October 2009 Archives

Dakota Future is a countywide economic development corporation in Dakota County, Minnestoa on the southern edge of the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area.  Within the county, we have more than a dozen communities, six chambers of commerce, a county community development agency, three workforce centers and assorted public and private colleges. Our prime organizational question is how a small membership organization, with leaders from business, education and government, can find its niche and stimulate enhanced economic competitiveness?

Educating the Dakota Future board on Intelligent Communities was the first requirement.  I did some presentations and we borrowed some of Robert Bell's time when he was in town for another conference.  Our board chair bought and distributed multiple copies of the Broadband Economies book - a quick but informative read containing many treasures in its storytelling of Intelligent Community.

As the Dakota Future board of directors learned more about the Intelligent Community approach, they became convinced of two things - that the approach was valid for Dakota County and that Dakota Future was the only entity positioned to organize this countywide initiative.  The Intelligent Community movement focuses growing the economic pie rather than competing for small slices.   This approach fits perfectly into our multi-organization environment.  Our board set a goal to achieve Top Seven by 2012.  Of course, it was easy to set the goal - you just have to say it!  But how do you achieve it?

The Community Accelerator was the perfect program at the right time for us.  We had to know where we stood in comparison to the past winners to know how real our goal was. Completing the benchmarking questionnaire required us to gather the data and our stories on the five Indicators.  It required us to reach out to our stakeholder organizations to find leads on the best practices happening around our county of almost 400,000 people.  It offered an opportunity for low-risk participation for people with limited time and plenty of skepticism.  This approach yielded some very interesting stories new to many established community leaders.

While completing the benchmarking questionnaire, we begin preparing for the ICF visit.  Robert Bell was coming to town and we needed people to be there to meet him.  We planned a meeting with the Dakota Future board at the new countywide 911 public safety center, a press interview, a tour of a beautiful data center and community television studio, a reception and a dinner.  We planned a community workshop where the benchmarking results would be presented. Ensuring that people, the right people, would attend was critical to our success.  This involved phone calls, personally addressed invitations, more phone calls, presentations to city councils and the county board and more phone calls.

We were pleasantly surprised when we received the draft Accelerator report.  It became clear that our Top Seven by 2012 goal was within the realm of possibility.  We had some strengths and some weaknesses, but we were definitely in the game.  As the results were released at our community workshop, peoples' heads were nodding and faces smiling at the positive results.  Looks of concern emerged over our weaker scores.   As we broke into work groups, there was definitely a shared sense of "Let's get this done!"  The buy-in we sought was beginning to take shape. 

Reinforced by third-party verification of our competitive standing, our teams set to work to create goals, inventory assets and develop strategies.  Recruiting additional talent was high on the to-do list of each group.  These teams have initially committed to work over the next six months on the five elements.  Our leadership team is in place to steer and coordinate our application for 2011, to be submitted in September 2010.

When I saw notice of our 2010 Smart 21 status through the Blandin on Broadband blog, I could not believe my eyes.  Our finely tuned work plan to direct our efforts over the next six months was turned on its head.  Now we are awaiting our new questionnaire that must be completed by the end of the year.  The contents of that will determine whether we achieve Top Seven status in 2010, two years ahead of schedule.  The Community Accelerator program has definitely lived up to its name in Dakota County; our efforts, just idling a few months ago, are making the jump to light speed. 

A partner in Community Technology Advisors, Bill Coleman serves as executive director of Dakota Future.  He can be reached at bill@communitytechnologyadvisors.com.

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Well, it's official. On Friday evening, we named the Smart21 Communities of 2010 at a ceremony hosted by the Swedish Consulate General in New York City, in honor of Stockholm's position as our current Intelligent Community of the Year.  (We also announced publication of our new book, Future Cities, which will soon be out on Amazon.com.  I hope you saw the charming address by lead editor Dr. Joseph Pelton on our Web site last night.  We'll have an archive version available soon.)

