I. Introduction
"We have to start writing this thing Monday. We have to light a fire under their ass," Frank says candidly to right-hand man Andrew Buss 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 Department of Technology's 18th floor office 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.
Through the windows, clouds have formed thick gray walls that will break the humidity and will 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 2005 press release announcing the Wireless Philadelphia business plan.
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's 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—including members of executive advisory committees helping shape the stimulus application—because his language and plans are too broad, too eyes-wide to be tackled.
But with the conversation open to dozens and 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.
For Philadelphia's technology community would like anything but to fail, once again, to create the foundations for a 21st century creative economy that thus far, has had little influence in the once Workshop of the World.