So Davis Sq. in Somerville has 2 of the most popular, and active coffee shops in the Boston area. For various reasons its been impossible to interest the owner of the shops (which has recently been consolidated under a single owner) into providing wireless access. Davis Sq. is large enough, and far enough from private residences that an open access point has not been forth coming. There are however, some community minded people in the square with a DSL.

The Possibility

The Mass Green however have an office just off the square, (that they share with Boston IMC) with a DSL connection. In many ways they make a great deal of sense as a place to put an antenna, but as a drastically underfunded non-profit, what do they get out of it? They don’t even have a techie on staff who could be swept up in the romance of it.

I think it would be awesome to setup a wireless router at the greens, perhaps with some bandwidth shaping to keep wireless surfers from eating up the all bandwidth, and nocat running to catch incoming requests.

The Opportunity

When the surfer first connects they are displayed a page telling them that their bandwidth is being generously provided by the Mass Greens, if you instead connected to the Starbucks you would be paying $20/month and perhaps you could donate something to make this service worth while. This page could also serve to hi-light Green events, press releases, and news items. However the page would have to be designed in such a way to make it clear that this was a conversation and not advertising. (though in a way it is) Then you could click on a “Connect” button, nocat would hand you a lease, and on you go.

Transparency & Money

Some refinements might be: format the money as a pledge drive, with a little progress bar marching up towards paying off the equipment, the cost of the bandwidth, rent, etc…

Some piece of the money could be added to a dedicated development fund that went towards expanding and improving the service.

Questions

Research needs to be done on what grade of hardware is needed for doing the routing and the bandwidth shaping, my instinct says that you might need something better then the usual 486 PC one normally uses for building a router.

Some design about antenna, and placement would need to be done to figure out the feasibility of serving both the Someday and the Diesel from the Greens office. Also would the Starbucks access point interfere with the signal?

Onward

There are a number of non-profits on Temple St., pratically overlooking the Boston Commons. It seems like this model would carry over well to them, that location, and probably lots of other organization and locations.