April 24, 2009
America's Broadband Future -- Whose On First Base?
America loves professional sports. More precisely, Americans adore our sports superheros. The analogy of sports leadership, heroics, and sports muscle, agility, and skill pervades our popular culture, corporate board rooms, our civic and national leadership. Those of us committed to and passionate about national broadband now have no fewer than three major teams to cheer for who, if they win the title, will bring jubilation and lead a collective renaissance of the nation.
The odds on favorite team for this season is team NTIA. You remember them. Only a year and a half ago (FY08) captain/President Bush proposed cutting their entire payroll/budget by more than 50% from $40m to $19m. No hope that under the former administration that team NTIA was going to lead our nation to national broadband heaven. This rag tag team is back with new ownership and now has a budget ($4.7b) that would make George Steinbrenner jealous. More important, team NTIA has a mission to invest in an 'open' platform and support all the underserved and unserved communities in America. This is the All American dream team.
Just 10 days ago, one of the perennial favorites, the FCC stepped forward under interim management of veteran skipper Michael Copps and asked for public support and input on a plan to deliver a winning formula to lead team FCC to victory no later than a year from now. Americans, never a nation to support the plodders, might show up at FCC hearings with paper bags over their heads in protest. But this is a team of veterans with both legislative, regulatory, and technical expertise. Don't count them out. Once they get moving, they could put together a winning streak that could propel them forward into serious playoff contention.
Team Nerd, better known by its agency calling cards starting with NSF, DOE, and even NIH (not to mention NSA, CIA, NASA and other agencies)have long held that they are the crown jewels of the American broadband dream. After all, they were there at the beginning. They architected, built, and operated much of the infrastructure that grew up on steroids and has become the commodity internet as we know it. Quite proud of that pedigree, Team Nerd is back, with major sponsors in the backbone internet business, linking the build out of a national broadband infrastructure with national competitiveness, scientific discovery and the promise of even shinier jewels to take the spotlight.
It's hard not to invoke that famed 1888 baseball jingle better known as a poem by Ernest Lawrence Thayer. All good sports fans read Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888" in school. It is, after all, the quintessential American story about hope, heroes, and hype. Of course, everyone knows how the poem ends. And so as we think about the dreams of the fans of the American Broadband league, it may be trivial and even trite to ask whose on first base. The challenge, from my vantage point, can be reduced to the basic insight that designing, building, operating, and evaluating a national broadband infrastructure is not about superstars or even a superstar team competing with other teams. It's time to re-imagine how we get there (national broadband) from here. The goal of developing a coherent and integrated national broadband policy, which in turn informs programmatic opportunities to innovate, communicate, and transform the lives of Americans from every walk of life, should begin with an acknowledgment that we're in this game together.
The fact that the FCC, NTIA, NSF, DOE and other agencies are not being locked in a room to work on a common game plan with roles and responsibilities gives me pause that perhaps too little has changed in Washington, D.C. Incoming FCC Chairperson, Julius Genachowski and recently appointed Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra should consider something radical like sketching the future of our nation's broadband efforts on the back of a napkin and then charge well intending acolytes to go forth and get the legislation, regulatory frameworks, and programs developed (in that order or at a minimum in parallel fashion).
I am a huge believer that Universities have a role to play in architecting a future national broadband policy. I also believe we (Universities) have enormously important work and a role to play in the communities within which we work, learn, and play. I tried to say as much in today's Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle, in its article on a submission to the NTIA by a coalition of higher education technology organizations and coalitions, decided to frame the article as a set of binary choices (was this a good or a bad idea/white paper?). I know, respect, and have been mentored by many of the principals of the white paper. They are among the handful of wizards the nation enjoys who helped to build our research and education networks for which we have much to be proud. AND, (not but) one of the challenges we face in higher education is our relevance, credibility, and effectiveness in demonstrating active listening to our community neighbors. If our community neighbors are being asked to identify their priorities and articulate them in the context of a strategic investment for the nation (under the terms of the American Recovery and Investment Act), then the Universities would do well to frame the challenge and offer designing multiple solutions that begins with those communities being highlighted and targeted in this (or any other) legislation. I would contend that if our reputations and credibility are built on our deeds we should be more generous and humble in realizing how, if, or to what extent we can contribute to the goals of the NTIA broadband initiative. As a design challenge, the NTIA program represents a series of really interesting and important constraints around which we should build authentic and genuine collaborations. I think we can improve our strategy for helping getting there.
