I. The Vision

City of Philadelphia Chief Technology Officer Allan Frank, a half-hour late for a meeting, walks briskly to his office and leans into a small room just a few doors down from his own.

"We have to start writing this thing Monday. We have to light a fire under their ass," Frank says candidly to an assistant before he slips into his office and settles into a cushioned red chair in front of his Apple laptop at a table covered in memos, maps and a half-eaten bag of potato chips.

His candor seems comically theatrical: calculated brush strokes that lend unpredictability and drama to an initiative he has lead publicly since May and which has for 30 days had him hunkered down inside the city's 18th floor Division of Technology headquarters at 12th and Market.

It's a muggy Friday early evening in late July, exactly two weeks before the city is to draft and submit its application August 14 for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's $4.7 billion Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, known as the national broadband stimulus grant.

The grant is an opportunity, Frank says, for a "game reset" on how Philadelphia can implement technology innovation inside government and for the public good over the next ten years. He calls this broader opportunity his Digital Philadelphia vision.

It must be said that Digital Philadelphia is little more than a conversation. The broadband stimulus grant proposal, a frame for that conversation.

Internally, Digital Philadelphia would invest more than $100 million into the city's internal IT infrastructure. It would put PDAs into the hands of municipal workers who could file documentation and check e-mail from city-owned vehicles. In the public interest, Digital Philadelphia would chip away at the digital divide by putting Internet access closer to people who can't afford it in their homes and by offering more and better city services online.

Businesses could benefit, too. The city is discussing with the commerce department and Select Greater Philadelphia how to develop enterprise zones where technology businesses would be prioritized.

All of it is based upon Frank's plans for a hybrid mesh network that utilizes and improves the city's current IT and public safety networks, which could potentially be funded, at least initially, by federal broadband stimulus grants.

Through the windows of Frank's office, clouds have formed thick gray walls that will break the humidity and pour on Philadelphia as Frank finishes cruising his email, staying late to tackle his tasks.

It's a dramatic backdrop for a city now skeptical of grandiose technology proposals. Philadelphia has heard talk of wireless and WiFi, nodes and networks, inclusion and the digital divide since spring 2004, when then Mayor John Street first announced his Wireless Philadelphia initiative. An initiative doomed to fail.

"Just as roads and transportation were keys to our past, a digital infrastructure and wireless technology are keys to our future," Street said in a press release announcing Wireless Philadelphia, a bold call for a city completely covered by WiFi hot spots that drew international attention.

Today, Allan Frank's vision invokes similar possibilities when he speaks of Digital Philadelphia.

News of Digital Philadelphia has barely tossled the city out of a technological slumber. Even media, so in love with tech talking points, seems to dismiss it; An op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer by broadband activist and co-founder of Media Mobilizing Project Todd Wolfson, and a short blurb in Philadelphia City Paper by tech beat reporter Morgan Davis, are all that's been fit to print.

It could be that the plan is so new that it's hardly a plan at all. Or that Frank's vision is criticized, off the record by influential members of Philadelphia's technology community—because his language and plans are too broad, too eyes-wide to be tackled.

But with the conversation open to dozens of public and private organizations, who Frank has solicited for input and as potential partners for Philadelphia's technology future, it could be said that Digital Philadelphia is posited for success.

After all, Philadelphia's technology community would like anything but to fail, once again, to create foundations for a 21st century tech economy that thus far, has had little influence in the once Workshop of the World.