Freedom to Connect, the annual event organized by David Isenberg, will be held on March 30-31, 2009 in Washington, DC. I am partnering with David to make this event fun and informative. This year is a very important one because President Barack Obama has made wired and wireless broadband – its cost, quality and availability – a major issue for his administration to tackle. Broadband is, in the eyes of the new administration, not just there for its own sake. It is a necessity for improving our lives: from the education of our children to the reduction of social isolation among seniors to efficient management of our energy grid.

There will be a lot of new people in Washington D.C. and as you have seen from the Inauguration ceremonies this week, there’s tremendous energy pushing for change. In the past, many of Freedom to Connect’s attendees have come from the FCC, various federal government agencies, the Congress and the Senate. This year we will see many new faces. We need to have a dialogue with them about the future of broadband and technological innovation in the United States.

The key topics for discussion include:
on-line, network-enabled industry and culture, new jobs and sustainable growth;
Burlington VT, where muni fiber enables business, artistic endeavor, and new telemedicine applications;
how Lafayette, Louisiana’s community came together as it built its muni fiber network;
the twin cities of Cedar Falls and Waterloo, Iowa, where one twin has a muni net, and the other doesn’t;
what municipal CIOs are planning for Seattle, Portland and San Francisco municipal fiber networks;
city nets, wired and wireless, that didn’t work – what went wrong and what we can do better;
what President Obama’s infrastructure and economic recovery plans mean for tomorrow’s network.
Sascha Meinrath (New America Foundation) and I will discuss in great detail what caused the municipal wireless networks in Philadelphia, San Francisco and other cities not to be built. Call it a post-mortem. It’s important for us to know what went wrong so we don’t make the same mistakes. We will also identify the key areas where cities and regions can use Wi-Fi networks not just to deliver public Internet access but to improve municipal and county services.

Among those who have already confirmed attendance to F2C are the CIO of San Francisco, the CTO of Seattle, the Commissioner of Telecommunications of Massachusetts and the Chair of the Vermont Telecommunications Commission, and 20-some other important shapers of the Internet who care about using it to spur economic growth, enhance participatory democracy and make our planet greener.

Get all the details, and sign up at http://freedom-to-connect.net.