government

#SharetheNet: Support Cuban Net Freedom, Community Networks on #GivingTuesday

 #GivingTuesday

The Internet Society New York Chapter (ISOC-NY) is now supporting other organizations that share our vision of open technology for social good.

Today, Tuesday, December 1, ISOC-NY sponsors our first crowdfunding campaign as part of #GivingTuesday, a global campaign for charitable giving as an alternative to Black Friday.

#SharetheNet will fund Apretaste, an initiative that brings Internet access to Cuba, and NYC Mesh, a wireless community network in NYC.

This is a critical point in the evolution of the Internet:Will the Net remain open and accessible to all – or locked down by repressive governments and corporate monopolies?

The ISOC-NY answer to that question is:

Empower Internet users to build their own Net and share it!

We’re asking your help to raise $152,000 in 24 hours to to make this happen.

Every dollar you give helps the open Net.

For Apretaste:

  • $6 provides one Cuban Internet user access that bypasses government censors
  • $120 connects 20 Cubans to the Net
  • $480 funds 80 Cubans to the Net as well as the development of an online encyclopedia, maps, store and weather service

Help Apretaste now

For NYC Mesh:

  • $65 buys a router with open source software for an NYC resident so they can cut the cord to monopoly ISP’s
  • $480 buys an antenna and sector radio to improve WiFi reception in lower Manhattan and the North and South side of Brooklyn
  • $2400 creates a supernode that connects one neighborhood to the next

Help NYC Mesh now

This is also a critical point for ISOC-NY – we’re asking for your help so our Chapter can take the lead in building an Internet that is truly for everyone.

There are many ways to get involved in #GivingTuesday. I encourage you to join the movement and visit www.givingtuesday.org to learn more about how you can make a difference.

Thanks!
David Solomonoff, President ISOC-NY

Continue reading

WEBCAST MONDAY 8/1: Fed-State Joint Conference on Advanced Telecom Services – Best Practices in Changing Times

Best PracticesOn Monday August 3 2015 at 10 am the Internet Society Livestream Channel will present a webcast of the entire proceeding of the Federal-State Joint Conference on Advanced Telecommunications Services public forum Best Practices in Changing Times on July 15 at the Marriott Marquis in New York. The program comprises three panels:

10:00am  PANEL 1: High-Speed Broadband Technology – Availability
Moderator: Gregg Sayre, Commissioner, New York Public Service Commission. Speakers: David Salway, Executive Director, NYS Broadband Office; Deb Socia, Director, Next Century Cities; Robert Mayer, Vice President – Industry and State Affairs, USTelecom Association; Brittny Saunders, Deputy Counsel to the Mayor of New York City. (Panel includes Welcome/Introduction from Catherine J.K. Sandoval, Commissioner, California Public Utilities Commission)

11:30am PANEL 2: Broadband Services Adoption
Moderator: Gregg Sayre, Commissioner, New York Public Service Commission, Speakers Thomas Kamber, Older Adults Technology Services (O.A.T.S.); Phillip Jones, Commissioner, Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission; Luke Swarthout, Director of Adult Education Services, NY Public Library; Louis Zacharilla, Intelligent Community Forum. (Panel includes keynote from late-arriving Travis Littman, Legal Advisor, Office of FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel)

1:00pm  PANEL 3: 21st Century Technology & Broadband Innovations
Moderator: Clayton Banks, New York City COPIC Commissioner & Co-Founder of Silicon Harlem. Speakers: Dazza Greenwood, Founder and Principal, CIVICS.com and Visiting Scientist, M.I.T; John T. Chapman, Engineering Fellow & Chief Technical Officer, Cable Access Business Unit, Cisco; Dr. Lawrence Jones, Alstom Grid; Ed Donelan, Telecom Infrastructure Corp.; Michael B. Shear, Strategic Office Networks.

What: Federal-State Joint Conference on Advanced Telecommunications Services – Best Practices in Changing Times
When: Monday August 3 2015 10:00am – 3:00pm EDT | 14:00-19:00 UTC
Webcast: https://livestream.com/internetsociety/bestpractices
Twitter: #broadband + #bestpractices 


Continue reading

What infrastructure is needed for positively disruptive technology?

Cosponsored by Disruptive Technologists

and the New York Chapter of the Federal Communications Bar Association

Infrastructure in this sense could be physical (fiber in the ground) – or open source software, legal/policy, etc. – more broadly any type of support structure.

This will be the beginning of ongoing initiatives to address the issues raised and follow with hackathons afterwards. A major component will be the development of standards and protocols for new Net-connected technologies with consideration of the social and ethical issues as machines become intelligent. We’ll also explore innovative funding methods for these projects using digital currencies.

