Making sure that local businesses understand how they can use the network is a key ingredient for economic success.

HBC then began to work our project into their installation schedule.  If all goes according to the schedule we should start having our first FTTH connection within the next week and our “high priority” first 3 connections completed before Christmas!

At Home and Community Options we have been busy getting things ready for the install.  We have been experimenting with some different methods of using Outlook to manage many of our day-to-day program management and communication functions. We call this our Efile system.   As soon as our FTTH connection is made we will test some of the different file sharing techniques to determine which approach provides us with the most secure and efficient performance.  Then as new homes are brought into the FTTH network we will implement the Efile program in them.

We also have been working with the residents of one of our priority homes to prepare them to become a test site for our Remote Monitoring Program.  We met with the men and all the responsible people on their Interdisciplinary Team. This team would include people like guardians, Case Managers, HCO representative, work site representative and any other parties that would have input into the individuals care plan.  We reviewed the precautions that would need to taken in order for the men to be allowed to be home alone without a night staff on duty. 

I ordered the basic equipment we will need to set up a remote monitoring program in this home and we hope to have all the components installed by the second week of January.  Then we will begin testing the various protocols that we would need to be able to implement if the men were going to be cared for remotely.

We are very grateful for the Blandin Light Speed Initiative for this opportunity to enhance our program quality and efficiency by connecting all of our programs to a fiber network.

The Blandin Foundation is supporting four standout broadband programs through the Light Speed program. The program’s purpose is to stimulate the deployment of bandwidth intensive applications that connect local institutions to area resident’s home. This post comes from a Light Speed community leader.

Track II: Technology – The Infrastructure, The Applications: Understanding Wireless Technologies by Casey Wagner, St. Cloud State University – What is and what’s coming – learn about current and prospective capabilities of wireless technologies, including wi-fi, wi-max, cellular data, 800 MHz, licensed vs. unlicensed, etc.

Track III: Considering the Business: Successful Marketing
Matt Clayton, Marketing Director, MStar, an acclaimed national expert, shares how to develop and implement a successful marketing effort to build support and sell services.

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.

My reflection is based on the lack of our ability to break through the “armed camp” attitudes of so many people engaged in the telecommunications discussion. Our Sesquicentennial pre-conference event was an attempt to get people to adopt a new perspective based on assuming a new role. I think that it worked pretty well for 90 minutes, but I was hoping for some carry-over as we resumed our real life characters.

Burlington VT is an extremely interesting community example and the audience obviously was captivated by Tim Nulty’s message and style. Burlington’s network offers residential customers a standard top speed of 5 Mbps symmetric. The audience was far less enthusiastic about JoAnne Johnson’s discussion of Frontier Communication’s 6 Mbps download speed.

When I discussed my current work with a community client and their pending recommendations about working aggressively with the incumbent providers to ensure competitive services, my table colleagues were aghast at the lack of vision by the community’s staff and task force. Of course, both of these folks benefit financially when cities decide to pursue their own municipal networks.

I am troubled by our lack of shared statewide perspective. How can we talk about gigabit connectivity when many rural Minnesotans don’t even have DSL or a wireless broadband choice? At the same time, I wonder how our top elected officials can avoid serious discussions about the need to ensure world-class telecom services in our economic centers. How can we move everyone forward?

My final thought goes out to my own profession. Where the heck are the economic developers? I enthusiastically applaud those few who were in attendance and wonder about the rest, especially those from state and regional organizations.

Marc was good enough to send us a list of follow up resources:

This is the link to my ever growing long list of useful links related to Web 2.0
http://del.icio.us/marcosten/web2.0

Great overview slideshow by Beth Kanter, a Summit Collaborative member,
http://www.slideshare.net/kanter/demystifying-web-20-tools-for-volcom-groups

Good overview article but the most important thing are the links within it
to connect you to others resources.
http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/webbuilding/page4758.cfm?cg=searchterms&sg=web%202.0

Case Studies
http://www.netsquared.org/casestudy

59 Smartest Orgs Online
http://www.squidoo.com/org20

Conversation and discourse are important in and of themselves. I think an important outcome of the day – though it will be hard to track – will be the connections that were made among the over 140 attendees from 8 states and all across Minnesota. Participants came from Big Lake, Bruno and Brainerd, all the way to Winona, Windom and Wilmer. It was a great opportunity to hear directly from folks what’s going on with broadband in their communities. The short answer: a lot!

Keep on message. There is a wide continuum of awareness and use of broadband across the state. While many people and communities have moved on from asking “what is broadband and why should I care?” to “how can we get it?” I think it’s important to continue honing the message about how critical broadband infrastructure is to community economic vitality and quality of life.

Necessity is the mother of… learning. People “get” broadband applications when they have to. Urgency helps. The more we focus our educational efforts on helping people use broadband applications and connectivity to solve a problem they have, do something they want to do, or make their lives better in some concrete way (for example, connecting with a relative serving in Iraq, as Light Speed grant recipient and School Superintendent Peter Hoyer in Hutchinson, MN is doing via high-quality, broadband-enabled video conferencing), the easier it will be for folks to appreciate the importance of broadband for now and the future. Let’s work to match “killer apps” with the audience we’re trying to reach.

