Yesterday the Blandin Broadband team met to start planning for the Annual Broadband Summit this fall. We were full of lots of good ideas. One thing we decided was that it would be great to have a very fun keynote speaker. Someone who might be inspirational or might help us answer definitively the ever popular question – what would people do with all that bandwidth anyways?
The tough thing was coming up with someone. So, I thought I’d ask the blog readers.
Who would you like to hear speak at the Fall Minnesota Broadband Summit?
To get the ball rolling I’ll share my short list:
- Anyone in R & D from Google
- Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW
- Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat
- Anyone involved with telemedicine applications for the army
- Tim O’Reilly, tech publisher
I’m not making any promises here – but I’d love to know who other people would like to see.
I had two very different thoughts for potential speakers:
Joe Amato http://www.southwestmsu.edu/regional/Staffpages/JosephAmato/
He’s from Marshall, longtime faculty at Southwest State. He talks about place, celebrating the place your in, the wonders of greater Minnesota, etc. etc. He’s actually from Detroit but found his place in Marshall. He has spoken at lots of non-academic places, e.g. the League of Minnesota Cities. He’s also on MPR fairly often. He’s retired now, I think, but has a center for rural living or some such thing in Marshall. People REALLY like him as a speaker, because he understands technology and politics, and he’s also a scholar, makes people feel good about wherever they are.
Closing the Gap http://www.closingthegap.com
It’s a network/resource for and about people with disabilities. They operate out of Hector, Minnesota. They’ve been around for 25-30 years. And they are now a big operation, still in Hector. They have a huge web presence, I see, and people come from around the world to their annual conference.
What about someone from Pew who worked on the Pew and American Life Project?
Andy Carvin, formerly of the Benton Foundation and now with NPR? He is now doing some work with video blogging.
What about a current or former legislator who worked on some of the early rural broadband work (I don’t know who that would be)?
What about Tim Penny?
Humphrey Institute Senior Fellow Tim Penny has been named president of the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation (SMIF) and will begin serving in April. SMIF was established by the Minneapolis-based McKnight Foundation in 1986 to foster growth and vitality in southern Minnesota communities. SMIF’s key interests include workforce development, early childhood development, and economic development with a focus on bio-ag and bio-medical. Past SMIF presidents include Trixie Ann Golberg (1993-2006), who was a Policy Fellow in 1994-1995.
Those are great ideas. I like the idea of getting someone from the Pew Internet Life project and I like the idea of talking to the Closing the Gap people. I went to their conference years ago and found it fascinating!
Speaker Nominee. Nina Antoniotti, RN, MBA, PhD, Director of the Marshfield Clinic Telehealth Program, a widely distributed, system offering a broad range of medical and dental telehealth services in rural Wisconsin. I understand that they are exploring joint ventures with Canada and China as well. It will be interesting to learn how a clinic system, headquartered in a rural community of 18,000 people, decided to reach out so far beyond the horizon. John