Finally, I think America's Broadband future is too important to leave to competing federal bureaucracies, vying private sector interests, competing public interest groups, and, yes, to well meaning but tunnel vision higher education technologists. It's time to stop placing bets on which 'Casey' is coming up to the bat to help 'save' the nation with a 9th inning grand slam home run. There's a lot of hard work ahead. The stakes are mightily high. Today we need masterful orchestration and choreography work. The best and the brightest are those committed, dedicated, and proven leaders whose primary commitment, dedication, and proof is in their ability to work together to achieve an imperative every bit as important as, and intimately connected to, our national security, financial recovery program, or strategy for global competitiveness in the rest of the 21st century.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio
April 24, 2009
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April 23, 2009
Oracle and Sun - Redux
A senior manager from Sun is a facebook friend. When the Oracle acquisition of Sun was announced, she quickly updated her facebook page to say ""Oracle of the East" Very excited for customers and partners". I started reading my tweet grid search tool for insights with an eye to gleaning insights from Sun and Oracle employees (or alumni) that I know and who are tweeting. The pundits, with typical 'certainty' framed the acquisition in 'objective' financial value terms. Some enlightened technologists whose opinions I respect offered versions of:
Here is this full set of integrated toolsets and solution stacks that we invest in with R&D and support. From a basic free LAMP stack, through Identity Management and Directory Services, Datawarehousing and EPM. We can put together a solution that fits your organization's needs with the right mix of support,development tools, training, professional services, we can even install the whole thing in a shipping container data center and drop it at your door.It's in our best interest to contribute back a lot of the these tools and solutions as OSS to broaden the overall ecosystem because that expands our potential service base
When I got a call from the Wall Street Journal to share my view, I outlined that I was neither expert in nor particularly interested in the so-called financial analysis. I also shared that Oracle's track record on advanced technology services was less than stellar from my experiences. While the WSJ article and subsequent reporting and ">here focused on MySQL and the risk of open source, my two cents were framed in much more, I would say, 'stark' insights.
I started by sharing with the WSJ that the acquisition was the 'mother of all organizational cultural mismatches'. I know dozens of Sun and Oracle employees(both current and alumni) who are scratching their heads trying to figure out what the blending of cultures will look like. From my nearly 20 years of experience with Oracles M&A activities and organizational culture I think we can kiss the innovation, autonomous technical genius, project driven methodology, and core commitment to Open Source (admittedly a more recent development) all part of what Sun is/was (good and bad)-- good bye.
Oracle will selectively integrate Java, some terrific middleware code, and perhaps continuing interest with thin-client. While there is likely to be some placation of the installed base of MySQL, OpenSolaris, and many of Sun's open development tools, the probability of further R&D investment in these business units is nearly zero over a 3-4 yearhorizon. As others have pointed out, Oracles likely business behavior will afford new opportunities for innovation and open source activity. The loss, I referenced, is less product specific (MySQL or OpenSolaris) and first and foremost that building an organizational culture, a paradigm of computing and technology does not re-emerge at the scale that Sun represented to the eco-system in an overnight fashion. This is what led me to conclude that the net result was/is a major step backwards. One guy's view....
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, OH
April 23, 2009
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April 04, 2009
Freedom to Connect: The Technorati Tackle Broadband Stimulus
This week, the annual Freedom to Connect conclave (or should I say cabal) took place in suburban Washington organized by the erudite and remarkably wired and connected David Isenberg.