Broadband is no longer just a “nice to have” for rural communities. What we heard from educators, health care providers and government officials in particular, is that broadband has become essential infrastructure for them to do their jobs effectively and efficiently. Ann’s got some great notes from the “Community Transformation” sessions. And more stories from the Light Speed and Get Broadband grantees will be available over the coming weeks and months on this blog.

Connecting to place in a global world. Through citizen media, community portals, issue forums, and other efforts to build and manage locally-developed content, broadband can be an important tool for not only connecting rural places to the world, but for building community in community.

No one size fits all. There are lots of paths for “getting broadband” and raising the sophistication of broadband use. Our collective challenge is moving knowledge into practice and sharing what best practices we have. Starting with the end in mind and keeping focused on the goal is important, but so is remaining open to new paths that may open up along the way. Learn as you go. Stay focused, but flexible.

Framing, framing, framing. Thee are lots of ways to talk about how a broadband-enabled society can help us do good, and do well, better. Broadband can be “framed” as a new alternative energy (think of the savings from e-commuting), as a national security solution, and as a resource to address public health threats (like pandemic flu). It’s a way to improve life long learning opportunities and help retain (and attract) youth and the “creative class” to rural places. Broadband is not just for geeks anymore.

Track II: Technology – The Infrastructure, The Applications
Suite 2
Community Transformation via Portals
Projects are underway throughout Minnesota to help connect people online to their local communities through online citizen engagement and citizen media. A panel of participants in Blandin Foundation’s Get Broadband grants program will talk about their plans, their hopes and their experiences to date.
Panelists: Jill Klinger, Mankato, Sheila Howk, New Ulm, Bill Carlson, Moose Lake, Maggie Montgomery, KAXE
Moderator: Bill Coleman, Community Technology Advisors

Notes from the session. I think I will be able to follow up with their PowerPoint presentations soon. I don’t have them yet – but I think I will soon (by soon I mean tomorrow or next week).

Bill Carlson of Moose Lake (http://ci.moose-lake.mn.us/):

We looked at our emergency plan and realized that broadband wasn’t mentioned. We need a proven model so we looked at the local public access channel, which has worked well in Moose Lake.

Our web site opened us up to global challenges. We needed to know that we could control access. We know the rules for using the library; we don’t know the rules for the online portal. SO, we’ve had to make that up.

We broke it up into 3 aspects:

What do residents need to know?
What do visitors need to know?
What do first responders need to know?

We created an e-information center at the public library. It’s a community server and provides email.

Jill Klinger of Mankato (http://www.greatermankatosourcelink.com)

We had a business that lost opportunities because they couldn’t get the information they needed – the information was actually available from a local resource but they weren’t able to find it. So they created a portal that connects businesses with other businesses and with local education resources.

Found a technology provider. Also needed to provide expertise to highlight on the portal to create a database of knowledge.

Numbers were low because we didn’t want to use newspaper to get false hits. So we plan to take the rest of our money to create a manufacturing directory online – as requested. MSU plans to use the SourceLink tool in house.

Sheila Howk of New Ulm (http://www.newulm.com/)

New Ulm had two great providers – we needed to make a connection with the retailers to get them online. We wanted to increase number of retail businesses online. We had 103 businesses. We also wanted to create an online marketplace by revamping the Chamber web site.

We struggled with the term broadband so we renamed the effort Local-e-Shop.

We looked at the usability of the existing portal (the chamber site) and realized that the retail was hidden. We are in the process of creating a new site that is much clearer.

We provided training to retail business: 1) build a web site, 2) e-marketing, and 3) how to sell online. The classes were a great success. We planned on 6 classes and ended up with 11.

Local-e-Marketing is the last phase. We’ve had events and articles published in the local news.

Maggie Montgomery & Scott Hall from KAXE (http://www.kaxe.org/)

See Hall’s presentation on KAXE 

KAXE is a community owned, member-based 100,000 watts radio station located in Grand Rapids. They are interactive or web 2.0 on radio.

We have volunteer training classes. Last week we had 20 new volunteers. One volunteer had only been in town for a month – and the radio as a big draw.

KAXE wants to foster a process where small communities can create community web sites that convey the same sense of home that KAXE does. On the world wide web, if you’re everywhere then you’re really nowhere. Creating a sense of place on the web is a different approach.

Citizen Journalists – Doug McGill has provided some training to get people involved with media to add to its breadth.

Young people get news and music online. Radio listeners are going down – but we can move to listen online.

Small markets are losing their newspapers and they need a medium for local news and for local marketing.

Local community groups will manage the sites.

The business model is the public radio model with pledge and business underwriters.

What were the challenges?

SH: Awareness and need. People were afraid of costs and were too busy to look into much.

MM: We were surprised with the number of people who came to the classes.

JK: The relationships that were built were amazing.

What about the digital divide issue? Have you thought about the folks who don’t have access to a computer?

SH: At the beginning of the project we focused on that issue. We planned to tell folks about public kiosks but some of the kiosks were removed so there are areas that we can go.

BC: We have the e-information center at the library.

How do you get people involved?

SH: We hope to have a hook that will entice people with a wide range of content.

How does KAXE reach the region?

MM: We use our contacts that we have through the radio. Just people who are on the radio is a base to market events and news. We have an online newsletter.

Why go with a new address for KAXE?

MM: We don’t want to lose people who might not be interested in the radio.

How do you organize the web site?

SH: It’s hard to build a web site by committee.

BC: We will let anyone get top billing.