I'm pleased to have Dundee, Scotland - a Top Seven community in 2007 and 2008 - back on the Smart21 list in 2010.  One big surprise: a single American state, Virginia, added three names to the 2010 list.  That's one up on the Province of New Brunswick, Canada, which had two Smart21 communities last year.  Of course, they both went on to join the Top Seven.  So we'll see how the Virginians do this year.  On Friday, we also welcomed one Chinese and two Australian communities to the list, as well as three more from Canada.  I don't know what these Canadians drink, but I wish somebody would give me some.  There have been more of them on the Smart21 list than from any other nation. 

You can read profiles of them all on our Web site.  Producing those profiles taught me an interesting lesson about digital inclusion.  The selections were made final on Tuesday.  By Wednesday, I had found time to write only about only four of the 21.  I was at a conference most of the day Thursday.  So it was late afternoon when I got home, full of ambition to buckle down and, as the comedian Larry the Cable Guy puts it, "get 'er done." 

The house was dark when I entered and I started switching on lights.  Darned if the first bulb wasn't burned out.  Funny thing, though: so was the second.  I noticed that all the digital clocks were blank and it slowly dawned on me.  We had no power.  This happens every once in a while for a minute or two, usually because a tree branch knocks out a power line.  Not this time. After 15 minutes went by, I called the power company and learned that power had been out for an hour already and they couldn't predict when it would be restored.  Hmm. I started work on my laptop, grateful for a battery with five hours of life to it.  The autumn day drew to a close, the house grew chilly, and I was soon working by the light of an old oil lamp we keep around.  Not as romantic as it sounds.  Worse than the eye-strain was the fact that I couldn't double-check any facts or call up information we keep on our online collaboration platform.  No power, no router, no broadband.  There I was on the outside of the broadband economy, racing the clock to meet an important deadline for a think tank that studies the economic impact of - you guessed it - broadband.    

And then it occurred to me.  The library!  Lights!  Heat!  Broadband!  I drove to the town library and was soon back online.  Like communities around the world, mine had turned its library into an access point for those without computers or broadband access.  Not a big breakthrough.  Nothing to put on the home page of your favorite news Web site.  But for me, it was a lifesaver.  There are good logical reasons why we made digital inclusion one of our five Intelligent Community Indicators, on which our award program and all our research are based.   But it wasn't until Thursday night that I understood the emotional cost of being on the other side of the digital divide.  In the life of this knowledge worker at least, broadband has become like oxygen.  No big deal - until you have to go without it.

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Back I was a newly-minted college graduate, I did what many young men and women do and tried to become a star.  I went to New York City, worked freelance, took theater classes and went to auditions.   I did summer theater.  I did low-budget TV commercials.  I did small parts in soap operas. 

It was very educational.  Among other things, it taught me that I wasn't going to have a career in the performing arts.  I was particularly grateful to a man named Michael Shurtleff, who wrote a book called Audition.  In its preface, he wrote that, if there is anything else you can do besides being in the theater and still be happy, please do it.  Good advice, which I finally took three years later.  But the real point of the book was to tell you how to audition.  Among his rules was this: When doing an audition, always look for conflict.  Conflict is the heart of theater, whether comedy or drama.  Always find a way to create a conflict in a scene, and your chances of getting the part will rise.

Last week in Minnesota, I learned that, however exciting conflict may be on stage or screen, the real excitement is in collaboration.  At least it is in Dakota County.  I was there presenting the results of the Community Accelerator analysis we performed for Dakota Future, the nonprofit organization dedicated to creating a new economy in the county.  The Community Accelerator uses the same methods we use to select the Intelligent Community of the Year.  It compared the county's performance to an average of the Top Seven Intelligent Communities of the past four years.  (See my post on October 4 for details.)

Dakota Future is chaired by LaDonna Boyd (economic development director of the Dakota Electric Association) and run day-to-day by consultant Bill Coleman of Community Technology Advisors.  The organization has set a striking goal for the county: to be named one of the Top Seven Intelligent Communities of 2012.  And the way they are going about it is a lesson in itself. 

