Free UTOPIA!

Since the old forums have stopped working and WordPress was badly out of date, I decided it was time to do some big upgrades. The website is now running on WordPress 2.5.1 instead of 2.1.3 and I've updated a bunch of plugins to match.

Bigger news is that I've ditched the old phpBB forums in favor of bbPress. It's from the guys at WordPress and seems to be a much more modern and clean design inside and out. It also has the most excellent Akismet spam protection, an area where phpBB just flat-out stinks. Unfortunately, all of the old posts and user accounts registered for phpBB will not be migrated. There wasn't much content and the pain involved in figuring out how to do it? No thanks.

Let me know if you encounter any oddities with either the site or new forums. 

Per reader request, I'm opening up a thread to discuss the relationship between PacketFront and UTOPIA.

Some background: Last year, PacketFront purchased DynamicCity, the project management group for UTOPIA. DC also did consulting on projects in Arizona and Palo Alto, CA. PacketFront is a Swedish company that draws on a considerable amount of industry experience from that country's construction of an open-access fiber optic network. As part of the purchase, the Lindon office has been maintained in its current location.

My understanding of PacketFront's relationship to UTOPIA is that they assumed the contract for project management from DynamicCity and have continued in that role with Chris Hogan, VP of Marketing, being the most public figure. A search on LinkedIn shows at least 12 PacketFront employees in the Intermountain West, some of whom I recognize as former employees of DynamicCity.

Questions? Comments? Rude noises? I'd also invite any employees of PacketFront to chime in to provide any additional details or clarification. 

If you've left a comment over the last few days that didn't appear on the site, that problem should be fixed now. Spam Karma decided to go "nom, nom, nom" when too many comments were posted over a short period or time. I've adjusted it to be much less sensitive to rapid-fire comments and recovered ones that didn't look like duplicates of existing comments. I've also turned on an option to let you redeem yourself through a CAPTCHA should your score still get a bit too low. If you still notice comments not appearing, please let me know so I can recover them and adjust Spam Karma's sensitivity.

I've now sent e-mails to all candidates for Governor, State Senate and State House, though a surprising number of candidates either did not submit an e-mail address or submitted an e-mail address that's invalid! I'm planning on sending out snail-mail versions of the surveys to these candidates, but if you have an e-mail address for any of them (listed below), I'd appreciate being spared the cost of a stamp. After all, I'm doing all of this out-of-pocket.

As a side note, a few candidates have already submitted responses but they have been slow in coming thus far. You can read what I've gotten on the wiki.

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I've just finished touching up the questions on the wiki and have sent the first round of e-mail questionnaires to federal candidates in Utah. Once I have one last e-mail address, I'll also fire off a copy to the candidates for governor. Hopefully we'll get some speedy responses and be able to start figuring out which candidates are good for broadband in The Beehive State.

Needless to say, it's a lot of work to pull all this together. It took me about an hour to build both pages and setup the e-mails for that relatively small group of candidates. Where I could really use some help is in building pages for the various candidates for county executive and legislative offices. If you've got some spare time (and a registered account), why not head on over to the Candidate Positions page and add in whatever you can? I sure would appreciate the help.

One of the biggest problems facing supporters of municipal broadband projects is a distinct lack of information on where a candidate stands. All too often, you'll only find out where they are after it's too late and we get an SB66 heaped upon us. To that end, I've decided that it's time that we know which candidates are UTOPIA-friendly and which ones are not.

On March 7, the candidate registration period for state and county offices opened up. It'll close on March 17. At that point, I'm going to send the following list of questions to each candidate and post their responses on the wiki.

1. Do you generally support or oppose projects like UTOPIA and iProvo?
2. What is the basis for your support or opposition?
3. Is your support or opposition based on the general concept or specific implementations used in UTOPIA and/or iProvo?
4. What is your position on the regulation of incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) such as Qwest?
5. What is your position on the regulation of incumbent cable companies such as Comcast?
6. What role, if any, should the state play in allegations of unfair business practices leveled at incumbent carriers such as Qwest and Comcast?
7. What proposals or concepts do you support to bring better broadband access to rurals Utahns?
8. What proposals or concepts do you support to improve average broadband speeds to be better competitive on an international basis?
9. What proposals or concepts do you support to increase competitive options for Internet, television and telephone services?
10. Do you have any other related comments you would like to add?

Each time I receive a response from a candidate, I'll post it on the wiki with a link from a post on the main page. As part of this, I'm also going to include some background information on each question to provide some neutral basis for the question. You'll be able to track all candidate positions from the wiki. Naturally, anyone that can contribute more information (such as offices up for grabs, candidates who are running, their voting history if they've held office before, etc.) would be very helpful.

An employee of UEN, Utah's education television network, is working to try and put together a pitch for KUER's UtahNOW public affairs program to talk about UTOPIA and has asked for our help on putting it together. Cruise on over to the open wiki article he's started to help flesh out the arguments so we can get some increased media exposure for the project. It's a bit of a harder sell to the programming directors since UTOPIA is a local solution to a national problem, but I'm sure some of you can contribute something to it.

UPDATE: The point is to sell them on it being a worthwhile story, not necessarily on the merits or demerits of the project.

And speaking of wikis, John Havey has been doing a great job at fleshing out WikTOPIA, our own wiki for tracking information on UTOPIA. If you've already registered an account, it's been approved and you can start adding to it at any time. The more of us that work on it, the better. 

Part of the biggest problem with UTOPIA advocacy is a lack of coordinating basic information. To that end, I've setup a new wiki to track information about UTOPIA including the positions of legislators, which cities are considering service and, for the 2008 election cycle, where candidates stand on municipal broadband and other telecommunications issues.

Anyone can participate and add their knowledge. User registration and admin approval will be required before you can contribute in order to prevent spam and defacing. Why not go ahead and register an account so you can help build it up?

Details are sketchy, but I've been made aware that there's some kind of telecom summit this Monday where iProvo will be one of the items discussed. It's going to be from 3PM to 6PM at the Covey Center for the Arts in Provo. I understand that Provo City Councilman George Stewart will be in attendance. Thought I'd pass this along just in case it turns out to be something interesting.

As a side note (and totally unrelated), there's an election underway for the new Bloghive Advisory Board and I got nominated. If you know some of the other bloggers on the list and want to cast a ballot, I'd encourage you to do so (and, hey, vote for me while you're at it).

Since launching the website, I've been using the Subscribe2 plugin to manage sending updates via e-mail to those of you not so big on RSS. Unfortunately, the plugin has been getting a bit buggy lately. For instance, yesterday it sent out three copies of the e-mail. (I get them too, so I share your annoyance.) I've also gotten at least one report that it won't properly process unsubscribe requests and AOL seems to think that any message coming from here is junk mail.

Given these problems and the great results I've gotten with my feeds, I've decided to switch to using FeedBurner's e-mail notification service. The old notification service is still in place and will remain there for about a week to give everyone a chance to make the switch. Make sure you remove yourself from the Subscribe2 list before adding yourself to the new FeedBurner list to avoid duplicate messages. Use the form below to manage your subscription.