Month: April 2010

Editorials & the Digital Divide

In this Sunday morning’s Advertiser the two “local” editorials both focus on the recently released baseline survey of internet use and attitudes. Three things struck me about the essays…two were similarities and one was a contrast.

Contrasts
The contrast lay in how much the two pieces evidenced a familiarity with, and a sympathy for, Lafayette.

This has become a familiar topic as the Advertiser’s Gannett-based owners follow a policy of rotating in new editorial staff from papers located elsewhere in their empire and, more recently, have lost staff as the national newspaper market continues to contract. Only a few of today’s staff have, for instance, any depth of understanding of the fiber fight that brought in fiber or the roll the digital divide issue played in referendum.

The headline editorial, presumed to be an expression of the new editor’s voice, was one of those pieces which gets the message right and the tone wrong. Yes the digital divide is an issue and, yes, the community needs to get behind efforts to close that gap. That is the right message. But the same essay misses the fact that even running this survey is a uniquely responsible thing for a community to do.—I know of no other community that has chosen to be so conscientious in its self-examination on this issue. It’d be nice to notice that. Other odd “unLafayette” tones include obligatory doubts as to the “propriety” (propriety?) of competing with private industry. Here in Lafayette that’s not an issue—we settled that on July 16th of 2005 when the city overwhelming endorsed fiber after a battle in which the Advertiser finally editorialized that Lafayette was right to reject that reasoning…but that was one, or is it two, editors ago. (Heck, Gannett’s national paper, USA Today, also endorsed Lafayette’s fiber!) There was also the mild snark that this astonishingly rigorous academic survey (authored by UL to national standards and run by the local Acadiana Educational Endowment) was some how “self-serving.” Finding and publicizing a digital divide when it would have been easy to “pass” on such a hot-button issue might be called many things but “self-serving” is hardly one of them. Finally, one would think that the editorial just might notice that LUS and LCG have, in part explicitly motivated by this survey, applied for broadband stimulus money to address the issue. From reading the bland editorial—which advocated nothing but the platitude that both private and public providers “redouble their efforts”—you’d never guess that the public provider is already at least attempting to address the issue.

The contrasting second editorial, “Important road isn’t available to everyone,” was signed by Bill Decker, whose views on Lafayette’s fiber (and other issues) have mellowed considerably over the years of his tenure in Lafayette. This piece starts by recounting one example of how the internet’s vast storehouse of knowledge is put at his fingertips…with BingGoogle leading him from the Book of Mark to fall of Troy. It’s sensitive in the way that it tackles the touchy topic of ignorance and education by starting with his own lack of knowledge showing how it was alleviated by easy access to the resources that are available over the internet. The internet is an amazing storehouse of information and, while the knowledge he quoted are those highfalutin ones that only fifteen years ago would have been available only in a large university’s specialized research library, he could have as easily talked about the more homey topic of finding the latest recommendations on tomato and okra plants suitable for a small south Louisiana garden. I was personally impressed that he Decker zeroed in on poverty as the immediate issue; in that I think he is right and data that revealed which census tracts had the lowest broadband usage would confirm that race is not the only issue.

Similarities
Both editorials emphasize the digital divide. And they both paint the survey as an LUS survey. I’d argue with both points. But not with writers of these editorials—both takes are understandable since the digital divide was the only topic raised and the press release came from LUS. But both conclusions are, in my estimation, committing the error of mistaking the part for the whole. While this first press release, following LUS/LCGs application for stimulus grants focused on the difficulties the study reveals the data itself is much, much richer and will serve us all well as we try to understand and shape a changing, fiber-enabled Lafayette. A much fuller discussion of the whole of the survey needs to be put on the table for the community so that it knows where it is now and so can rationally plan where it wants to go…not only in regard to the digital divide but in regard to the myriad of factors from wireless use to the effects of the French language among local Cajuns and Creoles. The digital divide is only one aspect among the many that we need to grasp in order to plan our own future. The idea that it was the community that needed to understand itself in order to make was decisions about what to do with its new asset was always the idea that motivated the survey, and it is why, from the beginning, the intent was to freely distribute both the survey data and the survey instrument. In a previous post I emphasized the deep and continuing involvement of community members in this project dating back to before the fiber referendum in ’05. Finally having the survey available is a culmination of a truly community effort. LUS did pay for the survey—and deserves all the props possible for overcoming the issue of funding when absolutely no one else would step up. LUS deserves that credit even more because the survey actually does very little that is directly useful to LUS as a simple business. It is obvious, once you look at the data and the series of questions in the instrument that it is not a “marketing” survey but a broader assessment of community attitudes about technologies rather than one that focuses on particular commercial products and how to best package them.

