Robert Bell: January 2010 Archives

I wrote in earlier posts about the Asian Way and the European Way of being an Intelligent Community.  Now it's time to come home and reflect on the North American Way, as illustrated by our Smart21 Communities of the Year. 

The same caveats apply to North American communities as to their Asian and European peers.  All are different from each other, and all share characteristics with communities in other parts of the world.  But they occupy a distinctly North American cultural, political and social environment.  That has shaped their evolution. It has given them something unique to share with the world. 

1.  Eagerness to Experiment.  North America is known as a place where innovation thrives.  It goes back a long way in history.  In his 1835 book Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville told about a conversation with an American sailor, in which de Tocqueville complained about the poor quality of American shipbuilding.  The sailor told him that ship design changed so fast that it wasn't worth building ships that would last very long.  They became uncompetitive too quickly. 
 
Innovation thrives because of a willingness, often an eagerness, to experiment.  In the Smart21 Community of Riverside, California, USA, a new city manager experimented with a whole series of changes.  He hired the city's first CIO.  He asked that CIO and the city's Economic Development Department to collaborate on an economic growth agenda.  He tried hiring a "high technology business concierge," and having this single point of contact helped attract and retain high-tech companies.  In another experiment, Riverside installed a small WiFi zone in the city's downtown.  It proved popular, so the city's new CIO started work on a more robust system that would double as the city's first-responder network.   

Arlington County, Virginia displays the same restless energy.  Government, business, institutions and citizens engage in intensive, ongoing collaboration that has been named "The Arlington Way."  This collaboration spawns an apparently endless flow of programs, projects and ideas, from professional internships in the schools to educational programs on the local cable TV network and the Web-based Arlington Teen Portal.  Successful programs endure.  Unsuccessful ones expire.   And the community as a whole moves forward.  

2.  Focus on Job and Wealth Creation.  Lacking the job and income protections common in Europe, North American Intelligent Communities make the creation of jobs and prosperity their top priority.  Many of the 2010 Smart21 offer "comeback" stories.  Windsor in Essex County, Ontario, Canada, is sister city to Detroit in the US.  Its fortunes waxed with those of Motor City, and have waned just as drastically.  With an unemployment rate the highest in Canada, Windsor and Essex County put retraining, job creation and economic diversification at the top of their list, and are pursuing them through an impressive array of programs from broadband deployment to education to investment attraction. 

Danville, Virginia, USA prospered when tobacco was a growth business and the American textile industry was globally competitive.  But by the beginning of the new century, it had Virginia's highest unemployment rate.  The nDanville fiber network was conceived as a means to change the dynamic - to create a knowledge-based economy and transform the city into an entrepreneur's haven. 

3.  Local Solutions in the Absence of National Policies.  While nations in Europe and Asia have long had national broadband strategies, it was only with the coming of the Obama Administration that America got serious about a Federal plan.  By contrast, Canada has been a leader in broadband policy and development projects for more than a decade.  In the US, the lack of national policy was hardly helpful, but it did spawn really innovative local solutions.  The history of rural electrification left many US communities the owners of their own electric and water utilities.  Some, like Bristol, Virginia, turned them into telecommunications carriers - and like Bristol, many spent years in the courtroom fighting incumbents for the right to compete.  Running at a profit, the Bristol Virginia Utilities network now extends into neighboring communities and counties, and has put Bristol at the center of an expanding web of connectivity for regional and national companies.  Dublin, Ohio followed the same path: laying conduit for carriers, then building its own fiber network in partnership with a telecom contractor and interconnecting it with public-sector state and national nets, and finally overlaying a WiFi network on top of it for public use.  Using tax-increment financing, Dublin ensured that the network paid its own way at every step in development.   Because American taxpayers are fierce overseers of every penny of public spending. 

And in some Canadian communities, they have decided that local solutions offer the best return.  Moncton, New Brunswick, relied on its incumbent carrier to help transform a former railroad town into a mecca for call centers.  But as the community's needs grew, it was forced to branch out.  Working with a local company, it installed WiFi in its downtown core, its municipal bus network, sports arena and concert site.  The city will soon expand and diversify that network to bring Moncton's fast-growing businesses the world-class connectivity they need.

The North American Way of being an Intelligent Community seems natural to me, because this is where I make my home.  But beyond that, I find it offers interesting values.  I believe that job and wealth creation belong at the center of the Intelligent Community movement, because it is economic vitality that makes possible everything else we love in our communities - the culture, social connections and quality of life. 

The willingness to try new things and then either scale them up or end them is essential to successful innovation anywhere.  So much so that innovation experts have a name for it: "fast failure."  If it's going to work, find out fast.  And if it's not going to work, find that out fast, too. 