A lot of individual, personal effort by Dakota Future's board brought about 70 people to attend a half-day meeting at a local community college.  In the room were mayors, city administrators and economic development officers, state legislators, county commissioners, university presidents and business executives.  They were there, as Ms. Boyd put it, because somebody asked them to be.  Keeping them involved - that would be the real challenge.

I kicked off the day with a presentation on how Intelligent Communities deal with the challenges of the broadband economy and seize its opportunities.  I finished with an overview of the Community Accelerator analysis of the county's performance. 

When I was finished, Ms. Boyd made her pitch.  Give us 10 hours of your time over the next 8 months, she said - just four two-hour meetings - and we will determine how to score a 5 out of 5 in every category of ICF's Awards program. 

Then the audience broke into six groups: one each for the five Intelligent Community Indicators and one for overall leadership and coordination.  Their goal: to digest the analysis I had provided and to decide on their group's objective, which would guide work for the next 8 months.  I went from group to group, listening, answering questions, offering suggestions.  Go ahead and call me a geek, but I found it thrilling.  People from many different backgrounds and organizations quickly coming to grips with complex issues...exchanging facts, fears and hopes...writing and debating and rewriting their goals.  All in collaboration.  And all in about forty-five minutes.   

I met with Dakota Future's board afterward.  The conversation was all about continuing the momentum, keeping everybody in the loop, and widening the circle of those involved.  Will they succeed?  I don't know - but I believe they will.  And here's why: because they asked well-meaning people to contribute 10 hours of their time.  No more, no less.  They kept it real.  They signaled that this is not going to be a talking shop but a doing shop.  A place for people who want to make a difference.  It was anthropologist Margaret Mead who said, "Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." 

I am writing this from the 2009 "Leveraging Technology for Community Development" being produced by the City of Moncton, a Top Seven Intelligent Community of 2009.  Moncton organized it to continue advocating for progress in the areas key to economic growth and social development.  It has attracted 250 people from local and regional government, institutions and business.  And after delivering the keynote, I have had a welcome chance to listen to people actually working the problems in the field. 

One presentation, by a local entrepreneur, was a window into bets placed by the telecom carriers of North America over the past twenty years - and which ones turned out to be right.  Neri Basque runs strategy for Virtual Agent Services, which is headquartered in Schaumberg, Illinois in the USA but runs its operations from Moncton.  He attributes his company's success in part to decisions by the CEO of New Brunswick Telecom (now Bell Aliant) during the decade when carriers around the world were rolling out optical fiber as the backbone of their networks.  This rush to fiber became the telecom boom as MCI Worldcom forecast that Internet demand would double every year for the foreseeable future.  Doubling demand?  My God, can we build fast enough to handle it?  Let's go public, let's borrow money!  Putting fiber into the ground is like planting your own gold mine!  Go, baby, go!

Well, it all ended unhappy, as we know.  The yearly doubling of Internet demand turned out to be a myth - at about the same time that a technology called wave-division multiplexing multiplied the capacity of existing fiber capacity by a factor of ten.  Fiber transmission prices plummeted, companies went bust at a total price to shareholders and bondholders of tens of billions of US dollars, and the entire ICT industry seemed to go on hold for a period of years. 

Contrast this well-known story to what went on in New Brunswick.  NBTel also rolled out a lot of fiber, but made the decision to run a little bit of fiber everywhere.  Tiny towns in the midst of woodlands and little ports on the Bay of Fundy got fiber as well as the provincial capital in Fredericton and midsize cities like St. John's and Moncton.  Why?  A different philosophy, perhaps. A focus on public service, or just on the longer term.  For whatever reason, it created a unique broadband landscape. 

Enter Virtual Agent Services, which was founded in 1999.  The company runs small inbound call centers - with tens of work stations - in small rural communities throughout New Brunswick.  They typically open them in disused buildings they can get for practically nothing.  All the call centers are connected into one virtual center over the fiber circuits, to which the company provides centralized training, human resources, sales and finance.  Virtual Agent Services has been on the Inc. 500 fast-growing companies list and won awards for quality of customer service.  The secret to their success is that their employees work in their local communities.  These are good-paying, knowledge-worker jobs in places where such employment is scarce.  Employee churn is a fraction of what is typical for the big "factory" call centers.  And as Mr. Basque said to me, "Where else but New Brunswick could we do this?"