David Solomonoff, President, Internet Society of New York

November 11, 2014

Brooklyn Law School

Fell Hall, 205 State Street, Brooklyn, New York

10:00 am to 8:00 pm

Admission: $20.00

Students with valid ID admitted free of charge

RSVP here

Zephyr Teachout, New York gubernatorial candidate, organizer, educator, and scholar

Teachout is a constitutional and property law professor at Fordham Law School. She is a deeply experienced leader in the fights for economic and political equality and against concentration of wealth and control in the hands of the few. She is one of the leading legal experts on corruption.

Timothy Karr, Senior Director of Strategy, Free Press

Timothy builds on Free Press’ grassroots and policy work to promote universal access to open networks and protect free speech everywhere. Before joining Free Press, Tim served as executive director of MediaChannel.org and as vice president of Globalvision New Media. He has also worked extensively as an editor, reporter and photojournalist for the Associated Press, Time, Inc., the New York Times and Australia Consolidated Press. Tim critiques, analyzes and reports on media and media policy for the Huffington Post.

Serene Han, Ideas Engineer, Google

Technological initiatives to help people confront threats in the face of conflict, instability, and repression

Dave Burstein, publisher, DSL Prime:

Wireless Engineers predict 50x improvement in capacity; How do we make it so?

Spectrum should be WiFi and less licensed. WiFi wiil do more and more, becoming increasingly crowded. Mobile carriers, using existing spectrum, can increase their capacity using MIMO and more with little or no increase in capex. Logical policy: All newly available spectrum go to WiFi/unlicensed.

Bob Frankston, Ambient Connectivity – merging wired and wireless telecom infrastructures

Co-creator with Dan Bricklin of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program and the co-founder of Software Arts, the company that developed it. In recent years, Frankston has been an outspoken advocate for reducing the role of telecommunications companies in the evolution of the internet, particularly with respect to broadband and mobile communications. (remote)

Sander Rabin:  Neurosecurity, National Security and Cognitive Liberty

Sander Rabin, a physician-attorney, is the executive director of The Center for Transhuman Jurisprudence, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is education in human enhancement and the development of policies and model rules of law for human enhancement that protect our rights to our minds, bodies and genomes, while minimizing human enhancement’s potential for divisiveness and harm.

Nate Heasley, Executive Director, Goodnik

Goodnik has developed a labor-backed digital currency for information workers to share resources with non-profits and for-profit companies with a social mission.

Nate has been working as a manager of and consultant to  non-profit and technology related companies for 20 years. Nate also founded GrassrootsCamp, an organization that provides free training seminars to non-profit organizations and social entrepreneurs. It is from that experience that Goodnik started as a way to broaden the impact of those events and ideas from that community. Nate holds a BA from St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD and a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law where he was a Crowley Fellow in International Human Rights and a Stein Scholar for Public Interest Law and Ethics.

Jim Dutcher, CIO, State University of New York, Cobleskill

How broadband is transforming rural America and what is needed now

Panel: Bitcoin and related cryptocurrency-related technologies

• Margaux Avedison, Moderator. Co-founder of EvotionMedia, a “Crypto-Media” production and finance entity. She is on the advisory board of the Bitcoin Shop and organized the first Bitcoin Education Day on Capitol Hill as an Advisor for the Chamber of Digital Commerce.She also consults for banks, individuals, large corporations and venture capitalists on Bitcoin and Blockchain 2.0 technology.  She is an early entrepreneur in the digital currency space and relaunched the first American Bitcoin Exchange, Tradehill, in 2012.

• Erik Anderson, Chairman, WC3 web payments group. Lead/Senior Software Engineer for much of Bloomberg’s Charting, Technical Analysis, Trading Strategies, Data Science, Interactive Data Visualization, Backtesting and Technical Analysis Screening, Core Graphics Infrastructure, math/Quants Developer, Financial Services

• Attorney Jeffrey Alberts, Partner in Pryor Cashman’s Litigation Group. Head of the firm’s White Collar Defense and Investigations Practice. Jeffrey’s practice focuses on government investigations and prosecutions and related regulatory proceedings, asset forfeiture and money laundering litigation, victims’ rights representation, and complex civil litigation. Jeffrey is an experienced trial lawyer who has served as lead counsel in numerous trials, including civil and criminal federal jury trials, state jury trials, and state and federal bench trials. Jeffrey has represented clients in disputes involving virtual currency. He also has been quoted by the media concerning criminal prosecutions of virtual currency service providers and government seizures of bitcoins. Immediately prior to joining the firm in 2013, Jeffrey spent six years as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, where he investigated and prosecuted a wide variety of white collar criminal offenses, including money laundering, securities fraud, bank fraud, mail and wire fraud, and bankruptcy fraud.

• Adam Krellenstein, Co-founder Counterparty. Lead developer of counterpartyd; chief architect of the Counterparty Protocol. Counterparty is a free and open platform that puts powerful financial tools in the hands of everyone with an Internet connection. By harnessing the power of the Bitcoin network, Counterparty creates a robust and secure marketplace directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, extending Bitcoin’s functionality from a peer-to-peer payment network into a full fledged peer-to-peer financial platform.

