If City Councilor John Tobin's vision for a Wi-Fi Boston comes true - Tobin is the point man for the upcoming wireless summit - you won't even need to search out a hotspot. The hotspot will be all around you. You could be good to go from, say, a park bench in the Public Garden.

Late last summer, Tobin, whose district includes Jamaica Plain, went to the house of his constituent George Fifield, founder and director of the Boston Cyberarts Festival, which kicked off on Friday. At one point, the two men needed to look something up. When Fifield simply opened his laptop, which was sitting on the coffee table in the living room, Tobin was stunned. Immediately, he began asking questions.

"'How can we make Boston a wireless city?' I wondered," Tobin recalls. "Wi-Fi seems a great way to bridge the digital divide, to get the Internet into lower-income neighborhoods." He sees benefits to education, commerce, and civic engagement. A Wi-Fi network, Tobin says, will make a better community.

An MIT experiment with neighborhood websites suggests he's right. Keith Hampton, an assistant professor of sociology, runs a university project called E-Neighbors, which provided interactive websites to several Boston-area neighborhoods and studied the effects. "If you provide a neighborhood with e-mail lists, they begin to e-mail each other about things like the plumber and town meetings and neighborhood-watch-type things," he explains. "People leak bits about themselves." They have a better awareness of one another.