Turning the homeless into 4G hotspots

[TexasTowelie]

AUSTIN (CNNMoney) -

It sounds like a headline from the The Onion, but it's true: A project called "Homeless Hotspots" is turning homeless Austin residents into mobile wireless hotspots outside the South by Southwest convention center.

It's part marketing stunt, part genuine charitable initiative -- and it's generating lots of double-takes and chatter from those who pass by.

"I'm Melvin, a 4G hotspot," reads the T-shirt of participant Melvin Hughes. "SMS HH Melvin to 25827 for access."

Hughes is carrying a Verizon MiFi 4G hotspot. Texting his code sends back his network password, which the recipient can use to suck down a few minutes of fast broadband access -- a scare commodity at SXSW, a tech/film/music gathering that has drawn more than 20,000 visitors to Austin.

http://www.ksat.com/money/Turning-the-homeless-into-4G-hotspots/-/2602640/9280932/-/jkmdciz/-/index.html

[dkf]

1. Also sounds like a good way for a scammer to get access to your data.

I'm not saying a homeless person would do this but that a scammer would pretend to be a homeless person.

[salvorhardin]

2. Sounds pretty exploitative to me

Last edited Mon Mar 12, 2012, 05:14 PM - Edit history (1)

The subhed is "'Homeless Hotspots' a hit with South By Southwest visitors," yet if you read further into the article you see, "Reactions are definitely mixed, Hughes says. He's handed out hundreds of cards explaining the project, and says a few dozen people have actually logged on." So I guess it's a hit for a few dozen people?

They're also puzzled by the backlash. I don't know. It sounds pretty exploitative to me, especially when the suggested pay-what-you-want price is $2/15 minutes. How much of that $2 goes to the "homeless hotspot," how much to Verizon, and how much to BBH Labs, the marketing firm whose brilliant idea this was?

And then there's this:

"Saneel Radia, BBH NY's director of innovation, casts it as a legitimate experiment in entrepreneurship. The company was inspired by the street newspapers sold by homeless residents in dozens of cities and wanted to update the model for the Internet age.

'We're believers that providing a digital service will earn these individuals more money than a print commodity,' Radia wrote in a blog post about the project. 'We're using SXSW as our beta test. Hopefully you can help us optimize and validate this platform, which we hope to see adopted on a broader scale.'"

Blech!

[TexasTowelie]

3. I had the same reaction.

To what extremes will a corporation go to earn a few extra bucks?

[Shankapotomus]

4. That sounds extremely exploitative to me

Are they serious with this? I doubt they give two cents about the homeless. They just want cheap labor so they take advantage of a demographic that will accept anything.

"A job isn't just about a pay check. It's about dignity" - Joe Biden's father.

You don't have to be homeless to be a mobile hotspot. What you have to be is poor and desperate enough to accept it.

This reeks.

[MrScorpio]

8. Exactly

Commercial exploitation that treats human beings as commodities.

[Rex]

5. Turning desperate humans that society ignores into objects

that society has a use for, but still ignores. For profit...hmmm...puke.

[salvorhardin]

6. Oh man, it's worst than I thought. Wired: The Damning Backstory Behind ‘Homeless Hotspots’ at SXSW

Bolding mine:

You see, before BBH Labs created Homeless Hotspots (or The Guardian’s much-lauded “Three Little Pigs” video about news in the age of social media and citizen journalism), a team of BBH Labs interns created Underheard in New York, which gave four homeless men mobile phones, Twitter accounts and unlimited texting to share their lives and tell their stories. These stories were amazing, particularly Danny’s, who was able to use Twitter to locate and reunite with his estranged daughter.

Stories like this helped Underheard in New York attract wide media attention. The program ran for 60 days, then was put on hiatus while BBH Labs took the project back from its intern creators and figured out its future. In the Homeless Hotspots post, BBH Labs’ Saneel Radia points to Underheard as an example of the company’s past success in homeless advocacy programs, and writes that “you’ll be seeing an update on its unexpected future at some point soon.”

It’s expected that this “update” will be a reality television show based on the original program. And this is where Mark Horvath’s doubts about Homeless Hotspots comes back in...

This is my worry: the homeless turned not just into walking, talking hotspots, but ... that [it] doesn’t care anything at all about them or their future, so long ... as it can prove that the real problem with homelessness is that it doesn’t provide a service.

Where the men involved aren’t even able to tell their own stories to the world, before they’re doubly used: first by the SXSWi attendees with their smartphones, and then by the marketing firm who will sell their story as a case study or TV show pitch, or to a company looking for a new advertising opportunity at next year’s SXSWi. Where people really are turned into platforms to be “optimized” and “validated.”

Full post: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/03/the-damning-backstory-behind-homeless-hotspots-at-sxswi

Wow. A reality television show. Damn. That's not just exploitative, that's downright Dickensian.

[freshwest]

7. Thanks for that add, I knew something was very wrong.

[salvorhardin]

9. FWIW, here's BBH's response to criticism of the Homeless Hotspot program

UPDATE: Obviously, there’s an insane amount of chatter about this, which although certainly villianizes us, in many ways is very good for the homeless people we’re trying to help: homelessness is actually a subject being discussed at SXSW and these people are no longer invisible. It’s unfortunate how much information being shared is incorrect (an unresearched story by ReadWriteWeb, which has now been updated is the epicenter of that misinformation). So, without being defensive (we welcome the educated critiques), we wanted to share a few key facts:

+ We are not selling anything. There is no brand involved. There is no commercial benefit whatsoever.

+ This is a test program that was always scheduled to end today (there’s no 2-week payment cycle)

+ Each of the Hotspot Managers keeps all of the money they earn. The more they sell their own access, the more they as individuals make (it’s not a collected pot to be shared unless people choose to donate generally).

+ Underheard in NY is NOT becoming a reality TV show. The confidential plans are much more akin to an interactive documentary. Regardless of what happens, it will stay true to the original idea: to give homeless people an unedited voice so people can understand their lives.

+ The biggest criticism (which we agree with actually) is that Street Newspapers allow for content creation by the homeless (we encourage those to research this a bit more as it certainly does not work exactly as you would assume). This is definitely a part of the vision of the program but alas we could not afford to create a custom log-in page because it’s through a device we didn’t make. However, we’d really like to see iterations of the program in which this media channel of hotspots is owned by the homeless organizations and used as a platform for them to create content. We are doing this because we believe in the model of street newspapers.

Source: http://bbh-labs.com/homeless-hotspots-a-charitable-experiment-at-sxswi