  • Patrick Deegan CTO, ID3 Chief Architect. ID3 is developing a new social ecosystem of trusted, self-healing digital institutions. This endeavor seeks to address the severe structural limitations of existing institutions by empowering individuals to assert greater control over their data, online identities and authentication.

Panel: Hear Me, Touch Me, See Me, Feel Me: Moving Natural User Interface (NUI) to the Mainstream

This panel discussion will explore the world of NUI and what it will take to move today’s emerging NUI technologies (voice recognition, Kinect, haptics, facial recognition, etc.) into widespread adoption and make them accessible to all.

  • Deb Benkler, Moderator. Co-founder of NUI Central – NY, the largest NUI group on earth and is known as NYC’s leading NUI evangelist. She is a practitioner of lean and logical UX focusing on best practices in the broader context of CX (customer experience). In 2012, she won a User Experience Award for her work on the Maryland Transit Administration Interactive Maintenance Kiosk, which incorporated facial recognition.
  • Ken Lonyai Co-founder of NUI Central and is known as the other NYC leading NUI evangelist. He’s a 15+ year veteran of user centered interactive project development including some of the industry’s most unique experiential systems. His skills span the on-line world and nearly every realm of human/computer interface used by brands and retailers – mobile, interactive kiosks, experiential displays, etc. He is a User Experience Award winner.
  • David Melville is a Research Staff Member at IBM. He has worked in the area of semi-conductor fabrication and nano-technology, exploring meta-materials and techniques for optimizing illumination and patterning masks for photo-lithography processors before making a jump to developing visualization and interactivity solutions for smart-grid projects. Most recently, he has been exploring what it means to interact with learning systems and working to establish a new era of computing experience.
  • Sean Montgomery is head of hardware at Ringly, the first fashion ring to manage your mobile device. He’s an engineer, professor, and new-media artist in New York City. While finishing his Ph.D. in neuroscience, Sean began to consider the fact that from the perspective of a neuron inside the human brain, both a cold winter day and the embrace of a loved one feels like a sequence of electrical impulses. Sean co-founded SENSORSTAR Labs, an agile R&D consulting group in New York City.
  • Tanya Kraljic is a Principal Designer for Nuance’s mobility division. Her work focuses on the strategy and design of speech experiences in mobile, wearable, in-home, and other emerging technologies. Prior to joining Nuance in 2010, Tanya earned a PhD in cognitive psychology, with an emphasis on adaptation in interactive spoken dialog.

ISOC-NY and Disruptive Technologists cosponsor events

We’re excited to cosponsor two events with the Disruptive Technologists!

Details on the first below. We’ll follow with an all-day event at Brooklyn Law on November 11 with panels providing a more in depth look at a wide variety of new technologies to be followed with hackathons to fill gaps in their realization.

Please join Disruptive Technologists for a panel discussion moderated by:

Bruce Bachenheimer, Professor & Director, Entrepreneurship Lab at Pace University, NYC

Panelists:

1. David Rose, VC & Serial Entrepreneur, New York Angels, Gust.com

2. Jessica Singleton, Digital Director at Office of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio

3. Chez Mee, Brand Innovation Strategist & Serial Entrepreneur

The financial crisis of 2008 was an inflection point where Mayor Bloomberg was widely credited for reinventing the traditional Wall Street Economy through technology entrepreneurship. Yet some criticized his success as having been more of a wealth creation model for a narrow section of the City.

Are we now at a second inflation point? At the recent press conference in Dumbo to announce Digital.NYC, the City’s new hub for tech and startups, Mayor Bill De Blasio talked about his new technology initiatives. So this brings up the question: Will things get worse or will they get better? What will happen to the gains made by the Bloomberg Administration? Or will there not even be a new inflection point, and things will remain the same? What does it take to make a successful tech ecosystem?

Disruptive Technologists is an organization dedicated to finding out what makes Disrupters tick – what they are thinking, how they do what they do and then inspire, promote, support, mentor and advise  in order to future Disruption in NYC through tech. We do this through the weekly publication DisruptiveTechnologists.com, monthly panels through our organization Digital Technologists in NYC and through our monthly newsletter. We also report on and cover new Disrupters and attend the hottest events in order to spread their Disruptive words.  We offer an intimate look at this new breed of tech entrepreneurs and their innovative products and services.

Join us for the event to hear from some of the most qualified, dedicated, and passionate Disrupters in the business.
Continue reading

The Future of the Internet Governance Forum

ISOC logoIn an extraordinary meeting on 6 December the United Nation’s Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) decided to create a Working Group on Improvements to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) (http://www.intgovforum.org/) with a membership made up only of governments.