So, those two essays, sitting on the same page offer a lot of things to think about. If there is anything that joins all these ideas it is that it is hard to overestimate the value of knowledgeable locals committed to the community…

Well that’s probably enough for a ruminative Sunday afternoon in the spring.

Big Deal: Lafayette Internet Use Study Released

It must be spring…a survey that’s been hibernating over the winter has been spotted a couple of time recently and emerged into the full light Tuesday.

LUS posted a press release touting the survey of Lafayette’s internet habits and attitudes today and the Advertiser has jumped in with the first quick digest. The official report is available on Lafayette Pro Fiber with the survey form and dataset access forthcoming. The instrument is a sophisticated usage and attitudes survey that pulls its questions, phrasing, and sequencing from the yearly national Pew and Annenburg studies of internet usage. It’s numbers were carefully designed to make sure that all of our communities would be reliably sampled. Taken together the “Internet Use in Lafayette, LA, 2009 Baseline Study” will give a valid way to compare ourselves to national standards and to track our progress—or lack thereof—over time.

This is very big deal, it was a long time in coming, and a number of people should stand up and take a bow.

It’s a Big Deal
It’s a big deal because it is, to my knowledge, the very first attempt by a fiber to the home community to hold itself accountable for improving itself. It lays the groundwork for actually showing the difference that cheaper, locally owned, really big bandwidth can make in a community. It lays down a serious bet that fiber will make that difference and gives our people, and others outside the community the ability to check the claims we make. We now know where we stand relative to rest of the nation in a survey taken immediately before the launch of LUS Fiber. Future surveys will chart our progress against the national surveys it is keyed to. It’s a big deal because it holds holds our feet to the fire.

It’s also a big deal because it gives us tools with which to make those changes. We now know where the weak spots and the strong spots are in our community’s use of modern technologies. Knowledge, in this instance, is access to money. Both private and public funding exists to aid efforts to move communities forward. But all such money reasonably comes with two requests: 1st you need to show a need, and 2nd you need to be able to demonstrate that the action the group funded made a difference. This survey vaults Lafayette to the head of the line. We know what our needs are (I’ll post later on just exactly what I think it shows) and anyone we ask for support from can see that Lafayette can accurately say what its problems are and that we have a good way to demonstrate when we’ve made progress. It will be important to some of those grantor agencies that we’ve taken this burden on ourselves—it makes it look like we actually are serious about making changes as needed; not simply fishing for cash. What we need now is an aggressive cadre of grant writers in all our institutions but especially at the school board and at LCG. The new head of LCG’s division of Community Development should dive directly into this. LUS has already made good use of the survey in this regard: it was used to support the community’s recent application for broadband stimulus funds, “

It’s a big deal, finally, because with a good survey we can defend ourselves, and the idea of publicly-owned fiber, against its insistent, irrational detractors. It is a sad commentary on the state of our polity that “astroturf” organizations like the Heritage Foundation are even listened to but Lafayette has seen the lengths to which such incumbent-funded “analysts” will go to denigrate the successes of projects like our own. The best defense is a good offense, the saying goes, and going out and getting solid, open research is our best defense against such opinionators.

It was a Long Time Coming
The idea of doing a baseline survey has been brewing in this community for a very long time. The first time it peeked out publicly was in the Bridging the Digital Divide document put together at the behest of the city-parish council and released in May of 2005. It was the first suggestion in the “Assessing our Successes…and Shortfalls” section:

Develop and periodically run a survey containing standardized questions. Surveys are particularly good tools to measure outcomes that we expect to remain comparable regardless of differences in time and location. Some questions will be unique to our community, assessing locally unique factors that change over time. Others will echo the questions contained in standard, national surveys of Internet usage that will help us compare our progress to that made in other communities.

A) Run this survey once before the fiber optic network is built.

B) Run the survey yearly, and combine it with other feedback suggested here.

