I had a great time at the Blandin Broadband Conference in St Cloud last week. It was definitely worth coming to Minnesota.

As always I enjoyed meeting new and old Get Broadband and LightSpeed community leaders. I am so impressed with the community leaders that take on the challenge of broadband. Some of them have no background in telecommunications or technology. From those folks I heard that the sessions with Sid Boswell were very good. In fact I heard that from a few folks who have been working with broadband for a while. I think those sessions were very instructive and that the time was ripe for such sessions.

In previous years, I don’t think people would have been ready, willing or able to jump into the nuts-and-bolts sessions we had on the technology or on rolling up your sleeves to plan for technology. But this year, the timing was good. I hope that even more people will learn from the sessions through the archived sessions. (We’re working on collecting all of the materials and should have them together this week.)

It was interesting to hear about everyone’s experience. Some said avoid government partnerships; some said seek government partnerships; some said wireless was the answer; others said fiber. It is so helpful to hear about programs that have worked – but I think the wide range of successful strategies demonstrates the importance of creating your own community plan.