If you’re planning to attend the re-opening celebration for Tacoma’s spiffed-up Wright Park Saturday, you might bring your laptop.

Turns out Metro Parks has already turned the century-old park into a giant free hotspot for wireless Internet service. Now you can commune with nature and do your email or spreadsheets at the same time.

I saw a “wireless pilot program” mentioned in an invitation to the re-opening event, which starts at 1 p.m. Metro Parks spokeswoman Nancy Johnson explained:

We’re conducting the wireless pilot project, in response to expressed community interest for expanded wifi access points throughout the city and our desire to help draw folks out of their homes and back into the outdoors.

We chose Wright Park for the pilot for a number of reasons – potential value for downtown business people, convention attendees and nearby students from Stadium and UPS campus.

We’ve been contemplating ways to combat the impact that technology seems to be having on the amount of time folks spend outdoors. Commissioner (Ryan) Mello initially brought the idea forward, so he may have more to add to that.

The tag line we came up with for the service is Parks, Where People Connect…intended obviously as a double entendre not only to mean connecting to the internet, but also connecting with nature, each other, etc.

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We set up the system in early September, but are just now beginning to promote it and collect feedback about it.

Three days after our IT staff told me the system was up, I went to the park to test it out. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at the park and saw a woman with a laptop surfing the Internet! I asked her how she knew about it, and she said she’d just moved to Tacoma and was looking for places with wireless and figured this “big park would probably have it”.

We aren’t set on how long the pilot will last, but we’re currently planning to give it at least a year to assess how much impact it has for our IT staff and get a read on how much it is used. We’ll be posting signage on the perimeter of the park and developing an awareness piece to reach those groups that I mentioned above.

If this proves to be something that increases the number of visits folks are making to the park and users feel that it enhances their park experience we may consider expanding it to other locations. It’s much too soon to know at this point.

It is a no-cost, use at your-own risk, no guarantees service…in other words, there will not be a help desk deployed if folks have difficulty with the signal. Users are required to accept use terms acknowledging before being routed to the Internet.

Here’s a link to the survey we’ll be asking users to take.