Shortly after the successful fiber referendum in July of ’05 folks active in the fiber fight got together with the idea that they’d try an take on various projects that would “keep the momentum going.” André Comeaux decided that he’d make getting a credible baseline survey his goal. He worked on that extensively, setting up ties with the Annenberg and Pew foundations, securing copies of their questionnaires, and lining up estimates for its cost. He canvassed the business community tirelessly for funding and while that particular deal never quite came together he produced a body of work that was ready to go when the opportunity finally presented itself.

The idea that periodic surveys were a good way to check ourselves never faded away and by the time LUS was ready in 07 to get its franchise from LCG to actually offer services a survey clause was included in the franchise agreement.

By the time LUS Fiber’s launch date neared most of the principals understood the value of a baseline survey but time was running to get the data collected before LUS had significant customers. A team had been put together from the sociology department at University of Louisiana at Lafayette crafted the questionairre and initially the hope was that a survey unit at the university would collect the data and a consortium of local businesses would pony up the necessary funding. When that didn’t work out and the survey unit at ULL was closed Joe Abraham at the Acadiana Educational Endowment stepped up and took on the task under the supervision of the university’s team. LUS took on the financial support. Several short stories worth of trials and tribulations later the data had been collected, vetted, and analyzed by the sociologists and the survey was complete.

Just in time.

Some People Should Stand Up and Take a Bow
I was in a spot to see most of this long and tortured tale come together and am left with a lot of solid admiration for the folks who finally made the survey happen. It takes a certain sort of mind to recognize the value of doing something that is so long-term and which has so little immediate value for any of the participants. Lafayette is lucky to have a large set of people who both saw the value and were willing to sweat for the sake of the community. I’m proud to know ’em. There are a whole crew of people who deserve to be stood up in front of the community and applauded. The best I can do is to is to list off the ones that I happened to see in action.

  • The folks on the original Digital Divide Committee and especially “Committee II” that drafted the original idea and continued to push for it over the years: Ed Bowie, Jennifer Hamilton, John St. Julien, Kevin Domingue, Layne St. Julien, and Melanie Louis.
  • André Comeaux deserves his own paragraph—he persisted when few would, convinced those who needed to be convinced, and got the basic package together.
  • When the deadline approached an ad hoc “steering committee” formed up: Joe Abraham, Steve Creeden, Jacques Henry, John St. Julien, Mike Stagg, and George Wooddell. They kept on pressing until the thing was done and in the box. That required special sacrifices from Joe Abraham, Jacques Henry, and George Woodell. Joe set up a calling center at his nonprofit and went through several kinds of H*ll getting it running right. Actually he did that twice. “The sociologists” Jacques and George had to battle data issues that kept cropping up and weren’t afraid to stop the cart and force folks to simply start over. Without their dedication it wouldn’t have been done right. Considering that they originally had to be cajoled using their affection for Lafayette, their recognition that this was something that simply ought to be done, and the (unfortunate for them) fact that no one else was in a position to do the analysis I’m sure they got a lot more than they bargained for. But they stuck it out. Terry Huval should be added to that list. If he hadn’t stood up with the money needed to do it when the timing got really critical the survey would never have happened.

This is the sort of thing that can happen in real communities. People hang in there for years, looking out for what is best for their community and finally get it right. Nor am I under the illusion that this survey is the only place you see such honorable behavior. In just a few weeks we’ll see Festival International 2010… I’m genuinely impressed—and pleased to live in a place where those sorts of things can happen.

“Carencro High pioneers in fiber optic education”

Marsha Sills of the Advocate has an analysis piece up today that coversthe Fiber Kids program at Carencro High’s Academy of Information Technology (AOIT). The lead:

Technology has changed the way classrooms look, how educators teach and how students learn. And one group of students, at Carencro High, is shaping the next generation of changes in the classroom, using fiber-optic technology.

Fiber Kids explores the use of fiber-optic tech in the classroom. The group has engaged in live streaming and video conferencing with kids in San Francisco and regularly uses a link to LITE’s video and 3d rendering engine. Community tech types regularly come into the classroom to offer their expertise on the arcane topics that knit together an understanding of modern big broadband technologies. The project knits together resources from Louisiana Public Broadcasting, the Lafayette Utilities System (LUS), Bay Area Video Coalition and Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise (LITE).

