Bytes From Lev

Wi-Fi at Cleveland Airport - A Smart Connected Community Strategy

Four years ago, I wrote a blog about Cleveland Hopkins International Airport (CLE) as the gateway to Northeast Ohio. If the region's future and vision was around being a smart connected community, leveraging technology, giving CLE a major makeover was a high priority. Kudos to CLE airport director Ricky Smith who since arriving in Cleveland has worked diligently and effectively to move the needle. One of the basic storylines in a smart connected city is the ability to provide connectivity. That's the underlying logic of the six plus year journey that is today OneCommunity. I am pleased that starting tomorrow, the 12 million annual visitors to CLE will have free wi-fi sponsored by Case Western Reserve University and OneCommunity. "Connect in CLE" is a small but important step in securing the brand and image of Northeast Ohio as a forward looking and progressive hub. Waiting for flights to your 2009 Thanksgiving destination just got a little easier.

Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, OH

New Gold Standard for Smart Connected Communities: Case Western Reserve University Announces 1,000 mb/sec fiber to the home research project

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at the Mandel School for Applied Social Science at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland estimates that as many as 72% of the households in and around the University have no Internet access at all. On a national scale neighbors of the University have as much Internet access as Panamanians or Vietnamese. Broadband Internet access in neighborhoods like East Cleveland, Fairfax, Glenville, Buckeye Shaker and Hough are a small fraction of those who have basic Internet connectivity. Being unconnected is only one indicator of a community ‘at risk’ in the 21st century. As many as three out of five (60%) of the University’s neighbors are on food stamps. Four out of five (80%) newborns in some of the census tracks around the University are enrolled in Medicaid. Foreclosures in the area are as a high as one out of every three households. As the neighborhood witnessed, and the world watched and read these past two weeks, violence in some of our neighborhoods can be horrific. In urban America the debate over broadband is not about whether it exists but rather whether it is relevant to the needs of neighbors like those around our University. If broadband Internet connectivity is to have any relevance at all, it must be about safety in the neighborhood, health and wellness starting with the basics like nutrition, obesity and diabetes, and education for the young people in our city, their parents and grandparents. Broadband Internet connectivity in the areas around University Circle in Cleveland have little, if anything, to do with marketing gimmicks like ‘triple play’ or ‘download your favorite aps’. Sustainable use and adoption of Internet connectivity in our neighborhoods is about basic human needs. If broadband doesn’t speak to urgent needs around public and personal safety, health and wellness, and a wide range of educational initiatives that all point to the here and now, Internet access is and will remain largely irrelevant.

This week, with no marketing campaign, fancy promotions, or Hollywood celebrities, Case Western Reserve University launches an initiative to roll out a new gold standard for creating a smart connected community around University Circle. The standard, 1,000 mb/second, that is switched gigabit over fiber optics marks and meets an international competitive bar that we believe can be sustained for no less than ten years of use on infrastructure that will last no less than 30 years. The university is currently scoping a formal university research project to connect the first 100 households in the immediate area the university as a ‘beta block’. An unprecedented collaboration of university researchers, technologists, public sector institutional partners in the region, and vendors will bring neighbors around the University the same quality Internet connectivity that students, faculty, and staff enjoy on the campus. The University Circle Innovation Zone beta block will be a research project conducted by the University in cooperation with more than 40 institutional partners, technology vendors, and community organizations. Eventually, the University Circle Innovation Zone seeks to connect more than 25,000 residents.

The research program has specific metrics and goals that include contributing to the reduction of the incidents of violence and crime, increasing completion rates of high school in STEM subjects, better identification of chronic health conditions along with increases in monitoring and ultimately, through wellness education, the reduction of the deleterious impacts of chronic diseases like diabetes and obesity, and better knowledge of and participation in household and neighborhood energy education and management. The research efforts are being directed by principal investigators at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, University Hospitals, Cleveland Clinic, Metro Health, STEM high school hub in collaboration with the College of Arts and Sciences at Case Western Reserve, the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, the Faculty of Engineering and the Great Lakes Energy Institute, public institutional partners in the City of Cleveland and East Cleveland, and a coalition of public safety forces. Though a small and circumscribed research program, the University hopes to learn in the near term what technology and solutions prove relevant and consequential as it pursues efforts to scale the University Circle Innovation Zone.