Clearly, NBTel's decision-making was better for New Brunswick than the decisions made by the stars of the telecom gold rush.  What strikes me is that, over the long term, it was probably better for NBTel as well.  It took courage not to fall in with the crowd during that time but profits are seldom to be made by copying the business plans of your peers.  When everybody has the same plan for profit, it's usually time to get into another line of business. 

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Here in the northeast corner of the United States, we are enjoying a beautiful start to autumn, with bright warm days and cool nights.  It's too bad the sun is setting earlier each evening, but otherwise it is my favorite time of the year. 

ICF is also deep into another of my favorite seasons.  I call it the Season of Bright Ideas. We just closed nominations for our Intelligent Community Awards.  Now I and my fellow founders are reading nomination forms.  A lot of nomination forms.  We are looking for the 21 most powerful models of economic and social progress based on information and communications technology.  We will announce the Smart21 Communities of the Year on October 16.  We do it at a reception hosted on behalf of Stockholm, the current Intelligent Community of the Year, by the Swedish Consulate in New York.  For those unable to attend - and that is most of our friends and colleagues around the world - we will be streaming it from our Web site.

I call it the Season of Bright Ideas because the pages (and pages and pages) of these nomination forms contain so many great ones.  Here's just a small sample:

One nomination comes from a city that is already a successful high-tech manufacturing center.  They are taking the Great Recession of 2009 as an opportunity to raise their game.  That game is all about talent: fostering it, attracting it and keeping it.  One program produces a wide range of activities for kids age 4 to 20, which all aim to interest them in technology careers.  How?  By having fun interacting with high-tech games and contests - and they have statistics showing that the program boosts the percentage of university students choosing technology majors.  The community's latest innovation is a Web site that gives foreigners information and services making it easier to relocate into the region.  They know that their future also depends on being a place that attracts and retains talent from around the globe.    

Several communities are putting their fiber and wireless broadband networks to use providing remote healthcare.  One community equips the elderly and chronically ill with devices at home for monitoring their vital signs, and advanced mobile phones that let healthcare workers find and connect with them wherever they are.  In another community, the network connects clinics in remote, low-income areas with the city hospital.  One successful program offers remote ultrasound examinations of pregnant women.  It has reduced the waiting time for an obstetrical exam from 4 months to 34 days, and women are now four times less likely to miss a scheduled appointment, because the appointment takes place close to home.  Intervening like this at the earliest stage of life can make a powerful difference in the decades to come. 

The broadband in both of these communities, by the way, is free.  They were unable to persuade the incumbent to invest, so the cities built their own networks.  Those networks saved the governments a lot of money they had been spending with the incumbent - so they decided to open the networks up to the public, as basic infrastructure.  And here we thought that business always moves fast, and governments always move slowly.   

In this year's award cycle, our theme is "The Education Last Mile: Closing the Gap Between School and Work."  One community has taken this idea remarkably far.  University students in the community receive an Employment Services Card.  It records their participation in programs offered in partnership by schools and government: career guidance, quality evaluation and job internships.  It also qualifies them for entrepreneurship training and business subsidies and subsidized loans for start-ups.  The training isn't just theoretical: 1,000 local business people personally train 3,000 university students each year.  Local universities and colleges also have active campus recruiting networks with online matching of employers and students.  And if that weren't enough, the government pays 60% of minimum wage for up to 12 months to subsidize the hiring of young people by local companies.  

Each of these bright ideas is a local solution to a local problem.  Each is shaped by the community's unique history, politics and culture.  Some of these ideas you may not want to try at home.  But some of them may be the inspiration for your own unique local solution to a local problem.  That's the reason we founded the Intelligent Community Forum: so that Season of Bright Ideas can be celebrated in communities all around the world.