AOIT has rapidly become a fixture on the Lafayette tech scene and most folks associated with technology have a (vague) sense of what the school within a school is about. But exactly because we “know” it, we tend to treat as something that is normal, a regular part of a decent city—in the realm of “oh sure, that’s a good thing.” As has been said: “A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house.” Others better appreciate what director Kit Becnel’s school has achieved as is evidenced by:

Becnel and the FiberKids project are known in the broadband community, council member Don Bertrand said at the (LCG-School Board) meeting.

Bertrand, City-Parish President Joey Durel and other city officials were invited to a broadband public interest workshop at Google’s Washington, D.C., offices.

“We did not have to tell them who you were,” Bertrand said to Becnel. “She’s setting the course in the entire country on the use of broadband in education.”

During the meeting, School Superintendent Burnell Lemoine noted: “Why us? Why Carencro High School?

“The response was: We were the only academy set up or in the position in the United States to do this kind of project…”

…connections set Lafayette apart from other communities, said Joaquin Alvardo, senior vice president of diversity and innovation for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, on a visit to Lafayette last fall.

The closing paragraph, quoting Kit Becnel:

“I think not only nationwide, but globally, all eyes are on Lafayette and the capabilities: fiber to the home, education, public media, online, on the air,” she said. “This is going to be huge … as far as education and education redesign goes.”

It’d be a good thing to recognize the prophets that labor among us for little credit and less pay…(the “profits” get plenty of credit as is…)

A salute to Kit Becnel and AOIT!

post scriptum: If you’d like a bit more on the award mentioned here LPF is at your service…

Brief: Lafayette’s Digital Divide Applications are in

Not exactly exciting news but interesting to some of us nonetheless…Both of Lafayette’s latest applications for stimulus money are now appearing on the Broadband.gov’s database of Louisiana projects. They are listed as “application received.”

What’s new is that you can now get a look at the “executive summary” of both the Lafayette Parish Public Computer Centers and the Lafayette Students Build-a-Computer Program projects. Interesting reading—they not only summarize the projects but lay out what the writers believe is the best case for giving Lafayette the grants. For instance, the Build a Computer Program cites the need revealed by a recent, and as yet unreleased, local survey of internet use and attitudes.

“Pixel Magic to make 100 hires in Lafayette”

An update on today’s Advertiser website says that Pixel Magic has committed to hiring a 100 artists to work at its new Lafayette location. They will work at rendering “old” 2-D films into new 3-D formats. That type of boost to the digital arts community plants the sort of seed that every community is looking for these days. It is the potential beginning of a hothouse economy built around the digital visual arts. 100 highly trained visual ‘magicians’ will have to have something to do in their off time…and some other personal projects to keep their juices flowing. For Lafayette it’s those spin-offs that will be the real payoff. [If the economic development people haven’t put aside some petty cash to sponsor a visual arts club for kids built around these folks as the core group then they aren’t doing their job. It’s stunning how much real development has sprung from cold pizza and warm coke…]

Looking for some of that work? From the article:

Pixel Magic will work with Louisiana FastStart to provide training for interested candidates. Knowledge of stereoscopic 3-D is a plus, but anyone with a visual arts background is eligible.

Candidates who are selected will complete a specialized training course taught by Pixel Magic artists. The course will be taught over 2-3 weeks starting May 2.

This announcement a tremendous success for LITE. And Louisiana, and Lafayette, and, I very strongly suspect, LUS Fiber (even though utility companies seldom get a fair share of the glory).

Pixel Magic is the real item—it’s not a start-up hoping to leverage the fallow assets of Lafayette into some star gig that lets them move up and out…it’s a major established house that has come here because it can accomplish more of what it wants to do for less money than elsewhere. It’s up to Lafayette and the region to set the hooks deep so that nobody ever wants to leave. Festival International will be a good start….and Mardi Gras and crawfish etouffe. [Never heard of Pixel Magic? Shame on you. Check out their site, with the Lafayette location prominently featured on the fly-in, and their list of movies, and, for real fun, go to the “reel” they’ve put up of special effects. Imagine being able to do that sort of stuff…it really does look like magic.]