I was priviledged to be part of the kickoff panel anchored by Joanne Hovis, President of CTC Columbia Telcommunications Corporation and lead researcher on fiber to the premise projects in San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and a half a dozen important initiatives (including hopefully one here in NEOhio really soon). The panel featured, Dirk van der Woude from Amsterdam, Bill Schrier CTO, Seattle, Tim Nulty of East Central Vermont, and me representing Case Western Reserve University as a model of Digital Campus to Connected OneCommunity.
The conversation was wide ranging but focused on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Stimulus) and its relevance to broadband and in particular to NTIA and the USDA RUS program for rural connectivity. There has been a lively set of exchanges following the conference suggesting once again that the best events are often times those that are generative and catalyze ongoing conversations. Outlined below is an edited contribution that I made to the conference listserv of some 250 persons.
There are too few enlightened ISPs in the US context, a context which is sans a national broadband policy framework. Indeed, not only do we not have a national policy we also do not enjoy state-wide or even regional policies for deploying broadband in the public interest where we have seen market failures. We are, as the technorati and cognoscendi in the F2C community know, among the very few advanced economies with a broadband-free policy framework. The result is that we have relatively arcane business plans for provisioning data services (which today and moving forward is the delivery platform for a convergence of data bits, telephony, and video services). It's a bit of a red-herring to suggest that the opposite of free is individual subscriber bills in this country that are as much as 100 times the $/Mbit as other international service providers who are not only providing 'consumer' experiences at $125-$140/Gigabit, but institutional and commercial services that are being sized at $/10 Gig and now $/40 Gig drains to intranets and to the broader internet cloud. As long as the public and 'in the family' debate is delimited to hand ringing around symmetrical 100 megabit/sec services without a broader framework for a national or at least regional ultrabroadband, I'm afraid we will fail to be answering the real challenge because we are posing the wrong question.
In the research and education community across this country we enjoy, through significant public investment, a national backbone infrastructure that is now measured in 10Gig and by the end of the year in 40Gig pipes connecting everything from some of the most advanced research labs in the world to the pillow tops in the dorm rooms across the land. The networks are well architected, built, and operated by some of the best and the brightest. The price per megabit/sec is well below $10 when aggregated which is a true fraction of the leased line costs being offered in the so-called competitive T1/DS3 or E3 space. If we're interested in leveraging this massive public investment of the NSF, DOE, NIH, and the Departments of Education, Economic Development, and Research and Development of well over 25 States (and their respective Governor's Offices), we have the basis for an American National Backbone for Public Access. Not withstanding the bias of many of my colleagues and peers, these research and education networks should not be (can not be) set aside for formal education and research activity only. The eco-system of education extends to public broadcasting, museums, libraries, health care organizations and of course the entire spectrum of pre-K-20.
Moving from digital campuses to connected communities is, in the first instance, re-framing the most basic questions around how the public should gain access to the network. Until and unless we do so, we're going to have ill informed policies informing the consumer choices we face leading to bizarre and retrogressive practices of 'capping'.
This is not to suggest that there are no rational pure market businesses. Another, and potentially complimentary approach is to call on savvy and forward thinking Governors to work with the Presidents and CIOs of our 3500 Universities and College across the land (along with our national research and education network carriers) to establish a robust fabric for a national public ultrabroadband backbone. The POPs and inter-connect points on that fabric can connect a wide range of public institutions that touch the daily lives of American citizens and in turn serve as the backhaul for new public investment in Fiber to the Premise (including households) to service and enable to models of home health care delivery, schooling, retraining, child care support, home and local community economic programs. As we are actively exploring here, the excess capacity of that public network for public good can be provided/leased/condominiumized to private service providers who will deliver layered consumer goods (in contrast to public goods) based on subscriber interests and new service offerings. Layered over all the fiber can and should be multiple wireless services which can, if appropriate, follow the same business logic of supporting public access as well private services.
