Summary: San Francisco TechConnectChris Vein is Senior Technology Advisor to Mayor Gavin Newsom, and Director of the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services (DTIS) for the City and County of San Francisco. Mr. Vein attended the W2i Digital Cities Convention (East) in Philadelphia in May 2005, where W2i invited him to co-chair the Digital Cities Convention (West) held in the San Francisco Bay Area in October. On Tuesday, October 11, Vein kicked off the conference proceedings of the Digital Cities Convention (West) with a presentation of TechConnect, Mayor Newsom’s initiative to provide every San Franciscan with free or low-cost Internet access. This summer, the city released a Request for Information/Comments (RFI/C), which expired on September 30. The city has taken the month of October to review 26 proposals and to come up with a recommendation for the mayor. * * * Mr. Vein welcomed participants and described Mayor Newsom’s vision to connect government to citizens, specifically through the TechConnect initiative. He further characterized preliminary results of the responses the RFI/C. Among the attributes of the challenges the Mayor and he are trying to solve with broadband-wireless access to the Internet in San Francisco are: • Government: The City and County of San Francisco has 28,000 employees and a budget of $5.3 billion. Departments include public safety, health and welfare, housing, administrative services, transportation, etc. and “each is almost a unique business unit unto itself,” Vein said. “Getting those business units to work together and cooperate is a big challenge to us.” • Tourism: San Francisco gets more than 17 million tourists a year and is one of the top tourist destinations in the world. “We know from surveys of our tourists that [free access to the Internet] is one of the things [visitors are] looking for.” • Business: San Francisco is a city of 80,000 small businesses, many of which are in need of high-speed broadband connectivity. • People: On average, San Franciscans are younger. About 70 percent are between 20 and 50. They’re very career oriented and well educated and relatively well paid, but the city also has a digital-divide problem. The middle class is shrinking rapidly. • Topography: The city is surrounded by water, and a mountain runs through San Francisco. Most of the city is 100 feet above sea level, and the mountain rises 800 to 900 feet.
“All this information will become very useful when you understand why we made the request we did in our RFC,” Vein said. Mayor Newsom uses the concept of “connection” to explain how government provides its services. Rather than government providing services and business and citizens coming to government, government should be taking those services out to citizens. He’s brought the concept to bear on the problem of homelessness, through Homeless Connect. “We actually have lawyers, technology people, food and training people, all coming to one organization, and homeless people are invited to come and get the services they need,” Vein said. “Or we have roving people go into the city and signing them up on the spot, and as a result we have dramatically cut down on the number of homelessness in the city.” TechConnect is a sustainable initiative to enable all families in San Francisco with technology. The effort is bringing together community development, economic development, housing, and schools, within the Mayor’s office to connect all San Franciscans. The initiative also involves the California Public Utility Commission and DTIS as well as partners such as the Full Circle Fund and OneEconomy. Civitium is a consultant. There are four parts to solving the digital-divide problem within the City and County of San Francisco: • Access to the Internet • Equipment to use to access the Internet • Focused content • Training and support
While the first has garnered the most attention, the latter three are very important in the total project and initiatives are afoot to provide them. [Start Project TechConnect Video] SUMMARY “We will not stop until every San Franciscan has access to free Internet service. No San Franciscan should be without a computer and a broadband connection.”—Mayor Gavin Newsom, City of San Francisco Project TechConnect will provide universal and affordable access for all residents and businesses, and connect residents of San Francisco to the social, economic and educational opportunities they deserve; and to the global economy for job creation. Mayor Newsom says the United States was No. 3 in 2000 in broadband penetration and is now 16. “For us to be competitive, we better wake up to the growing realities of offshoring and outsourcing or its going to be difficult to stem the tide. We’ve got to get wired and competitive. TechConnect is about access, low-cost equipment, content, training, and support. People are trained not just as users but as trainers themselves. The goal is a state-of-the-art network that is simple to maintain and inexpensive to upgrade, that protects the privacy of users, respects consumer choice, and fosters diversity of information and ideas. San Francisco already has hotspots, and the government is supporting organizations determining unique and individual business models to provide Wi-Fi access. “We are about creating business, opportunity, and I think there’s plenty of space within the marketplace for all to play,” Vein said. “We are very supportive of free public services and free private-sector initiatives that are going on.” The city is also experimenting, and running a pilot project similar to Internet over power-line. In the area of equipment, the strategy is to offer with partners new and refurbished devices, starting in the schools with computers, training, support, and focused content as well events to take the initiative directly to the community. The content on the city government Web site will also be rethought, working with One Economy for a beehive page just for the City and County of San Francisco. Training and Support: “We should be able to roll out some innovative and exciting stuff later this fall, so watch for that,” Vein said. RFI/C Results The city wants its network to provide universal access and to be affordable, fixed, nomadic, and portable. Its goals and policy standards to achieve this were reflected in the RFI/C. “If any of you have been following this, we kept this fairly high level but fairly specific about what we were looking for,” Vein said. There were two parts to responses: commercial interest, and no commercial interest. Of the no-commercial-interest responses, the city received 282 comments. “The positive far outweighs the negatives on comments,” Vein said. The 26 commercial-interest responses grouped into three categories of solutions: • turn-key, • partial, • technology/vendor specific.
The responses represented the full range of business models, from pure public models, on one end, to pure private-sector models, on the other. The city received more private-sector model proposals than public-sector model proposals. “We got an interesting mix,” Vein said. Vein said that, during the process, there had been concern that proposals would be able to meet the technical requirements laid out in the RFI/C, including: • that the network cover all 49 square miles, including the area with the mountain; • that it be portable, fixed, and mobile; • that there be penetration into multidwelling units and access above the first floor; many San Franciscans rent and living in multi-unit dwellings.
Initial Reactions Google with its press release, an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, and articles from other outlets “really created a lot of interest in what we’re doing,” Vein said. Many of the public reactions were issue specific. Vein cited headlines: • Mayor sees wireless service as a basic right • Wi-Fi rhymes with why die? Vein: “Certainly a person who didn’t believe that it’s a fundamental right, and didn’t believe the City and County of San Francisco should be going in the Wi-Fi access area.” • City Wi-Fi chills telecoms. Vein: “Interestingly enough, we haven’t really heard much from SBC, Comcast or anybody else. It will be interesting to see how this plays out with our friends at SBC and Comcast.”
Vein said: The most telling thing for me is to go to a housing project and talk to the people in those projects who ask me, ‘When? When are they going to get affordable or free access to the Wi-Fi. We need it now.’ When you talk about the time it takes to make sure it’s a fair and open selection process, you can see the disappointment. ‘Here it is, government again, going to disappoint me.’” People come up to Vein in the street and ask, ‘When is it going to be? What are you going to do for me? I want it now?” “The general reaction to the people we serve has been incredibly positive response to this.”
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