At the November 16 Wireless Expo at Minneapolis City Hall, the new portal pages were on display.



Click through for larger images at my Flickr page.

I think these will be free to access if you have Wi-Fi (of any type) and can get the signal. I don't know exactly what's behind the "doors" but I lobbied for as much useful internet as possible. The portal was originally known as a "walled garden" but has since become a "civic garden."

The civic garden concept was fleshed out by Chicago community activist Michael Maranda in this blog post. He defined the difference between a walled and civic garden as one of content access with a civic garden allowing access to all .gov and .edu sites. (In many areas, you would also need to add extensions like mn.us which is used here for city sites.) So far, our local portals are only going to display a subset of government and education sites. It would be nice to get a complete list. I'll do some digging and let you know.

I don't see a library link. I hope a link to the library and its catalog is included.

It would have been nice (and would still be nice) if they made these pages public and provide a public commenting system and get some discussion going as to what folks would like to see in the portals.

Technorati Tags: minneapolis, wireless, wi-fi, municipal, community_portal