we have known it, will cease to exist. It will fade out little by little, inexorably, unless we do something about it, and do it now.

The handwriting is on the wall, as it had been in New Orleans. The warning of disaster, unheeded for decades, destroyed the community of color in New Orleans in a few hours.

In Harlem, the warning about the danger to the community must not go unheeded. Community collapse will not strike with a single blow, as it has in New Orleans. It will grow insidiously until it becomes unstoppable, and by that time it will be too late to seek magical cures.

What can the Harlem community do now? The community can pull itself together organizationally, align itself around a coherent set of specific joint objectives, and back up these objectives with a unified political voice. These include the following.

Joint objective: Take ownership, through community residents, community businesses, and community organizations, of Harlem land and buildings, to the greatest extent possible.

This means following the admonition of Inez Dickson, newly elected City Council member, that Harlem businesses should be encouraged, helped, and supported in acquiring control of their destiny by moving progressively toward ownership of the premises on which they operate.

The admonition can be readily extended to homes of residents, bypassing the difficulty of low household incomes by institutional arrangements involving NGOs, cooperatives, and condominia.

Real estate values in the U.S., according to many, are at or near the peak of a bubble which is likely to burst before long. That will be a good time for the Harlem community to make a concerted effort to take significantly more widespread ownership of its underlying assets.

Joint objective: Take control of new, advanced communication infrastructures in Harlem through direct or indirect user ownership of these infrastructures within the community.

On the rough assumption that average monthly telephone bills per household or small business are of the order of some $40 per month, this represents community outlays of a hundred of million dollars or more per year for what the industry refers to as POTS or “plain old telephone service.”

By use of modern IT technologies, the city of Philadelphia and other pioneering communities are now able to deliver advanced triple communication access — telephone, broadband data, and high-definition TV, all three over the Internet, with assured open competition among service providers over community-owned infrastructures.

The cost of such infrastructure, including both investment and annual maintenance, can be covered for well under half of what POTS alone now costs in Harlem. Potential savings, made available for other expenditures within the community that support living levels and broaden local markets, are at least in the tens of millions.

While municipalities in many states are now forbidden by law to compete with telephone and cable companies, user ownership of networks by businesses, NGOs, and households is legal and widespread. The Harlem community can pioneer such legal ownership nationwide for communities of color, and benefit from immense improvements over POTS, while retaining within the community the large funds now drained off by outside interests.

Joint objective: Speed up human and business development in Harlem by aggressive exploitation of the potentialities of advanced broadband communications.

Huge advances in the effectiveness of public schools, in the ease of public interaction with different levels of government, in the efficiency of hospitals and public health centers, and in the productivity of small businesses are likely to follow the universal availability of low-cost triple communication access all over Harlem.

Yet, widespread public ignorance and fear of advanced communication technologies hampers the realization of these potentials. This has been surprisingly overcome by a huge recent volunteer effort that hand-delivered Internet access, over several days, for tens of thousands of New Orleans refugees in the Houston Astrodome. Volunteers established communications for refugees with FEMA, helped search for their family members, tried to find information about the condition of their homes. The result was an immediate, spectacular increase in openness to and demand for access to Internet services.

There is thus an urgent need for a program of great promise, perhaps to be called “Harlem Astrodome Internet fair days,” to be aimed at overcoming public inertia and fear with regard to the use of advanced-broadband Internet access technologies.

For such Internet fair days, preferably to be conducted periodically in an atmosphere of public street fairs, a force of computer-literate community volunteers needs to be mobilized. These volunteers would help community members on a one-on-one basis in using the Internet, for the purpose of taking care of specific individual or business problems involving government contacts, data access, or other practical concerns. The cost would be limited, the payoff if done properly could be massive, and an additional benefit would be the community’s increased sense of cohesion.