Author Archives: TRUE Partners

About TRUE Partners

The TRUE Partnership is an informal alliance of organizations working to create a learning community for rural Minnesota social justice champions and equity advocates

Senator Klobuchar visits Blandin

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Jim Hoolihan and Senator Klobuchar talk broadband at the Blandin Foundation

It’s been a whirlwind around Blandin since the announcement of the ARRA grant last week. While some of the staff has been out meeting partners who will work on the ARRA-funded Minnesota Internet Rural Communities (MIRC) initiative (more on that soon), others were able to greet Senator Amy Klobuchar and talk about the project with her in greater detail.

Yesterday, Senator Klobuchar visited the staff at Blandin. President Jim Hoolihan spoke about the project,  “The grant is not going to be used for laying cable or fiber but the grant is going to be used to work with partners for increasing demand for broadband. Blandin is very excited to receive the grant.” While Senator Klobuchar recognized the need for such a project, “We went from third in the developed world, to fifteenth in just the last decade when it came to internet subscribership and internet speed. That just can’t keep going that way.”

We were pleased to have a number of local media at the event and happy to see articles in Northland’s Newscenter and Fox 21 News.

 http://blandinonbroadband.org/2010/03/25/rural-minnesota-awarded-arra-broadband-funding/

 http://www.northlandsnewscenter.com/news/local/89550262.html

 http://www.fox21online.com/news/senator-klobuchar-visits-northern-minnesota

Call our for community broadband stories

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Dear Blandin Broadband Colleagues,

We write to you today on a mission. We’re in the midst of finalizing the development of an exciting new Broadband Toolkit. It’s going to be a website that features over 100 applications across categories like Healthcare, Education, Government, Business, and Consumer. It will serve as a resource for communities that want to make the most of broadband and take advantage of all the 21st century has to offer.

Included alongside the applications listings will be links to articles describing broadband in action, providing both case studies and best practices on how to use these applications.

That’s where you come in. We want to use this Toolkit as an opportunity to showcase the many great things happening in Minnesota communities through the use of broadband.

So we’re putting a call out to everyone in Minnesota to send us links to stories written about great things happening in your community through broadband.

They can be stories written in your local newspaper, in a regional magazine, in a journal or study, even blog entries and press releases. Basically anything and everything that highlights broadband in action in Minnesota.

By doing this you can help your community’s efforts to receive national recognition as while the Broadband Toolkit is first and foremost a resource for Minnesota, we expect it to draw attention from communities across the country. Already a number of nationwide organizations have expressed interest in sharing the Toolkit with their constituents once it launches.

So don’t miss out on the opportunity to have your hard work recognized.

In fact, if you know of a great story that hasn’t been written yet, send along information about that as well and we can work with you to get a story written.

Email your links to
broadband@blandinfoundation.org.

Now is the time we stand up together to shout from the rooftops that broadband is great and through it we can change the world. So join in, help out, and send us all your have about the impact of broadband in your community!

To insure that your story makes it into the Toolkit, be sure to respond to this email by June 18th. Later submissions may be accepted but in order to get into the launch version of the site it’s important to get back to us ASAP.

Sincerely,

The Blandin Broadband Team

Journalism, democracy, place and blogs

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In her Blandin on Broadband post Broadband or Internet news from towns around Minnesota, Ann included a link to a commentary by Jon Tatting, editor of the Isanti County News. In it, Tatting ponders the state of news media in age of blogs.

I’ve just returned from The New Pamphleteers/New Reporters: A Passion for Place, hosted by the folks at Journalism That Matters, where over one hundred entrepreneurs who combine journalism, democracy, place and blogs spent two days probing the relationship between traditional media and the new media made possible by technology.

