TAC Meeting Report - November 22, 2005

1. Broadband @ $14.95? - Fast Internet access is quickly becoming one of life’s necessities. The first item explored was the availability of Verizon's $14.95 per month DSL Internet access service in Community District 3. At 750 Kbps, Verizon’s $14.95 DSL service provides adequate download speed for today’s community board applications. But it will seem slow for market and entertainment services. And its upload speed (at 128 Kbps) is quite slow, making it of questionable utility for home office use. However, if one is upgrading from dialup service’s 56 Kbps, it will feel delightful. By comparison, cable offers 3,000 Kbps for $43.00 per month

Verizon’s Christopher Levandos reported that community district 3 is served by the central office on Broadway in Elmhurst and that DSL is distance-sensitive: the further one lives from that office the lower the quality of the service provided. However, everyone in community district 3 is within 18,000 feet of the office and should be able to qualify for the $14.95 broadband service. However, he pointed out that some old technology still serves the community and this often needs to be removed before the service is available to a particular home.

To test DSL’s availability, on December 14, 2005 the committee’s chair entered the first 10 names on the alpha list of community board 3 members into the Verizon’s http://www22.verizon.com/ website. All received NOT AVAILABLE responses. We reported this to Verizon and received a good news response from Chris Levendos: So many people have responded to their new DSL offer, that the main switch is overloaded, but it should be remedied within a few weeks. This was good news in that the other cause, inadequate wiring, could take months or years to correct. Chris will inform the chair upon the upgrade’s completion. In the mean time, should the website respond “NOT AVAILABLE” to you, enter your contact info in the form provided and Verizon will follow up ASAP.

2. Modeling - After the Verizon presentation, the committee was taken on a tour of SecondLife, a leading “virtual world” service. Virtual World services provide a method for developing 3D models that enable the board to better envision proposals for physical developments that might be brought before it. For example, a housing model would allow one to walk around and through the model to see it from a variety of angles. Two stops were made on the tour.

First stop on SecondLife was a visit to a recreated small town, Hanover, New Hampshire. The chair’s avatar (the cartoon-like character he guided around) walked the town’s main street as directed by the arrow keys on the chair’s keyboard. Time allowing, the avatar could have entered the stores and purchased a product: either a real-world product (e.g., anything one can purchase on the internet), or a virtual product. Virtual products are things like clothing, cars, housing, or furniture one might use while in the virtual world. How big could a virtual product market be? No projections were offered, but it was noted that in June 2005 Forbes reported that cell phone ring tones are now a $4 billion a year world-wide market.

The chair raised an interesting question about the impact such virtual worlds might have on a real world real estate. The example used was 74^th Street’s Little India shopping district. The chair imagined the 74^th Street Merchants Association recreates the district in a virtual world, with each real store having a counterpart in the virtual world: i.e., there’s a Gotham Gold Company one can walk to on 74^th Street and another one can mouse to online. With the virtual Little India developed and owned by the merchants association and its members, what impact might this have on the rent a real-life landlord could charge at lease renewal?

Now imagine the situation where a landlord asks for triple the rent at renewal time. The tenant looks at the “real estate” and “virtual estate” bottom lines, refuses the landlord’s offer, and decides to focus on the online business. Next, imagine the reaction when the prospective new merchant for the retail store on 74^th Street learns that he has to purchase the online space separately, from the merchants association and previous tenant. Would this reduce the amount the prospective merchant would be willing to pay to the real-life landlord for rent? Might it force the landlord to offer space for a lesser rent to the current tenant?

Next stop on the tour was a recreation of Landing Lights Park, the 4/10 mile long park at the northern end of the district that stretches from 78^th - 83^rd Streets. The virtual Landing Lights Park was made on the Democracy Island section of SecondLife. Operated by New York Law School, Democracy Island is an effort to build “tools, systems, and environments in the 3D virtual world of Second Life to foster and enhance real world civic participation.” Several projects will share Democracy Island. In addition to Landing Lights, the U.S. Department of Transportation will explore citizen feedback on policy issues, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center’s Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies will seek to inform the debate on nanotechnologies.

Several of those involved with developing the model were at the virtual park and joined the committee meeting: Jerry Paffendorf, project manager for Democracy Island, Ron Blechner, primary builder of Landing Lights Island, and Scott Frimmer, a New York Law School e-democracy student, and the chair’s avatar. And we were joined by Batman. (Again, you had to be there.)

How might this help the Community Board?

Engaging youth in the board’s work is a foundation goal. Today’s youth are tomorrow’s leaders. A project like a “virtual” Landing Lights Park presents several opportunities to involve youth in community activities:

· With its game-like features, the project’s technology is certainly familiar to youth and might offer a certain magnetism. By way of background statistics, 90% of U.S. teenagers currently use the Internet and 32 Community Board 3 members (64%) have email addresses.

· Vivian Dock asked who would do the work associated with such a project. The chair responded that one way to approach such a project would be to get area youth to do the technical work of designing any proposal and presenting it to the community. By way of example, he used Landing Lights Park. Interested youth could make park models and present them to the local community (the park’s neighbors). In doing so, they might work under the leadership of the Parks Committee with assistance from the Youth Services Planning and Technology Advisory Committees. Any final decisions would, of course, remain with the park’s neighbors and the Community Board. But should an acceptable plan emerge, funds from the $100,000,000 Airport Lease Agreement Community Fund might be available for an accepted park plan. Perhaps some funds might even be freed up to plan, recruit, and train youth in using the SecondLife software.

· Beyond the community effort, introducing youth to this technology might provide them with insight into career opportunities. (Remember the $4 billion ring tone business!) Perhaps we might have a presentation about the opportunities arising through virtual world technologies at next year’s Business-Youth Convention. It’s the world they’ll be growing up in.

In addition to youth, at some point developers and agencies will begin presenting projects to the Community Board in virtual worlds, and a current engagement will begin to familiarize the board and staff with the technology.

Finally, the meeting was videotaped in an effort to determine how to report and archive such hybrid real life / virtual world meetings. New techniques and processes will need to be developed to ease access to records of this sort.

3. Network Neutrality - New technology will allow your Internet Service Provider to edit the sites and services you access. We again discussed the issue with the thought of developing a Neutrality recommendation for the board's consideration. For background see: http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/b_paper.pdf and http://www.networkingpipeline.com/169500292. This will be a focus of our next meeting.

4. The .NYC TLD – In April 2001 the community board passed an Internet Empowerment Resolution calling for the city to apply for the .NYC Top Level Domain name. Other familiar TLDs are .com, .org., and .edu. For background on its quality of life, marketing, and financial advantages see Community Board 3’s resolution at http://www.cb3qn.nyc.gov/page/62506/.

The time is approaching when the organization that issues TLDs will again be receiving applications. Berlin, Germany is applying for the .berlin TLD. Borough President Marshall recently brought the issue to the city’s Office of Marketing. But this doesn’t guarantee a fair hearing before the mayor. What else can we do to get Mayor Bloomberg to consider and support an application for .NYC?

5. Hands On: Eugene Atkins has been working on technology to allow the audio recording of committee meetings. It’s hoped that the next Tech Advisory Committee meeting will be recorded and made available for download and playing on ones computer or MP3 player.

The meeting ended at 9:15 PM.

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