Pixel Magic bringing employment to Lafayette is not the result of any simple, “silver bullet” approach to development. This had to look good to the company from a number of different angles. Starting at the state level a big chunk of their favorable decision has to be Louisiana’s “aggressive” tax benefits for film and digital production. The company will get some extremely nice tax credits for the work that is done in the city. But that’s not nearly enough. Many states have copied Louisiana’s generosity. There’s also Lafayette’s location on big backbones like the Internet2 and LambdaRail consortiums. Shipping big buckets of bits back to Los Angeles won’t be an issue. Then there’s LITE itself—with a 3D rendering setup and multiple varieties of 3D visualization venues testing out films in settings from theatrical to flatscreens will be easy. LITE also has a couple of monster underutilized rendering farms on site. Pixel Magic no doubt gets a good deal and LITE gets a client that will actually use its massive facilities for more than a prestigious address.

Finally, we’re down to LUS Fiber. You have to know if you’ve been down to “the egg” at the LITE building that they’re not going to put 100 cubicle workers in that facility. No way they’d fit. However they do have to do the tedious work in Louisiana to get those credits. So some large percentage of those 100 workers will have to be off-site. But they’ll have to be able to do their work as if they were in the same building with, at a minimum, the 100 megs of connectivity that standard ethernet LANs provide. That, of course, is exactly what LUS provides on its justly acclaimed 100 meg intranet. A person setting behind a nice workstation setup on Moss Avenue with a nice VLAN setup could work within the Pixel Magic network as if they were just down the hall from the boss’s glossy corner office (something both would probably prefer). The ultimate in working from home. I’ll not be surprised if Pixel Magic opts for an offsite work center like NuConn did—but there too LUS’ fiber-to-every-nook-and-cranny make it possible to shop for the cheapest appropriate location rather than the cheapest location that has something close to real connectivity. In that sort of situation it would be easy and damned inexpensive to leverage LUS Fiber to provide a gig or several of commercial grade connection between the two points.

All of that taken together—each element individually impressive but not uniquely decisive—turned out to make Lafayette very hard to match.

The best thing is that this little coup will put the “three ‘L’s”—Lafayette, LITE and LUS Fiber on a lot of people’s radar in the digital video arts. Rev up your motors guys….the race is now beginning.

LUS Reveals Long-Term Plans

(Please note: this was first published on April 1st. It’s also worth noting that a lot of the following is simply true and more is actually planned; what isn’t true is credible IMHO…the fun is in figuring out just what the status of each claim is. Might be worth coming back next year.)

LUS has revealed its long-term plans!! Sorta. A daylight savings glitch apparently caused a timed press release to be sent early. (This sort of thing has happened before.)

After a press release dated tomorrow, Friday, showed up in PR inboxes across the city mid-morning calls to LUS and an embarrassed George Graham (from whose office the missive was mailed) confirm its authenticity. The surprise release gives an amazing amount of detail (7 loosely organized pages) about topics the local utility has always deemed “proprietary information.”

Said Huval:

Yes, It’s real…We just decided that since it has become extremely clear that Cox and the Independent’s FOI [Freedom of Information] requests will force us to reveal many details that would remain private were we a privately owned company like Cox or the The Independent we’ve decided to make the best of a bad situation. If we can’t keep our competitors from using and critics from revealing much of our proprietary information we’ve decided that a pre-emptive strike is our best bet. We’ll simply tell our community—our owners—everything we are hoping to do and see what their reaction is. Hopefully we’ll get good feedback that will help us make final decisions. [Pause] Besides most of this stuff is either obvious or nothing Cox or AT&T can do anything about anyway. Why not let the community know?

Huval declined to elaborate on what was meant by “extremely clear.”

Said Graham:

Yes, it’s for real. No, it’s not supposed to have gone out quite yet….the attached pages haven’t been fully edited and organized…that’s pretty much the way it came over from LUS and our writers haven’t much of a chance to whip it into shape. There’ll be a better version this evening. The thing was on automatic send for tomorrow. There’s some sort of time glitch in Outlook that’s in the news this morning…our IT intern is supposed to be on it. I’m not a happy camper.

The pages are pretty much a mess…. But the substance is pretty visionary. No need for LPF’s reporting to wait till the evening. If we can get even half this stuff done….well…. I’m impressed.