My big takeaway from the conference was crystallized in a presentation by John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation. While others were making distinctions between “big J” and “little j” journalists (professionally trained vs citizen bloggers), Nichols issued an invitation to think of anyone who gathers information and conveys it to others as a journalist. He dispelled the notion of “journalism ethics” as a lie (which was amplified in speeches given this weekend by Dan Rather and Bill Moyers at the National Conference for Media Reform held in Minneapolis), instead he stated that anyone engaged in journalism must be guided by personal ethics. Nichols also offered the measure of success for online journalism not in the number of hits a site receives but by its influence over the course of time. As many question mainstream media (print newspapers was the primary focus), it’s reassuring to know that new media entrepreneurs are defining themselves and their role in civil society – made possible by broadband technology.

I want to quickly tell you about the “Open Space” conference format used, which brings people together for shared learning, guided by the “Law of Two Feet” – if you’re neither contributing nor getting value where you are, use your two feet (or available form of mobility) and go somewhere where you can.

From the law flow four principles:
• Whoever comes are the right people
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
• Whenever it starts is the right time
• When it’s over, it’s over

I’ve attended countless traditionally structured conferences, and this format was refreshing and invigorating. The benefits were quickly revealed as we self-organized to have rich discussions. When I felt I’d learned what I could from a session and had nothing else to contribute, it was liberating to use the “Law of Two Feet” to join a new group and continue learning. Another key component of open space conferences is the online networking both before and after the conference to keep the networking going. Click this link to learn more about open space technology. The Blandin Foundation will be learning more about this process as we prepare for a “Rural Voices – Online Citizen Engagement and Media” conference early in 2009.

Blandin on Broadband shows up in the darnedest places

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Yesterday I attended a technology and communications conference sponsored by the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits and MAP for Nonprofits. Throughout the day, “Digital Immigrants” (a term used by keynote presenter Beth Kanter for folks who didn’t grow up with technology) were exposed to examples of how Web 2.0 tools such as Flickr and Tweeter, You Tube and Facebook and blogs and wikis could support our work.

Mary Turck of Twin Cities Daily Planet fame and Jeremy Iggers, executive director of the Twin Cities Media Alliance, presented an information-rich session titled “Media Relations in the Age of New Media”. Theirs was a message of change and opportunity – change brought about by the dramatic decline in print media readership (resulting in sharp cuts in news rooms across the country and their ability to cover the news) and opportunity enabled by technologies that put powerful tools in the hands of ordinary citizens. This repositions a growing segment of the population formerly known as “the audience” to partners in a multi-directional communication network.

The take-home message behind all of this is that the stories we tell must remain the constant and the driving force behind the mediums we choose to deliver them. I was jotting this note while Mary was bringing up an example of a blog that, in her opinion, does just that. When I looked back up, I was both surprised and delighted to see the Blandin on Broadband blog projected – bigger than life – on the screen. I shared with the group that the success of the BoB blog (as we affectionately call it) rests squarely on the shoulders of Ann Treacy, our blogger rock star. Thank you Ann, for jumping in with both feet to the age of new media!

Fibre-to-the-home reaches one million Europeans and Grand Rapids Minnesota

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Hello! My name is Becky and I’m a first-time blogger on Blandin on Broadband. Today I was doing a quick scan of my daily email from the folks at Baller Herbst when I saw an article from vnunet.com titled Fibre-to-the-home reaches one million Europeans. The story includes reference to the fact that “the 150 municipal networks serving these customers tend not to be owned by conventional telecoms operators, but by utilities or local authorities.”

2-internet150.jpgThis is true in Grand Rapids as well. Last summer I watched eagerly as Paul Bunyan Telephone Cooperative brought the capacity for bandwidth beyond my wildest dreams through a trench in my yard and up to my house. Paul Bunyan Telephone has served Northern Minnesota for over 50 years. Today, the cooperative offers local & long distance phone service, internet service including high speed service and all-digital television. Their “Connect Grand Rapids” fiber project is on schedule for completion by May 2007 although word from the Paul Bunyan office is that they’ll be fully operational before then.

I can’t help but wonder if Paul Bunyan’s access to public funds made the difference in their ability to bring fiber to Grand Rapids and Cohasset, our neighbor to the west. And I wonder if this could be further evidence that infrastructure projects of this kind need to be supported by the kind of innovative financing that public-private partnerships provide.