A smart connected community is a portfolio of endeavors to leverage broadband technologies to affect positive change in the lives of neighbors and in the communities where we live, work, and play. The University Circle Innovation Zone gigabit to the home research project is being supported by unprecedented co-investments by the research community, start up ventures in Cleveland and around the region, and major underwriting support by an “A” group of technology vendors, partners, and thought leaders who, along with Case Western Reserve University, believe in the efficacy of testing and analyzing the impact that broadband can have on real challenges and priorities of the community.

As the project works its way through our Institutional Research Board (IRB) and the various layers of review of our partners I hope to be able to share more about this effort along with many other coalition partners in this smart connected community venture.

Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, OH
November 17, 2009

100 Day Countdown to National Broadband Policy Looms

100 day countdown for new national broadband policy framework – what’s it mean to Cleveland and AnyTown, USA?

The sand is slipping through the hour glass and today the magic counter on http://www.broadband.gov/ slipped to 99 days. On February 17th, 2010 Julius Genachowski and Blair Levin of the FCC will send up to Congress what may well be the single most important infrastructure policy framework since the 1956 legislation on building the nation’s interstate highway under the President Eisenhower. Funny thing, unless you happen to be an ‘insider’ you’re not likely to even know that the FCC is working on this massive and potentially transformational infrastructure policy. Even more important, the FCC and broadband evangelists are having a hard time getting air time (ironically) to explain “so-what”. Let me try to outline why folks in Cleveland and AnyTown, USA should care and engage.

The preview of the conclusion is simple. The hopes of Clevelanders for a vibrant future for themselves, their children, neighbors, and friends are intimately and inextricably linked to the systemic transformation of our traditional economy. That journey involves new collaborative leadership, thoughtful and consensus-based investments in our regional leading-edge advantages, and a blueprint for a globally competitive 21st century infrastructure. A huge part of that 21st century infrastructure is ultra broadband. The truth is, most anyone anywhere can substitute Cleveland for their home town and the story about tomorrow has a similar calculus. For reasons that folks living in the rustbelt know better than others, the inability to shift core industry and infrastructure comes at a high price. Communities and their leaders all around the country should educate themselves about broadband and practice civic engagement. Five years from now, it will simply be too late. We’ve seen this movie before and it doesn’t have a fairytale ending.

Back in 1956, under the President’s call for a national interstate and defense highway system, some $25billion for construction of 41,000 miles of highway was appropriated over 20 years. Today, the stakes and the need for leadership for public investments in core national infrastructure are as important as was the bold action to shape policy to build our nation’s 20th century transportation infrastructure. The ‘hook’ is no longer the Cold War and defense and the need to be agile in our response to an invasion of our boundaries by a hostile foreign army. We are in a globally competitive environment for attracting business, developing and retaining talent, and developing leading edge economic engines for the 21st century. As is appropriate, there is plenty of concern and significant energy and brainpower being deployed to respond to what most everyone now understands as a great leveling of the economic, education, and innovation around the globe over the past 20 years. Indeed, many of our legacy industries that defined our greatness in another era are now part of our risk portfolio moving forward. No one knows that better than the communities like Cleveland in the rustbelt of America. The next 99 days may be the most important precursors to whether the United States will remain globally competitive over the next 99 years. Hyperbole aside, there is, in my view, not another public policy agenda as important as what the FCC and the other agencies in the federal government are positioned to do over broadband infrastructure.

All around the world, the stature of cities and knowledge regions are being defined by a dynamic and messy combination of research, talent, culture, entrepreneurship, amenities, services, and public policy. In Australia, the national government just announced a $43 billion (Australian) dollar national broadband policy as a “major piece of infrastructure contributing to economic growth and prosperity (Sydney Morning Herald Nov 6, 2009). As Chiehyu Lili and James Losey from the New America Foundation point out (http://www.newamerica.net/files/100%20Megabits%20or%20Bust.pdf) the story is the same in cities and countries around the world. The single most important new public investment portfolio is ultra broadband. The framework being developed by the FCC is a high stakes undertaking. Many otherwise intelligent consumers of broadband services in Cleveland and around the country live with the twin fallacy of continuing American primary in the global digital economy (after all, we invented the Internet) and that somehow, public investment in broadband is un-American, or something like that. Anyone who has travelled to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, northern Europe, indeed most any OECD country and spoken with friends and/or colleagues knows that ultra broadband connectivity (on the order of 100 to 1000 times more broadband than we currently typically experience) is now the DNA of their everyday experiences. Health services, education and training, energy and traffic management, public safety and yes, their generic data, voice, and video services are all enabled over what are generally (all though not exclusively), public investment or co-investment in this next generation infrastructure. The single most comprehensive survey of the international environment comes from the Berkman Center at Harvard (http://www.fcc.gov/stage/pdf/Berkman_Center_Broadband_Study_13Oct09.pdf). More importantly, take a look at Yochai Benkler’s response to the feedback on the original submission (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/5751).

