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04/25/2006Los Angeles Marks 4 Years, 14th Event for W2i
This May marks four years since the founding of the Wireless Internet Institute. The W2i Report interviewed W2i Executive Director Daniel Aghion about the upcoming Digital Cities Convention in Los Angeles on May 24-26—W2i’s 14th major event since 2002.
 What is Digital Cities Convention all about?
The W2i Digital Cities Convention creates an environment fostering a high-level, business-oriented, nonpartisan dialogue and sharing of best practices among key decision makers on broadband-wireless network solutions. Since its inception in early 2005, more than 1,500 key participants, 250 faculty members, and 75 field-practitioner case studies presentations have contributed to our global program, yielding the largest shared online knowledge to date in the emerging broadband-wireless communities field.
What’s the expected outcome?
W2i focuses its agendas on the tangible benefits that participants expect to derive from such sessions. CIOs of the largest cities in the United States and leading service providers will be participating in our upcoming Los Angeles W2i DCC. We expect to further the dialogue and progress made in sharing win-win solutions that make sense for all broadband-wireless constituents.
Why go to Los Angeles, in particular?
As the biggest metropolitan area in the United States, Los Angeles constitutes a great backdrop to the complexities involved in drawing consensus from overlapping jurisdictions, diverse communities and a rich, influential and demanding private sector.
Combine this with a newly elected mayor—the first Latino mayor in the 136-year history of the city—and a strong and experienced CIO; the fact that L.A. controls the largest municipally owned utility in the world—L.A. Water & Power—and a population reliant on best-in-class telecommunications and cable services, and L.A is a hotbed of ideas and experiments that will benefit most local-government leaders.
What can participants expect at this Convention?
First, the Convention provides an opportunity for sharing best practices among peers. Second, the Convention has an unprecedented track record of attracting high-level decision makers, including leading elected officials and their CIOs who are assuming high-profile leadership roles in providing a framework for policy making.
And third, as we saw at the W2i Convention in Houston in early March, the platform pulls together local-community stakeholders, such as the Greater Houston Partnership or Downtown L.A., chambers of commerce, neighborhood and community development organizations, and even corporate citizens in exploring how broadband-wireless solutions enhance citizens’ lifestyles and improve local-government operations.
How does the program take shape?
Each Convention is tailored to local requirements, needs, and aspirations through the establishment of a Program Committee. In Los Angeles, this Committee is chaired by Thera Bradshaw, who is a career city CIO. It gathers together the key decision makers in the community to help fine-tune the agenda.
What’s the benefit for small- and medium-sized cities?
Los Angeles is an aggregation of independent smaller and medium-sized jurisdictions and communities that strive to coordinate their efforts. From a practical level, the W2i Digital Cities Convention, in partnership with NetLogix, provides a full day of practical training for local-government professionals chartered with planning and deploying broadband-wireless infrastructures and applications for their communities.
What role does the private sector play at the Convention?
The Convention in Los Angeles will host the second Service Provider Executive Roundtable in which participants, technology providers, systems integrators and service providers, will delve deeply into understanding the sustainable business models required by private investors to bankroll and mainstream pervasive network infrastructure deployments.
A second roundtable on Digital Inclusion is being field-tested for the first time in Los Angeles. It will gather, in an unprecedented way, field experts from both the public and private sectors to address the issues related to providing public access to underprivileged communities and the physically impaired, two large segments of the population which local government leaders must address by mandate or law.
These roundtables will result in two output panels during the plenary session on May 25. W2i has had a history of acting as a benchmark in thought leadership in this nascent industry, and Los Angeles will be no exception.
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