The state of Minnesota had a series of audacious goals:
To completely eliminate children living in poverty.
To completely eliminate lead service lines in its drinking water.
To make affordable childcare so accessible in Minneapolis that any family could walk to an elementary school or daycare center.
To protect the state’s peat lands, an effective collector of carbon.
To deploy high-speed internet to even the farthest corners of a state that is larger than all New England but has just one-third its population.
That’s a wild array of challenges, and Minnesota tackled all of them with a single technology: Maps.
Although governments at many levels use mapping as an analytical tool, the state of Minnesota has infused mapping into its problem solving in a way few other places have, making high-tech maps and geographic information systems (GIS) technology, a part of the everyday infrastructure of state government.
Broadband maps are hard to maintain, since they change so quickly, but I have used Minnesota maps as the backbone of the MN County Broadband Profiles for years. One frustration right now is that the State maps are not the maps that are being used to determine eligibility for federal broadband funds.