In cities like Cleveland and many many other cities across this country, the very last things we need (want) is restrictions on bandwidth informed by narrow and 'national' business models. If our community is to re-imagine itself as being more than a ghost of our rust-belt self, we must, indeed we have no choice, but to grow the availability and consumption of bandwidth throughout the region, and indeed, across the entire Great Lakes economy between Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh (and beyond). As I have been sharing (with those interested in listening) I am pretty sure we can't get there from here through the private market solutions alone. The time and place for public investment is where we see demonstrable and structural market failures. Those public investments should not be made to lock out the private sector but rather, as we have seen time and again through out our economic history (and the broadband economies of Europe and Asia today), public investment should be made in the public interest AND as enabler of innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio
April 4, 2009
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February 26, 2009
Connected Cities: A Small Contribution to Advancing Knowledge at the Intersection of Education, Technology, and Open Content
I’ve enjoyed blogging this past month for the Chronicle of Higher Education. An edited version of this blog appears today.
Working and being associated with a great university is a privilege. Taking the mission of the university seriously also brings with it obligations. There is a natural tendency in times of local or national economic distress to become inwardly focused. It’s a basic instinct and form of human survival. The problem is that instinct leads to behaviors that work at cross purposes to the underlying interdependencies that now characterize the global economy. At the very moment when economic nationalism becomes politically expedient, we need an architecture for global education that balances the chauvinisms that comes with much ‘wrap ourselves in the flag’ economic policies. With the world economy ever closer to the edge of the precipice, building and reinforcing the undergirding of interdependencies are vital to our collective future.
In my last blog entry, I outlined that we now have an educational economy of information abundance confronting an educational delivery system that was built for a time of information scarcity. Although I don’t consider myself a technological reductionist, I think there are a number of immutable forces at play which will result in more and more open educational resources. Over a relatively short period of time, through fabrics of trust and various forms of peer review, those open educational resources will improve in quality. Will we simply substitute open resources for the legacy and largely proprietary learning economy? If we are to meet the challenges facing the education community in the context of the tensions in the global economy, I think it would be most unfortunate if that was the limited extent of our aspirational goal.
The long term health and well being of our great universities are intimately and ineluctably linked to the health and well being of the cities within which we work and study. Ours is, as we are now finding out, a fragile eco-system. Cities around the world are links in a chain of value which produces knowledge, economy, politics, and different forms of community. Technology, open educational resources, and the education community are the key drivers and enablers of an arc of human activity that can lead us to learn and appreciate more about one another and about ourselves at the very moment when the forces of economic nationalism (and the likely corollary of reassertion of different form of militarism) are pulling us in a very different direction. I think the stakes are that high. I hope that Universities will serve as beacons and a clarion call to both the risks and challenges we face and the need to take action to avoid repeating the lessons of history.
Cities like Cleveland have dozens of sister or twinning cities around the world. In Cleveland we have twenty sister cities as diverse as Taipei, Bangalore, Gdansk, and Alexandria. What if we began a 10 year project to design and develop a university-initiated “connected cities” project (with concentric circles of other twinning cities following to allow the project to scale and extend to many other cities and Universities). The different segments and communities within our cities (children, schools, professionals, unions, educators, artists, elected officials, and cultural communities and so forth) would be afforded a systematic and fully integrated opportunity to advance our working, learning, and cultural relationships with peers and counterparts in our sister cities. The quality of rich interactions could extend from sharing oral and multimedia histories of our communities with one another to formal professional, educational and research exchanges. Technology mediated household to household exchanges or churches here and there could be augmented by international exchanges and visits by graduating seniors, educational leaders, or elected officials. Scientists might share common work underway to attend to sustainability and alternative energy not in a disconnected way from members of the same communities learning about the ways in which high school students are using open learning resources to learn about ecology and the economics of recycling and waste streams. Mentoring relationships, local capacity and human development, collaboration for research and education, professional exchanges between communities are one of the important service roles that universities can play in the 21st century. We can and we should leverage our universities’ ability to create powerful networks of technology and learners to create binding partnerships that matter.
