I personally apologize for not keeping this site up to date. A lot has been going on in my work and personal life that has kept me away. I was recently happy to see more people have filled out our interest survey, including interest in becoming cooperative board members. I still don’t think there’s enough to constitute a full board, so I’m wondering if it would be worthwhile to expand our mission.
I’ve been reading about services related to renewable power generation and (DC current) distribution, and thinking about how that relates to Power over Ethernet (PoE) network technology. I’ve also been reading about new local cooperation services like NeighborGoods and local time banking. New peer-to-peer technologies keep on getting better, that allow things like reliable storage sharing, and distributed computation using nearby unused hardware. New online currencies like Bitcoin can be used to exchange these services among communities fairly, with almost no transaction costs nor any cash expenses. I think as a technology cooperative, we could find experts and collaborate to serve many of these community needs simultaneously. I think this new name (keeping the same initials and web site) might serve that new expanded purpose well:
North East Los Angeles Infrastructure Service Cooperative
Notice that this is only a single word change — Infrastructure (general services) instead of Internet (communication specific). I think this change would help us advance our community investments together, and think past Internet communications to all the real-world ways that open communications enhance our communities. It would also allow us to start competing with more incumbents than just the local communications duopolies. We could take on the local power, construction, and logistics monopolies as well.
What do you think of this change? Please comment liberally, or note private sentiments in our interest survey.