And finally, I just like the scale of local solutions.  They are something you can pursue and hope to see results in your lifetime.  And that's true no matter where the community is.  During the last Building the Broadband Economy summit in New York, I spoke with Vice Mayor Ulf Kristersson of Stockholm, which was named the Intelligent Community of the Year.  He talked about his previous career in Sweden's Parliament and his decision to return to local politics.  "It was interesting being a legislator," he said, "and working on national policies.  But I prefer working in local government, because you know you are making a difference."

Is there a distinctly European way to be an Intelligent Community?  In my last post, I took the risk of describing three characteristics of Asian Intelligent Communities.  I did it knowing full well that the Intelligent Communities of Asia are more different than they are alike, and that many communities outside Asia share some of their attributes.  The same is certainly true of Intelligent Communities in Europe.  But the similarities are still striking and have something to teach us all.

1.  Multi-Level Leadership by Government.  Western Europe is home to the welfare state, which actively intervenes in social, business and civic life.  In today's Europe, however, the "state" has many levels.  Policies and funding flow from the European Commission to member states and then, in the form of both programs and grants, to municipalities.  Rare is the European Intelligent Community whose programs fail to integrate with national plans and pay homage to European policies.   

Trikala, Greece, a 2010 Smart Community, has mastered the difficult art of leading while at the same time remaining comfortably integrated with national and European priorities.  With the help of European Union funding, Trikala built a metropolitan network and launched numerous e-government and digital inclusion programs.  On the strength of these achievements, the Greek Ministry of Economics named Trikala the first Digital City in Greece.  This opened up additional funding for research, urban and regional development from the EC and national government. 

Tallinn, Estonia, another 2010 Smart21, has benefited enormously from national programs.  In 1999, the government sold 49% of its state-owned telecom carrier to foreign companies.  A Telecommunications Act, Digital Signature Act and Public Information Act were passed in quick succession to create the conditions for growth in all forms of telecom.  The government launched a "Tiger Leap" program to put PCs in schools and triggered a wave of IT and network investment fueled by NGOs.  These actions put the wind under the wings of Tallinn's own Intelligent Community programs.  The result was a surge of local growth and one of the most Internet-savvy populations on the Continent.

2.  Focus on Social, Civil and Cultural Priorities.  Welfare states spend heavily on services that foster social progress and individual well-being, from health and pension systems to education and environmental sustainability.   ICF's 2009 Intelligent Community of the Year, Stockholm, will be the European Green Capital in 2010.  And Europe is surely the only place where cities take turns serving as Cultural Capitals.  Tallinn will be one in 2011. 

When European cities invest in becoming Intelligent Communities, they carry these priorities into the digital realm.  Besançon, France was named a "Ville Internet @@@@@" (Internet City) by the French government in 2008.  Not only because it built one of the first metro fiber networks in the country but for applying information and communications technology to improve urban living, culture and education, social life, citizenship and business.  One of its many projects, the Digital Schoolbag, grants every student a free laptop with educational software, a discount broadband subscription and computer workshops for adults.  At a significant cost, Besançon is trying to erase the digital divide for future generations.

3.  A Bias for Publicly-Owned Fiber.  Government ownership of utilities, railroads, airlines and other infrastructure is a tradition in Europe.  Anyone who has ridden trains on the Continent knows that quality of service is the first consideration with cost a distance second.  So it is with broadband.  Alone and in partnership with business, European Intelligent Communities build broadband networks with a marked preference for the high speeds provided by optical fiber.   In the UK, the 3i group is collaborating with Dundee, Scotland to lay fiber-optic cable throughout the city sewer network; in 2010, 40% of homes and businesses will be passed by fiber offering 100 Mbps connectivity.  Eindhoven, Netherlands is the site of multiple fiber deployments, from the nationally-funded Kenniswijk pilot project (15,000 homes) to the Nuenen co-op (7,500 homes), and major deployments by Reggefiber (230,000 homes).  One of the latest projects of Eindhoven's Brainport public-private partnership is the Eindhoven Fiber eXchange Foundation (EFX).  This nonprofit seeks to interlink local, regional and outside networks to manage capacity and interconnections, with the modest goal of making Eindhoven the "ultimate broadband region."

There is much to like about the European Way of being an Intelligent Community.  Because Europeans are comfortable with big government, they put a lot of emphasis on setting policies.  Once the policies are agreed, all those layers of government can throw huge resources at building networks and funding programs.  Those policies measure the well-being of the community as much by health, safety, social progress and cultural vibrancy as by job and wealth creation.  On the other hand, there is also a lot of bureaucracy.  In the European Union countries, because so many decisions are reached by consensus, there can be a lot of compromises that lead to muddle.  And the flow of cash that accompanies European and national priorities sends some communities chasing whatever program is being funded rather than creating sensible strategies to tackle their problems.  At worst, the European Way makes passivity profitable as communities wait for directives and money to arrive from above before taking action.  At best, national and European policies and funding energize local ambitions and empower Intelligent Communities to amazing achievement.