As we learn more about others we will also learn more about ourselves and grow a better appreciation of the ways in which we can leverage technology, open educational resources, and our commitments to community-building to attend to the priorities of our own cities and neighborhoods. We are bounded together not only by common destiny. The oceans that once separated us are now made smaller by the technology that we have helped invent and deploy. We can continue to transact with the world around us in an atomistic and disconnected manner. We can also leverage the power and genius of the university as a creation and ongoing project of creative women and men to lead and to enable science, discovery, and wisdom. Deepening the linkages within and between our communities and across our cities is a 21st challenge worthy of great universities.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
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February 24, 2009
How Technology Will Reshape Academe After the Economic Crisis
Today's blog appears in an edited form in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Where will the Academy be the ‘day after’ the current global economic crisis passes?
If we imagine the future state of the university and the education eco-system, of which we are a key institutional part, as effectively picking up from the same point the day before the crisis, then I believe we will have missed the dynamics driving the current crisis. Some are prepared to concede that the financial crisis may take its toll on a number of universities. Mergers, consolidations, and perhaps even closures are all possible outcomes of the financial crisis. Viewed as only a financial crisis, crisis management has attempted to attack the economic equation by constraining and re-directing inputs. Fewer students, fewer offerings, suspend sabbatical leaves, salary freezes, and staff layoffs are all intervention strategies for the financial ledger. As someone who lives with the crushing budget challenge those decisions are painful and risk ripping at the core fabric of the Academy. It’s also not the heart the challenge.
The structural challenges we face are far more complex than (tuition+research+endowment)-(salaries+facilities). Paul Romer is quoted as having once said that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” I leave it to thought leaders across the Academy and readers of this blog to opine as to what opportunities might present themselves to universities prepared to seize the moment.
I offer one arc of insight for consideration regarding the explosion of education content in the past 20 years. The iron lock and tyranny of traditional text book publishers and the tacit complicity of the Academy in this oligopolistic business practice is imploding. In the pre-Internet era, the scarcity model of education was enabled and reproduced through the specialized and encyclopedic knowledge of the professoriate combined with a cannon text which bore truth as a supplemental guide to our favorite professors. The information explosion engendered by the distributed architecture of the Internet has transformed much of our research agenda and also the DNA of the educational experience in the classroom. First it was the electronic posting of syllabi and email for office hours as complements to their legacy analog functions. Hypercard became multimedia and desktop publishing became the World Wide Web. Learning and expressions of discovery moved from fundamentally inward artifacts like a classroom presentation or an exam to student published web pages, searchable discussion boards, and collaborative wikis for medical school education. In a curve which is only accelerating these past 20 years, we now have an educational economy of abundance confronting an educational delivery system which has become calcified and premised on an outdated model of scarcity of information. I am of the general view that we won’t solve the underlying fiscal crisis facing the university until we look at and re-frame the nexus of technology, educational content, and knowledge creation. While it need not be an either or proposition, there is little positive that can come out of continuing to deny the impact of the technological revolution we are living in and contributing mightily towards as we chart the next chapter in the life of our collective enterprise.
The most exciting challenge the Academy now faces is a collective project to advance the research and learning enterprise moving into the 21st century by embracing the tsunami of open educational resources that have been generated by distinguished faculty researchers, brilliant teachers, and exceptional students. Today, those resources live both within the gardened walls of our institutions and our web presences and over the past three or four years as generally available resources through platform technologies like Apple’s iTunes U, Open Courseware, and explosive content creation activities underway in countries like India and China. The collective effort of technologists and technology leaders has created (and will no doubt continue to generate) a series of platforms for re-visiting our pedagogies and our understanding of how different kinds of learners engage in the socializing and processing of information towards knowledge.
While we might have asserted in the pre-Internet era that we had a significant (if not monopolistic) impact on the learning that a typical university student has during their experience on campus, that is simply no longer the case. If we are to remain relevant to the post-secondary education experience of future generations, nothing less than a big, bold, and yes, transformational project is required. If indeed a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, future generations of learners will no doubt look back at the global economic crisis of 2008-09 and reflect on which institutions were agile enough to bring the wisdom of its scholars together with the acumen of its technology leadership and the ingenuity and determination of the universities leadership team to make a difference. It’s actually not only the future of the university that is in play. How we produce, organize, and distribute open education resources is at the heart of the future of education around the world.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
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February 20, 2009
Re-Thinking Technology Leadership on Campus
Today's Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus carried an edited version of this blog entry on technology leadership at Universities.