The Internet Society believes this decision sets back the model of multistakeholder cooperation under which the IGF was established, and contradicts the instructions given to the CSTD for the establishment of the Working Group.

The Internet Society has joined the International Chamber of Commerce – Business Action to Support the Information Society, the Internet Governance Caucus, and many other Internet, business, and civil society organizations in sending a letter to the CSTD, asking them to retract their previous decision and to establish an appropriately constituted Working Group that ensures the full and active participation of governments, the private sector and civil society from both developing and developed countries, involving relevant intergovernmental and international organizations and forums.

Like the Internet, a multistakeholder approach has been at the core of the Internet Governance Forum’s formation and success. We hope that Internet Society Chapters and Members, as well as other organizations, will join us in signing the letter.

You may read the full letter, and see the growing list of signatories, and indicate your own support here:

http://isoc.org/wp/newsletter/?p=2710

Continue reading

Milton Mueller: Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance – NYU 12/14 #icann #igf

Milton MuellerISOC-NY is delighted to present Milton Mueller’s first full exposition of his new  book  Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance at NYU on Tuesday December 14 2010.  Prof. Mueller is a co-founder of ICANN’s NonCommercial User’s Constituency and a renowned cyberlibertarian.  His 2002 book Ruling the Root has long been the definitive work on governance.  We are excited to hear details of what, in his mind,  has changed in the last 8 years.  This event is open to the public and will be webcast live.

What: Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance
When: Tuesday December 14 2010 : 7-9pm
Where: Rm 317, Warren Weaver Hall NYU, 251 Mercer St NYC (& W. 4 St)
Who: Public welcome.  No RSVP needed.  Photo ID required.
Webcast: http://www.livestream.com/isocny
Hashtag: #isocny
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=175907139093951
Continue reading

First Broadband Stimulus grants announced

Broadband Technologies Opportunities ProgramDec 17: Vice President Biden announced initial recipients of grants in Round 1 of the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) for an amount of $183m. The awards, spread across 17 states, will be matched by $46m from public and private contributors. A total of $2bn in awards are to be rolled over the next 75 days.

The National Economic Council today released a report, “Recovery Act Investment in Broadband: Leveraging Federal Dollars to Create Jobs and Connect America” which details how broadband investment will boost the economy.

Two funded projects are in rural New York State.
Continue reading

NYC Council Hearing on Innovation 12/16/09

NYCNew York, NY – On Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 10 AM in the Council Chambers of City Hall, the New York City Council Committees on Technology in Government and Small Business held a joint public hearing to examine how small technology start-ups are surviving in this tough economy.  This hearing will help the Council understand the dynamics behind successful firms as well as what options are available to the City in aiding these important businesses in their struggle to remain competitive and viable in a global environment.

Archived webcast and the twitter feed are embedded below.

Continue reading

Broadband Stimulus Program Take Two – less is more? Request for comment..

Broadband Technologies Opportunities ProgramNov 10 2009: The United States Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) today announced they are streamlining the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s broadband grant and loan programs by awarding the remaining funding in just one more round, instead of two rounds, The first round of RUS’s Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP) and NTIA’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) garnered $28bn worth of applications, and about $4bn is expected to be awarded in loans/grants. The agencies have issued a Request for Information (RFI) seeking public comment on how the application process may be improved.

Continue reading

Video of NYC BTOP meeting

With the deadline for applications for the first round of grants from the $7.2bn set aside for broadband adoption projects in President Obama’s stimulus plan rapidly approaching (Aug14), members of many of NYC communities met to discuss how best to achieve results. Representatives of the City’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DOITT) poured cold water on many aspirations stating that most, if not all, the cash would go to rural projects. Despite this many declared it their intention to apply.

Audio & Video below. A listserv has been set up for further conversation. Twitter: #nycbtop
Continue reading

New York City Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) Meeting

Broadband Technologies Opportunities Program Council Member Gale A. Brewer invites all members of the New York City technology community to discuss the recently released Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) funding that has been made available through the federal stimulus package which passed in February 2009. The purpose of this event is to help galvanize interested applicants around common goals. Please distribute this invitation widely and invite all pertinent stakeholders to attend.

When: Tuesday, July 28, 2009 from 6-8 PM
Where: DCTV’s Third Floor Conference Room
87 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10013 (@ White St) (map)

Contact Kunal Malhotra [kmalhotra@council.nyc.gov] or Sam Wong [samwong.nycc@gmail.com] at (212) 788-6975 if you have any questions and suggestions.

Continue reading

NTIA call for reviewers of Broadband Stimulus Fund Applications

NTIAJuly 10, 2009
Call for Reviewers
Broadband Technology Opportunities Program
Help America Advance its National Objective of Broadband Access for All

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce is soliciting experts to evaluate grant proposals for the $4.7 billion Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), an important part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.