Thanks to Bill Coleman’s imagination, last Fall I got to travel with him to Little Rock AZ to attend the annual Rural Telecon Congress. Bill heads up his own consulting firm, Community Technology Advisors and since 2005 has been working with Blandin Foundation to provide coaching and technical assistance to the 29 rural Minnesota communities enrolled in the Get Broadband: Keeping Communities Competitive program. Bill suggested that, using the Get Broadband program story as our calling card, we go to Little Rock and learn more about best practices for promoting the benefits of ultra high speed Internet access. He thought we could use what we learned to help design “phase II” of the Get Broadband program.

As hard as it is for me to escape the tyranny of my daily inbox, I am always glad when I do because of the new ideas I hear about and the new people I meet. When we got there, Bill and I conducted a survey among Congress attendees asking how their work and lives would be changed if they woke up tomorrow to find their homes and businesses connected to an ultra high speed network. We were surprised at how hard it was for even these saavy telecommunications advocates to answer this “live the dream” question. Most of us still don’t live in that kind of world, and so it’s hard to know what we’d do with all that speed. It seems to me that answering that question is key to generating the political will and public and private resources required to build the “big broadband” infrastructure we need to thrive in the global economy of today and tomorrow.

So I was tickled to find in my in-box this morning an announcement that the theme of the 2007 Rural Telecon Congress, to be held October 14-17 in Springfield, IL, is “capturing the promise,” with a focus on effective utilization of broadband connectivity.