I am what I think you think I am.
One of my mentors describes himself as a 21st century highway builder. I used to asked him whether that was his self-image or what he aspired to be. For many technology leaders on our campuses we are indeed seen by much of the campus as the folks on the campus who own responsibility and stewardship for the University’s non-trivial investments in core networking technologies. It turns out that the technology that makes reliable and robust access and that which enables research and learning is complicated and requires a regime of predictable investment and management. Like most of my counterparts across the university landscape one of my jobs is to educate my colleagues in the leadership of the University of the need to develop sustainable models for feeding the infrastructure associated with this (and other) mission critical resources. Add to this part of our portfolio the growing set of security, privacy, and regulatory challenges and the Chief Information Officers at our universities could be fully consumed with these critical services and operational challenges. Indeed, many of us see our professional contribution as effectively being circumscribed by these services because we think that is what much of the campus views as at the heart of our job description.
For many years, technology leaders argued that our contribution to the leadership of the university was limited by the fact that we were the new players in the President’s cabinet. Well, as a profession, we’ve been at it for about 30 years. We appear to be rather routinely only one technology implementation away from a leadership role on the campus. First came the build out of our campus networks followed by the need to investment in the Y2K debacle. Somewhere in between or right after Y2K we found ourselves back at the table with our hands extended looking for millions for ERP implementations to modernize the university’s business operations. More recently security needs are the calling card for investments in IT operations. Every one of these major operational activities over the past 20-25 years was important activities. Being at the table to make the case for investments in these areas has been critical to what the university community as a whole has accomplished. Indeed, the quickest way to redefine CIO from Chief Information Officer to Career Is Over is to ignore the core responsibility we have to the University regarding the network. These are, in many ways, analogous to the core services that the Provost’s office provides to make sure that the basic curriculum is properly structured, learning goals and outcomes are associated with syllabi, that faculty receive predictable experiences associated with their promotion and tenure considerations, or the research office in providing infrastructure to support the research enterprise on the campus. As such, at least in my view, the network and some of its attenuated services are a necessary but insufficient condition for contributing to the University’s leadership efforts.
It is time to ask some important questions and try to chart a path to a different level of discourse on the campus. Once our campus networks and services on them like email were things you could only experience on the campus. As members of the campus community have come to experience a relatively robust and reliable consumer experience outside the University, the self-image of the IT leader providing special enterprise network services is no longer consistent with the experience of much of the campus and in most cases not the basis for a call to a leadership role at the University.
Here are four brief examples of new leadership opportunities that I think contribute to the overall portfolio of the CIO. These examples take the plumbing elements of the portfolio as a foundational activity but attempts to define innovation activities that help to distinguish the services and contribution of the CIO to the campus leadership team.
The future of science and discovery is intimately connected to computational research activities. High performance computing, analytical services and visualization tools are at the heart of the enterprise. Most universities can no longer afford a highly distributed set of redundant investments across the campus. We can and should support models of centralized services to support the research enterprise on the campus.
Second, most every campus needs a blueprint for greening the university. This is both an operational opportunity to integrate systems with facilities and IT in order to simplify the management of the physical plant of the campus and of course to realize important energy efficiencies and financial savings. In addition, many students see our green initiatives as being every bit as important as our network and course management services.
Third, many universities over the past decade and most likely for the next 25 years will be attempting to architect a strategy for international initiatives whether those are off-site campuses or hybrid offerings that join the main campus with a wide range of satellite and distributed campus and learning environments. The technology community can and should play a key role in the architecting of the blueprint moving forward.
Fourth, after all the investments made in ERPs, most campuses understand that their business culture and the way we do business represents the most important set of ‘next challenges’ beyond the implementation and updates of the software. CIOs and their technology colleagues have a real opportunity to partner with the business officers of our campuses to develop strategies for engaging the front line staff as well as key personnel across the campus in working together to realize some of the as yet untapped parts of our ERP systems.
