Baltimore ACM Chapter

Dear colleagues,

You may have heard of the Google Fiber for Communities Initiative
in which Google will select locations to deploy optical fiber
for high-speed Internet access to homes. Google has issued
a Request for Information (RFI) and solicits nominations here:

http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/ .

Baltimore ACM has endorsed a grass-roots initiative to bring
Google fiber to Baltimore called "bmorefiber":

http://www.bmorefiber.com/ .

If you would like to help the effort, there is something you can
do, no matter how busy your schedule is.

** The deadline for responses is this Friday, March 26. **

If you have...

* 5 minutes: visit http://www.bmorefiber.com/ and click
the link "Add your voice" to register your support on the site.

* 10 minutes: visit
http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/public/options
and submit a formal response to the RFI nominating
Baltimore. They ask you to give a reason why you would like
to have fiber and ask about the speed of your connection.

* 30 minutes: review and comment on one of the technology
"use cases" that will be presented to Google. (See below.)

* 2 hours: contribute to a use case in your area of expertise.

If you're as excited about this and want to do more, like assist
with community outreach in Baltimore (see below), please email me.

Use Cases

Bmorefiber currently has drafts of use cases for the

* Johns Hopkins University
* Space Telescope Science Institute
* Music/Recording.

Bmorefiber is soliciting use cases for

* Distance Learning
* Video Games/Serious Games
* MICA
* Cybersecurity
* Distributed/cloud computing in a "Baltimore Cloud"

We welcome ideas for use cases that would be novel ways
to take advantage of high-speed Internet throughout the city,
and especially if you can link it to something peculiar
to Baltimore.

If you would like to review, contribute to, or develop any use cases,
please write to me, Emil Volcheck . I'll put you in
touch with Charles Martucci, bmorefiber's coordinator for use cases.
Let me know if you have particular expertise in a topic, but that's
not a requirement. You'll need to sign up for the Google Group at:

http://groups.google.com/group/bmorefiber .

What has BACM has done so far?

Jason Pyeron (BACM Treasurer, PD Inc.) and I have been doing community
outreach in partnership with Dr. Robin Truiett-Theodorson of Urban
Alternatives. Our goal is to help increase the number of formal RFI
responses from organizations to address the Google RFI requirement for
demonstrating community support. We've emailed over 130 community
associations, phoned 40 association presidents, and offered our help
to them in submitting a formal response (aka "Exhibit B" response) to
Google's RFI. We're continuing our outreach this week and are
contacting various nonprofits. If you can think of an organization
that should be supporting fiber for Baltimore and is not on the
bmorefiber website, please let us know. If you live in Baltimore,
then encourage your neighborhood association president to respond.

Thanks for your support of this effort.

In other news, here are two upcoming BACM events that we'll announce
shortly. On Wednesday evening, April 14, we will have a presentation
on the Maryland Cybersecurity Initiative at the National Electronics
Museum. On Saturday, April 17, at Johns Hopkins, we will have
a career day for student ACM chapters in the region with speakers
from Mind over Machines, ACI Group, the National Security Agency.

Best regards,

Emil Volcheck, Chair
Baltimore ACM Chapter
http://bacm.us/
volcheck@acm.org