DCN Endorses City's Response to Google's Request for Information for Fiber Initiative

Dear Mayor Asmundson,

The Davis Community Network enthusiastically supports the City of Davis in its bid to become part of the Google Fiber Initiative, and we will work to insure its success if Davis is selected.

Davis has much to offer Google, and DCN is well positioned to assist. Davis is a community with a strong tradition of creating and sharing Internet media. There is every reason to believe that we would embrace the possibilities of a very high-speed-to-the-home network in the way we embraced the Internet itself.

Davis was the site of the first non-University Internet Access Provider in the region, the Davis Community Network, and it was clear from the beginning that our community wanted to create and collaborate via the Internet — not just consume. Within days of the inauguration of this cooperative project of the City, UC Davis and the Davis Joint Unified School District, the citizens of Davis were building scores of websites and mailing lists, sharing our information about schools, PTAs, churches, service clubs, interest and activism groups, and the community itself. Since then, DCN, with the help of our partners in the community, City, schools and Yolo County, have pioneered Internet applications for public-record sharing, election and campaign finance reporting, use of mapping and Geographic Information Systems for democratic decision-making, volunteer management, community content management, and shared calendaring.

If Google would like to find out what kinds of new information systems a community would create with a radically fast and extensive community network, Davis is the right place to try the experiment. Indeed, it would be a perfect fit with the far-sighted elements of our community's General Plan, which call for Davis to be a test bed for the development of new telecommunications technologies. DCN has been proud to be a central part of our past efforts, and would aggressively and enthusiastically look forward to a new phase in our community's proud history of Internet innovation.

Sincerely yours,

Kimball Sargeant
President, Davis Community Network