Finally, I think we need to also find ways to provocatively lead the University. In my next blog entry I want to tackle the opportunity we have to extend our contribution to both our campus, the communities we live in, and the general challenges facing the human condition through open educational resources. IT leadership on campus is perhaps for now uniquely positioned to contribute to the campus leadership dialogue on this important emergent topic.
If we are indeed what we think you think we are, then we are overdue for demonstrating our ability to move with the campus to its next set of challenges so that you think we are valuable to the future of the campus in addition to our role as highway builders.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
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February 18, 2009
Urban Universities and Connected Rural Communities
Today, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an edited version of this blog below.
Like a number of urban university technology leaders, I remain hopeful that as the final details of the Stimulus package come together that infrastructure funds for inner city connectivity and for community networks serving urban community priorities remain part of the vision of 21st century America. In my last blog, I outlined the opportunity for a new urbanism which I called the emergent smart city. I think dynamics are such that at the same time we may well be witness to the emergence of a new form of economy and human habitat, what I would call the “connected village”. What we do as Universities to support and attend to real human needs in our cities is matched only by our ability to render our research and learning experiences relevant to what happens once ultra broadband connects the very edge of the network in rural towns and villages, just beyond the bright lights of our cities.
What has become clear is that as much as $2.5 billion dollars in stimulus will be made available to support our generation’s rural electrification program. When markets failed to deliver the electrical grid to rural America, New Deal legislation in 1935 provided the investment to light up the rural regions of the country. Following earlier legislation passed some 20 years earlier (1914), Universities followed the priorities of elected officials during the New Deal and the needs of the rural community and extended a model of agricultural extension programs that served as an integrated program supporting the technology, learning, research, and new economic opportunities for as much as 25 percent of the population that lived in rural America.
Today, less than 5% of America lives in the rural communities of our country. The industrial age beckoned and seduced the rural population to the vibrancy and opportunity of steel, auto, and a manufacturing economy based in our cities. In an era of relative scarcity, those seeking opportunities to educate themselves and their children saw the city and its universities as a destination. In contrast, uurs is an era of relative abundance. The massive stimulus investment in rural internet access might well do a whole lot more than just connect the remaining red barn houses dotting the rural landscape. Once connected to the global network, many services and experiences once only available in the city will be readily accessible from anywhere. These include, of course, the once location-specific and relatively hard to get to education experiences once only available in our cities at our universities. The future of the economy and the jobs of the 21st century need no longer be delimited or thought of as being centered on a 20th century urban/suburban model. In much of the world, economic crises and structural adjustments in the economy lead to severe dislocation and in many cases an increase in population movements out of the city. A quilt of connected outer ring rural villages may represent part of a model that might help to reduce the negative impact of the likely dislocation that faces much of the population in this country over the next 10 years. Smaller intentional communities stitched together with ultra broadband connectivity could be one part of a new sustainable habitat strategy. Following evidence of similar activities in Asia and Nordic countries of Europe, public libraries, public broadcasting, museums, and universities in this country may be afforded an opportunity to help re-invent what it might mean to service the needs of quilt of connected villages.
The Internet has made possible connecting classrooms in far flung corners of the world. Research is conducted by collaborators whose physical distance is less impactful than ever before as labs are connected through the Net. As rural connectivity is realized, health care education and direct health care delivery will be more readily available through new models of delivery. The back offices of our service economy can be connected over a fully connected grid in which customer service or other operations can be fulfilled most anywhere. The return of a ‘small is beautiful’ life style combined with many of the important attributes of once exclusively urban experience are now possible. This need not be a mythical or romantic return to pre-modern time. Bringing some of the best of yesteryear forward to the world of ultra broadband may lead to a renaissance of village and small community life, reconnecting to sustainable economies, healthy life styles while remaining connected to the educational, entertainment, healthcare, and many of the other amenities of the ‘city.
Will Universities be as agile and adaptive in the 21st century in creating an engagement strategy for connected villages as earlier generations of leaders were in establishing our rural extension program? The ground is fertile for those prepared to experiment and innovate.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
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