Looking for Openness.org?

Openness.org was my web campaign site which evangelized the merits of open broadcast public safety systems. Open systems referred to radio networks that the public at large could tune into and listen to police, fire, and medical calls using police scanners or other apparatus. It developed in response to an increasing trend in public safety to switch to trunked and/or digital radio networks thereby gradually shutting the public out. Certainly that trend continues, but scanning technology is keeping up and many more agencies are embracing formal open access policies. The site is down for now but will likely continue in the future with that focus.

It is also worth noting that the site branched into many other areas as it exemplified an early use of the web as a sole individual's soapbox espousing viewpoints associated with a niche issue. In that role, it frequently explored and touted the merits of personal web publishing and the threats such a practice ultimately faced, and the freedoms and democracy it would foster. Openness.org was a precursor site to today's "blogs" and much of the mainstream issues discussed regarding blogging now were long explored at Openness.org "way back when".

The Openness site originally ran as the Calling All Citizens campaign beginning in 1996. Over the years, until the site's demise in the early 2000s, it went through several presentational incarnations. For now the closest incarnation of the site remains in the form of my occassional blog entries at my personal site under the Police Scanning category.