On to the good stuff as I see it; extracted from the PDF, organized into my categories:

Major points:
LUS is planning a set of hardware upgrades to the network

  1. The local backbone electronics are being upgraded to 10 Gbps as we speak. [This is about 2 years earlier than the first electronics upgrade anticipated the business plan.]
  2. New 1 gig-capable CPE equipment [the box on the side of your house] has been ordered and installs done after May 1st will use it; early adopters with 100 meg equipment will be upgraded “according to demand.”
  3. The 100 meg intranet is being upgraded to 1 gig [LUS has always talked, awkwardly, about the intranet as a “full available capacity” feature and this upgrade is consistent with that stance since the CPE was the choke point before…but: wow.]
  4. A 100 meg symmetrical internet connection will be available for retail customers. (100 megs is currently only available in a “business” package though a household is allowed to buy that package if it wishes. Presumably the retail version will be cheaper.)

LUS is upgrading their set top boxes, software and hardware

  1. The software upgrade comes first and is due March 15th.
  2. The plan is to install new MS Media Room software “beginning” on that date. (no hint on whether you’ll have to bring your box in or if an over the network upgrade is possible. Either way expect an uncomfortable transition moment.)
  3. A set top hardware upgrade is planned for August. Upgrades will be available to current “upper tier users on demand.” (Why switch boxes? no hint…)

A WiFi network will extend the fiber. This has long been in the plan, both Terry Huval and Joey Durel have stated their intent in public forums but no concrete plan has emerged before today.

  1. The network will consist of both public and private “channels.” (Presumeably the “private” channels will serve safety functions — there’s been a lot of discussion of GPS costs on the council recently and this would be a very cheap way to address location issues inside Lafayette.)
  2. The public side will exclusively use 802.11N and will be offered on a “best effort” basis
  3. 1 meg of symmetrical wireless service will be offered to everyone on a “guest” basis.
  4. Subscribers to internet service get free “best effort” service. (WiFi N is rated as high as 600 Mbit/s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11n-2009#Data_rates) but I doubt we’ll see such speed—but 50 or a 100 wouldn’t be impossible considering LUS’ rejection of the bandwidth-sapping mesh architectures that hobble most muni networks.)
  5. Probably associated with the wireless issue: “The CPE [Customer Premise Equipment] will equipped with a wireless repeater node.” (I’m not sure I fully understand that but I’m pretty sure I like it.)
  6. Cellular interoperability for “select” WiFi phones from “a major carrier.” (?)

Digital Divide/ Digital Inclusion, the one sheet devoted to this and is in a different format for what that is worth. Digtial divide and digital inclusion are used interchangeably, possibly this is the beginning of the Graham Groups rewrite…digital inclusion is the newer term.

  1. There will be a comprehensive DD/DI program whether or not the current application for a stimulus grant is won. That is, support for community computer centers is planned for a “slower rollout” if the grant bid fails.
  2. The WiFi node in the new CPE is cited as part of this.
  3. The new set top box is also mentioned in this regard. Apparently it has on-box memory that is regarded as necessary to use this box as a “fully functional” web browser. (The current WAP-based browser in the set top box, while innovative, is simply not practically useable.)
  4. The free 1 meg of wifi to all is mentioned again on this page.
  5. Discussion of supporting “NAD’s” seems to refer mainly to smartphones and perhaps to the new iPad and recent netbooks. (Network Attached Devices is an odd generic term to use and may refer to a recent LWV study and other local mention.)

Things I don’t understand….
Well, there’s actually plenty I’m not sure I understand; the doc could use a lot of clean-up. I’ve tried to stick to reporting stuff that made sense to me. The upcoming release of a cleaned-up version should help a lot.

  1. There’s stuff in there about a media server and AOC that are opaque to me… also stuff about VLANs and remote access to the same. (I need to do some research to get into this.) AOC is also mentioned in reference to support for its “new location” (?) and server space in the front-end for “multi-format web-based VOD.” (again ?)
  2. There’s stuff about cloud computing, standardizing access protocols, and “supporting” a unified data access categories “scheme” that probably means something to some readers but doesn’t to me. (help?)
  3. Interoperability & “widgets:” A lot of emphasis throughout the doc is placed on interoperability and widget-based interfaces. APIs are mentioned that would support incoming phone calls on the TV, Caller ID, remote login to video recording features, etc. The Media Room product supports some light programming so apparently the idea is to allow local 3rd party developers access to some (but not all) of the hooks.

Ok folks, that’s a lot to digest. A dream-list. I presume they’re not wedded to it all and Huval explicitly asked for input from the community. What do you really want LUS to get behind?