RI-WINS Town Hall Recap, Part 1
Posted by Brian
[Update: Part II of the re-cap, the Q&A, is now available]
To everyone who attended, and all our speakers (Bob Panoff, Don Stanford, and Tracy Williams) thanks for making the first Providence Geeks Town Hall a success. The event was held Wednesday, June 21 at AS220, and the speakers gave us a comprehensive overview of the RI-WINS project, and took Q&A from the audience (I’ll have a post up soon with some highlights from the Q&A).
- Don Stanford was the first speaker, and led by explaining the relationship between the Business Innovation Factory (BIF), the EDC, and RI-WINS. In a nutshell, BIF is a combination of public and private interests that is housed at the EDC. BIF’s focus is bringing people together to collaborate on innovation projects to make Rhode Island a great place to live and work. WINS is the pilot project for BIF, and is designed to be the platform on which future projects are built.
- Bob Panoff spoke next, and discussed RI-WINS. He pointed out that Rhode Island’s size, intimacy, and heterogeneous nature makes it a microcosm of the larger world, and as such, is the perfect testbed for a border-to-border wireless network. He explained that the goal of RI-WINS is to encourage new business models and practices that are based around the assumption that you’ve got pervasive broadband connectivity.
- Tracy Williams was our final speaker, and described her role as being “responsible for information technology at the executive branch” of government. She explained that the RI-WINS network could become a critical part of how the RI government delivers information to its citizens. As a specific example, she mentioned lawyers and social workers in courthouses: they need wireless access to data to be more effective, but since courthouses are often historic buildings, it’s impossible to outfit such structures with wireless networks effectively. By bathing the whole state in wireless, RI-WINS enables wireless access to state information in places that would otherwise be quite tricky.
A video of the event is available, and it should play under QuickTime as well as on many mobile devices. If anyone has trouble viewing it, please post a note about this in the comments and I’ll see if I can re-encode it in an alternative form. Also, corrections and clarifications are welcome, so feel free to use the comments for that as well!
(My apologies to Don for skipping a few seconds at around 00:06:00 due to my clumsiness operating the camera.)
July 3rd, 2006 15:01
[...] Find out more in the event coverage: Part I and Part II. [...]