James Vorderbruggen and Edward Burnell

Through a year of co-learning, Ujima and Mass Mesh will organize a community-owned wireless mesh network in Roxbury and Dorchester to provide home broadband access.

The Project Collective

Ujima Boston is a democratically controlled investment fund that seeks to establish residents’ control over development in Roxbury/Dorchester, in response to displacements of communities of color in Boston. In our interviews with core Ujima staff and members, their key goals were:

• building up a cooperative economy and black-led futures
• creating agency and self-determination (as defined by community members) in Roxbury and Dorchester
• meeting neighborhoods’ needs, but also building community assets

In 2018 Ujima used assemblies, dot voting, and polling to learn resident’s priorities for the fund, and learned that the top three were (in order) community land trusts, community-owned internet, and child care. During the coming year, Ujima is assessing the feasibility of various ways in each they might build these assets locally.

Mass Mesh was started to “fork the internet” (i.e., build an alternative communications network) by people shocked at the Snowden revelations and the infiltration of Occupy Boston by police. In our interviews with core Mass Mesh members, their key goals were:

• building a network with security and anonymity built in
• infrastructure for “the working class, not the owning class”
• eschewing capitalism

At Freedom Rally 2018, Mass Mesh installed six nodes providing internet access across the Boston Commons. This pop-up network proved the feasibility of the hardware but dissipated with the event.

Mass Mesh, Ujima, and other individual and organizational stakeholders will be working collectively over the next year to organize this mesh network. There are valuable convergences and divergences in collective member’s goals, backgrounds, and knowledges. While Mass Mesh developers tended to point out concerns with privacy and security, Ujima members were more worried about questions of autonomy. Both Mass Mesh and Ujima membership expressed concern with any strategy that emphasizes outdoor internet access. Both groups are far more interested in getting internet into people’s homes.

Our Understanding of the Situation

People of color have less access, knowledge, and skills pertaining to information and communication technology because of the ways in which such infrastructure is owned, developed, and managed. These impediments also exist for people with low income (and doubly so for those in the intersection). Manifestations of this digital divide are everywhere, and is visible in both broad statistics (see figures below) and in the lived experiences of Roxbury and Dorchester residents. Such infrastructural inequity is both unacceptable and unnecessary.

One mechanism for the digital divide’s enforcement is the pursuit of profit by corporate ISPs. Internet providers often cite “lack of demand” as a reason to avoid building fixed broadband infrastructure in low-income areas. But what resident has no demand for internet access? The truth is, communities who lack financial appeal (or are “othered” by structural racism: after a Ujima meeting, one member joked about cable companies being unwilling to send vans into Black neighborhoods to do maintenance) get left behind in internet deserts with coverage by one or two low-quality providers, or more often, with no providers at all. Because infrastructural inequity has left the United States with broadband service that lags behind other developed countries, the FCC has attempted to map broadband coverage by census tract. Unfortunately, the FCC’s map is an optimistic speculation rendered virtually useless by its sampling methods. From FCC Form 477:

broadband connections are available in a census block if the provider does, or could, within a service interval that is typical for that type of connection […] provision two-way data transmission to and from the Internet with advertised speeds exceeding 200 kbps in at least one direction to end-user premises in the census block.

That is, rather than verifying the situation on the ground, the FCC just adds together ISPs’ optimistic maps of their possible future coverage. But even through such motivated projection, the competitive outlook for Roxbury and Dorchester is bleak, with only one or two providers in most areas. Residents know that the options available are even sparser than shown.

Such a lack of competition is built upon other monopolistic practices of internet service providers. Prior to 2005, cable and phone wires were considered Tier II (“common-carrier services”) in the United States. This meant that although most cable and phone wires were owned by a natural monopoly, local and regional internet service providers (ISPs) were allowed to use the wires to deliver data too. In 545 U.S. 967 (2005), however, the Supreme Court and FCC overturned their previous antitrust positions, affirming cable and phone wires as the private property of cable companies and so allowing cable monopolies to deny local and regional ISPs the right to exist. Consequently, at least 70% of all high speed internet service in the United States is now provided by just one company. This decision was reversed in 2015 with the Open Internet Order, which re-introduced net-neutrality. In 2017, though, Trump’s chosen FCC chairman Ajit Pai repealed this bill.

Simultaneously, legislation written by ALEC and other conservative lobbyists currently bans or significantly encumbers municipal Internet projects in 26 states, cable lobby groups have launched extensive advertising campaigns in opposition to municipal networks, and many government projects have been directly sued by the cable giants (presumably for over-delivering to their constituents). In Massachusetts, Charlie Baker’s 2018 economic development bill bars municipalities from using state funds to support broadband networks that would compete with private industry. Even if there were not such strong legal barriers to municipal internet projects, the necessity of trusting the City of Boston to maintain infrastructure needed primarily in poor Black neighborhoods reduces interest in municipality-owned internet.

Ujima members’ knowledge of telecoms’ ruthlessness has been expressed to us multiple times; no longer being dependent on them is a major motivation for interest in community-owned internet.

For details on our plans for the next year, see the full design brief! 

I’m delighted to be working next to y’all in this codesign studio. Rather than starting with a bio, I’m going to try leaping straight into the work I hope to do, tagging in my background as it comes up. (we’ll see if that works into something readable lol)

I’m intrigued by the formation of shared ideas (aka joint-cognitive design concepts) during creative group work. For example: imagine a group of people discussing something they’ve agreed to work on together: it starts out as just a name or label, but as they come together they build it up by talking about their perspectives on what it should be. Then a fascinating thing happens: someone at the table asks another person “what do you think [a particular part of the concept] looks like?” At this point the asker is referencing a shared idea, something that isn’t physically real (though it may be referenced in sketches), but that the asker can imagine, and what’s more knows the person they’re asking the question of can imagine, and further, that that person can see things in this shared reality that the asker cannot.

This kind of conversation has happened in many of the engineering, product design, and teaching teams I’ve been a part of, and it generally isn’t remarked upon. But in my experience it’s during this formation of the shared idea where many of the voices, perspectives, and concerns that are marginalized or less powerful are prevented from shaping the direction of a project. The shared idea, especially as anchored in sketches, CAD, spreadsheets, can serve as a secret language, excluding those who were not given the chance to build bridges from their experience to the shared idea from having a hand in the project’s vision and organization of work. For me, a powerful realization of this came while teaching in Ghana, where when we presented hands-on activities students held back on telling relations between chemistry (which they’d learned in English) and everyday life (in a city that spoke Fanti) until the classroom became a comfortable place for them to switch between the two languages.

My hope for this class is to focus on co-creating those moments and representations of shared ideas in ways that build power at and amplify voices along the margin of who we consider “designers”. This is currently my research for a Mechanical Engineering PhD, but it started when I was working in the engineering industry: I wanted the machinists to be critiquing the modelers’ concepts just as much as the modelers were currently critiquing the machinists’. However, the aerospace research engineering that I started with began to feel a bit too privileged to hold some of my hopes for co-design. As my expertise is in interviewing practitioners about the shared ideas of their work (which are by their nature difficult to put into words) my hope is to work with a community of practitioners to build power and knowledge such that their shared ideas are more listened to and given more weight in the rooms they bring them to.

In particular, I’d love to work with a local union and unionized workers. I have a few connections to labor organizers in this area, and am beginning to reach out, but am also definitely feeling my inexperience in co-design as I try to understand how to do so and what the opportunities might be! From my current perspective, the way organizers reflect on, share, and build their practices seem like a very interesting set of shared ideas to work with. I’m quite open though to other suggestions of communities and partners.