The movement to strengthen early childhood education in Detroit is growing, and we are excited to be a part of it. The Southeast Michigan Early Childhood Funders Collaborative engaged us to plan, design, and implement a citywide campaign to boost enrollment in Detroit’s 65 Head Start centers along with our partners from Early Works.

As a company that supports free software and an open, decentralized Internet, we often find ourselves at odds with dominant Internet paradigms. While cloud services might have lower startup costs and less technological or usability barriers, we often compromise our ideals and our needs. For example, to fill a need for company-wide communication, we've had to augment our project management software with a combination of personal Google Talk accounts and text messaging to share our work status with each other. We wanted to figure out how to enhance our communication, and ended up with our own XMPP server.

People around the country are paying more attention to local food systems, entrepreneurship, and sustainability as our economy changes. This attention is well-deserved as organizers in our urban centers are exploring myriad ways to strengthen our connections to food and community. We recently began working with FoodLab Detroit, a part of this emerging movement, to help it plan for an online presence.

As part of our research for the Commotion Human Interface Guidelines, we interviewed four people who have been involved in building community wireless networks around Detroit. Based on these interviews and our experience working with various users, we recommend that Commotion developers and organizers implement the following concepts: