You wouldn’t know it from the Chronicle, but there were six proposals submitted for the TechConnect project. The big news seems to be that Google and Earthlink are teaming up. Why Google wants to team up I get, since they are not an ISP and have no network-deployment experience. Earthlink, on the other hand, won the bid to do the Philadelphia project without Google. The only thing I can think is that Google will provide the money, by providing location-based ads. You can read more about the proposals in the Mercury News.

In other Municipal WiFi news, Houston has released a draft of their RFP. (via Muniwireless) This is funny because when the San Francisco RFP draft was leaked, there were accusations that people worked for the telephone companies, there were threats of lawsuits, and a general attitude of great wrongs having been done. Meanwhile, despite San Francisco’s reputation of openness and governent transparency, Houston does us one better by releasing the RFP without fuss.

Which brings up one of the concerns we’ve had about the TechConnect project in general: a reflex toward secrecy. Getting information from the city on this project has been a slow and painful process, but more disturbingly, the city staffers on the project have reflexively kept information from becoming public, whether there’s a valid reason or not. This is not a problem unique to this project, of course, which is why we have sunshine laws, but it is definitely a case where the city is cutting itself off from useful expertise by not giving community members (many of whom, frankly, are much more qualified than the City’s people) enough information to come up with solutions or suggestions.