According to the Mandate Programme of the Administration and the Charter of European e-Rights of citizens in the Information and Knowledge Society (delivered by Eurocities network www.eurocities.org) , the Municipality – in partnership with local stakeholders and taking part in international networks - intends to pursue:
- rights to access to technological equipment and networks (also broadband), equal opportunities, privacy and personal data protection;
- rights to education and training, providing each citizens with the content and knowledge she/he really needs;
- information rights, through a user-friendly, high understandable, complete, high quality and up-to-date public information;
- rights to participation, reinforcing this fundamental rights of citizens and ensuring a public Administration actively engaged.
The aim is to improve more e-Governance (e-Democracy) than merely e-Government (e-services) and inform citizens on the functioning of decision processes in a highly understandable way.
Moreover, from 2004 onwards community wireless networks, especially in the United States, have had an increasingly widespread development, a development which has apparently renewed the pioneering enthusiasm engendered by Internet access during the early 1990s.
Local public administrations (San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland, etc., but also those of smaller centres) are today undertaking strategies and projects which increasingly place promotion of access to the “broadband wireless” network at the centre of public policies.
In America as in Europe, rapid Internet connection is swiftly establishing itself as a basic public service like water, gas and electricity. But many citizens find themselves on the “wrong side” of the digital divide, without the possibility to be connected on account of the high commercial costs.
According to the “U.S. model” the solution is that of “community internet” and municipal broadband wireless. In reality there is more than one model but the basic philosophy is shared by the various solutions on offer: free or at low cost compensated by business models (in truth not yet established or mature) depending on publicity, value added services, diversified performance for particular needs, covered zones, etc.
Very soon, in Europe as in the United States, thanks to convergence and digital multi-channels, all media – TV, telephone, radio web will also be distributed via Internet through broadband connections. Wireless and cable technologies already permit local governments, partnerships, schools, communities, and groups with special interests to produce and make available less costly and more reliable Internet services.
In Europe, too, many cities and regions are moving in this direction and a certain dynamism has been registered, favoured also by projects sustained by the European Commission and private partners. It is in this context of new experiences both at infrastructure level and at that of planned public contents/services, that the Bologna Iperbole Wireless civic network experiment, promoted by the Municipality, availing itself of private partners for the technological infrastructure, the access points and the Internet connections, made available freely by the HiTel and Acantho companies.
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