 I'm Curtis Heimerl and I'm here to talk about my PIT UN 2020 project, DIY telecoms for Puget Sound Universal Access. This is a project about community networks. Now what are community networks? Community networks are networks that are owned and operated by users, often in a cooperative fashion. The big idea here is that instead of your normal ISP or Comcast or AT&T of the world, what we want to do is empower the people being connected with the ability to build and govern the communication networks and bring that power back into the community. So in these, there's a bunch of associated skills. People not only get internet access, but they learn tech and organizing and are trained on the sort of basic elements, including even higher level elements of networks. Now, my lab has a long history of such work. On the left here, you can see some people from my lab helping out with an installation in rural Mexico. In the center, you can see an installation in rural Indonesia. And on the right is one of our Seattle Community Network installations. We'll note that Seattle is very different from these other environments and may not be as obvious, obviously in need of internet access. But recently, the city of Seattle put together a survey and found that 95 percent of Seattleites have internet access, which is quite good at one of the most connected places in the world. But that last 5 percent is exactly the place where my lab works. And indeed, they went into that 5 percent, and it is what you would expect. People living in poverty are significantly more likely to have lack of internet access. People with a disability, racial and ethnic minorities and so on. All of them were disproportionately likely to not have internet access in Seattle. And so that's the goal of this project at its core, to bring internet access and all the benefits of internet access and the growing importance of internet access to the people in the city of Seattle who don't have it. Now, we do this by building socio-technical systems. And so this grant covers both the development of novel technical elements of building up these kind of networks, as well as the social science and community building supporting them. Our specific solution is LTE and the CBRS bands. This is one of the first such networks to use this technology. It's very new to provide connectivity in the cities. The reason we do this versus the traditional answer of Wi-Fi coverage is that Seattle coverage is much, much wider. It's called home or fixed Wi-Fi, or sorry, home fixed wireless. And you can install an antenna on a roof and provide connectivity to a large number of people at high broadband connectivity. We've have throughout the grant period installed a number of installations. The Filipino Community Center in South Seattle, Skyway Library in Skyway, which is sort of in between Seattle and Tacoma, where our other installation is in the hilltop neighborhood. We are actively installing at Franklin High School, Garfield High School, the Romo Cultural Center in South Seattle and Surge in Tacoma. Now, as mentioned, this project has both technical and non-technical elements. We've been doing significant software engineering. These are some maps, some coverage maps on the left is in Tacoma and on the right is the Filipino Community Center installation, as well as measurements of performance, you can see tracking that over time and seeing how well the network is performing. Now, a core element of what we've done is actually try to build out a brand new core network architecture. This is fairly deep in the woods, technical work. The idea here is that your traditional M&O, your AT&T and your T-Mobile, install equipment and parallel in the city and compete against each other to provide coverage, and that's not going to work when we're supporting cooperatives, providing internet access to their constituents. Instead, what we do is provide a new back end that allows them to cooperate. Basically, we've together multiple small community networks to create one larger M&O, and we are in the process of deploying this with the installations that we have in place. Now, the day to day of a project like this involves a significant amount of operations, installation of equipment, testing and troubleshooting, and more interestingly, in the recent past, teaching and training. This has become a more and more important part, and we started working with a number of new partners to provide connectivity. These are installations that we've been doing, and that window shot is some user equipment in a house providing internet access. We also manage the social elements of what's going on, building our website and providing training materials about community networks. Lastly, I want to speak to, almost lastly, I want to speak to the benefits of this project to PIT-UN. First, we're growing the body of socio-technical researchers. The people on this grant really are both turning wrenches, writing code and managing and engaging with community members. And these researchers, I think, exemplars of the kind of researchers PIT-UN would like to put together. We're also deploying this actual network platform, actual infrastructure for future connectivity research. And indeed, it's part of an SNCC funded grant and that will be picking up soon. Another piece of the grant is our Community Networks course. So we put together a capstone. It's ongoing here in the fall quarter with students both doing technical development as well as engaging with partners. This material, including the project outputs from the class, will be made available here in the winter when the class is over. And lastly, this grant has allowed us to expand with new partnerships and new grants. So we brought on Black Brilliant Research Projects, Seattle Center College, API, and a number of other partners who are taking the research agenda, developing their own research agendas and bringing the project to places that we could not bring it on. Lastly, lessons learned. I was initially skeptical of the appetite in these communities for this kind of engagement, but it turns out that even when competing with free or low cost internet, there's still a strong desire to own the infrastructure to really own the data, to own the entire ecosystem rather than trusting these external companies to do this. Similarly, there's been a strong undergraduate interest in this space. We've built a large team that have been going out and doing this work in the field. And lastly, training has become a more and more important part of this infrastructure similar to the organizational appetite for doing this. People also want to know how to build these things and how to maintain these things. And so our focus shifted somewhat to training with our partners and their research agendas in that direction as well. So thank you all very much. I'm Curtis Emerall.