Introduction

Fearless City Mobile is the mobile technology piece of a larger grassroots effort to build the W2 Community Media Centre for our inner-city Vancouver neighbourhood. Fearless represents the effort of our residents working together to break the digital divide and learn about appropriate technology to ovecome marginalization and support self-representation. Our neighbourhood is referred to as "four blocks of hell" by the corporate media which uses us as a feeding ground for sensational voyeuristic coverage of our national public health crisis. Long standing problems include more than one thousand people homeless, widespread injection drug use, and an outstanding public inquiry into the murdered and missing women.

Solutions

So what can mobile phones do about this crisis? Fearless is on the cutting edge of socially inclusive, creative-use-of-technology initiatives globally. Fearless City Mobile brings together to create longterm change by handing the means of representation to our neighbours, peer-to-peer, one neighbour at a time. We work with technology companies and web developers to support our work and share skills, funds, and strategies. We work with residents and activists to share access and support community generated media production. When the world comes to Vancouver for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games, we will have a searchable database of people's stories and documentation of key events, as well as geo-tagged rich media live streaming from throughout the neighbourhood at any given time.

Using Mobile Challenge Funds

1. Build a mesh network with 20 nodes
2. Redistribute 40 wireless handset devices
3. Train 40 DTES residents to make a total of 90 mobile human rights documenters
4. Install live screens in public spaces (at 8 sites) connected to the Fearless social media platform

Implementation

With the mesh network and live screens in place in public spaces, our residents and mobile documenters will have secure access to tell the story of the community in change; both the stories involving gentrification, police abuse, violence, and vigilantism, but also the stories of cultural survival and hope. Distribution of handsets and peer training puts residents into the position of control of their representation, in an environment pitting media giants, land developers, and politicians against community control. With free and unregulated access to sharing live streaming geotagged content, Fearless City provides a critical tool in documentation of human rights abuses, and leverages the media landscape to support community-based solutions as presented in local press conferences, community cultural and political events, and individuals expressions.

We will put into immediate action any contributions from the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center Mobile Challenge, as well as leverage contacts and new tech partners from NetSquared and Techsoup Global. Fearless City Mobile has been operating for about 18 months and has dramatically ramped up engagement in the neighbourhood, testing of mobile streaming and mapping technology, public participation using mobile engagement at live events, and experimented with mesh network technology. This past year has been a good training ground for us as we adapt our community organizing and social justice work to get involved with technology to build a communication infrastructure. A television report profiling the Fearless City Mobile work can be found here.

With an investment from the Mobile Challenge we will be able to complete the mesh network to ensure ubiquitous network access, distribution of wireless handsets to community organizers and resident journalists, and complete the www.fearlesscity.ca website. At present we do not have the funds to complete this, and are eager for the support of the Netsquared competition to realize this vital mobile technology infrastructure piece. The timing could not be more crucial with only 10 months until we see the eyes of the world peering in on our inner-city neighbourhood as we host thousands for the Olympics including thousands of accompanying journalists.

Collaboration

We have relied on a collaborative approach of building Fearless City using a network of mobile activists and developers. An example of this was our conference within a conference at Northern Voice, supported by Mobile Muse 3 and the DTES Community Arts Network Society, in which we provided a day-long stream of 10 mobile workshops. For this we brought up our allied project VozMob from Los Angeles in order to advance our mutual projects and share and exchange tactics and successes with using mobile technology with marginalized populations within a so-called "First World" inner-city environment.

Carrying on our tradition of mutual reliance with other artists and activists using mobile technology, in June 2009 we will host Antoni Abad and Megafone/Zexe.net in-residence to support Fearless City Mobile and our engagement and training of Aboriginal youth from our neighbourhood. Our Downtown Eastside neighbourhood has the highest number of displaced First Nations Peoples in Canada, with youth making up the fastest growing demographic. Antoni's residency and training work will advance the objectives proposed in this UC Berkeley proposal. Both the VozMob and Antoni Abad partnerships are examples of how we scale up and disperse what we know and share open source technology solutions to other inner-city communities in North America. Following our June work, we will extend our mobile tactics to inner-city Aboriginal youth in Calgary and Toronto during 2009.

About W2

Fearless City Mobile is the first project to hit the ground running from a dedicated crew of volunteer workers building the W2 Community Media Arts Centre in the neighbourhood. W2 will open in the Fall 2009, as a 14,395 sq ft not-for-profit space for our participants and the broader community to extend these accomplishments and solidify them as community-controlled infrastructure. W2 is designed as the first crossmedia centre in North America, and will include a home for Fearless City Mobile, and push interactions between mobile platforms and a community FM radio station, web TV, community cable TV, cafe, performance centre, gallery, digital and letterpress print shop, youth media lab, and disability arts studio. Details are available at our community social networking site www.creativetechnology.org

The task of developing this W2 community media arts centre has been a lived and actualized movement by Downtown Eastside residents since 2005. While the process of planning the space with the City of Vancouver has gone on for four years, the constituency behind W2 has persevered and developed its capacity involving marginalized artists and neighbourhood residents. This process has demonstrated both the vision and strength of the Fearless crew and W2 organization, as well as the appetite and desire of DTES artists and residents and local technologists to impact and animate technological innovation, participate, while supporting community and economic development. W2 and Fearless have worked with local technologists and progressive entrepreneurs to create a local ICT Cluster, and includes such companies as Raincity Studios, and progressive web of change and open source activists.

About Fearless City

Since 2008 Fearless City Mobile has been conducting research and mobile technology engagement events in the community. Fearless is a project with a demonstrated track record and people watching our work from other cities can have confidence that we will continue to ramp up and complete our proposed tasks within the next 10 months. We list this roster (below) to share our experiences, but also demonstrate our capacity and track-record, as we finish our infrastructure pieces in time for the Olympics in February 2010.

Fearless City Mobile has programmed a series of live events in and around our inner-city neighbourhood while supporting daily production of community generated media and media artwork. Mobile Media Labs have taken place every week throughout 2008, promoting a peer-to-peer training methodology and sharing both learning and practical implementation and paid work experiences. Workshops on a range of topics were held and scheduled in a sequence which builds skills parallel to the many events and research projects conducted throughout the year. Examples include: mobile sound gathering, geotagging data, mobile uploading, in-camera edits, open source strategies, working with drupal, camera techniques, lighting for mobile video production, overcoming the user interface, primer on mobile technologies, Web 2.0, blogging, and more. Workshop mentors and teachers included some of the most advanced artists and technologists working in mobile technology: Roland Tanglao, Kris Krug, Mo Simpson, Scott Nelson, Lorraine Murphy, Amy Kazymerchyk, Irwin Oostindie.

Mobile Media Labs took place at a street centre for marginalized and street-entrenched DTES residents where they are provided skills or employment training, peer support, referrals and laundry and coffee services. More sessions took place at a mental health cultural centre where artists informed by mental health, trauma, and sexual abuse survivor issues accessed weekly support sessions learning about mobile gear, writing, blogging, and social networking. Other sessions have taken place at a local housing cooperative community room. More than 20 workshops have taken place and fifty DTES residents trained through the program. An additional 40 will be trained during 2009.

In 2008, we participated with local open source technology activists to help advance hopes of building a neighbourhood mesh network using Meraki network of nodes. Plans were blocked when Meraki changed their terms of use, and no alternate system was put in place, and Fearless focused on other short-term priorities. We are now looking at redoing the mesh network with a new technology solution and putting it in place in the summer 2009.