In June a bunch of great people went with me to a cottage for the weekend to create something. It was our 3rd Wilderness Labs adventure. The outcome is pretty awesome.
We built a service to collect simple ISP reviews to help Canadians find their best local ISP. We called it RateMyISP. (Coming up with names might not be our strongest suit.)
The idea came from Open Media's Stop the Meter campaign when more Canadians signed a petition protecting indy ISPs than use them. People who use the larger players still wanted the indy ISPs to exist so they would have an option when they become dissatisfied. Trouble is, finding the right local or indy ISP is kind of difficult. I found mine in London, ON thanks to a Reddit comment which is no doubt now buried never to be found again. The comment listed the local ISP options per city in southern Ontario. There had to be a better way and now there is.
The service is ready to start absorbing reviews. As we gather reviews over the next few months we will use that information to vastly improve the search. We plan to highlight what areas indy ISPs provide special services for, and we hope that your reviews will help the great indy ISPs stand out from the rest.
I also wanted to acknowledge the many open source tools which made the project possible including Django, jQuery and twitter's Bootstrap. These projects, among others, enabled us to go from concept to working service in a very small amount of time.