Clevelanders and every other American are exceptional only in only one sense and that is that we do not have a national broadband policy. Indeed, our policy until this FCC led by Julius Genachowski is that we did not need a policy. Beyond bravado and obfuscation the simple reason we are not globally competitive and we pay more for less is that there are very powerful and extremely well-funded companies whose narrow interests are best served when we have no public policy. One last word before trying to attend to the ‘what difference will this make’ to Clevelanders. The naked truth in the broadband debate is obvious to everyone. No one (and here I mean to include the hundreds of lobbyists being paid millions of dollars in total) has any illusions as to what the stakes are in this policy arena. Decision makers at the highest levels of Government are inundated with what they and everyone around them know is poppycock and b-movie scripts about why we do not need to make a change in our no broadband policy policy.

The broadband debate in Washington has remained, by and large, a policy wonk and ‘inside the beltway’ conversation. Too bad. I mean, really too bad. It’s not like the healthcare debate, where most folks have an opinion and care about the outcome. The broadband debate could be all about a focused set of new models to help deliver more cost effective, preventive wellness education and health care. It’s not like the debate over safety in our neighborhoods where we try and care about the outcome of community policing, parks, and lighting. The broadband debate could be all about our common interest in safer neighborhoods and more efficient and collaborative public safety responses to incidents made possible by broadband. It’s not like the debate on ‘no child left behind’ and our continuing concern and hope that we can close the so-called ‘achievement gap’ so that our children might have a future as good as, if not better than our own. The broadband debate could be all about extending structured and informal learning, at home, in the community library, between generations, through pathways of self discovery and exploration of the global village enabled by the Internet. When the price of gas at the pump goes up above $4.00 a gallon we certainly care about our energy policy. Home heating fuel prices are a major concern for folks in the Midwest and Northeast. Many folks know whether it’s an ‘inconvenient truth”, or not, that there is a global and local awareness about Carbon emissions and the need to develop a forward looking policy on energy conservation. The broadband policy could be informed in significant measure on new alternative energy strategies and their relationship to economic development. Or incentives for alternative energy consumption tied to broadband adoption and new models of working.

Broadband is the enabler of opportunity in the 21st century. Breakthrough discoveries in our universities based on new models of global collaboration are enabled over ultra broadband that connect researchers and their labs around the globe. Remote surgeries, health-related consultations, and daily interactive wellness programs are made possible by the roll out of next generation internet connectivity. Education disadvantage for underserved urban and rural America are reduced as ubiquitous internet connectivity becomes an attainable set of expectations that they, along with middle class suburbanites can enjoy. Public and neighborhood safety should be every American’s entitlement and made possible by smart public policy investment in public broadband infrastructure.

Public investment in infrastructure makes sense under three basic
conditions;(1) new market creation and incubation of new markets , (2) evidence of market failures (where profits are not attainable), and (3) when such investments serve the broad public interest and are related to other public policy goals. Incumbent market players as well as new private sector entrants into the marketplace have an enormously important role to play in helping all of us, young and old, inner city residents or rural community families, healthy and frail, to understand and create value in using this powerful and potentially transformational infrastructure. In the 1956 debate over the build out inter-state highway system the public investment was made in the name of national public policy. An enormous and robust private sector set of services grew up to take advantage and provide much value on that public investment. Clevelanders and residents of Northeast Ohio understand how important our transportation and transportation logistics industry is to our region and to the nation. The same is true on the long over-due public investment in a national broadband policy. Over the next twenty years, every American should have an ultra broadband enabled home, neighborhood, city to call their own. The future of the quality of life in our communities and in our country’s global competitiveness rests on getting this broadband policy right.

In my next blog entry I will outline an exciting set of new initiatives underway among more than 40 public sector anchor institutions in NEOhio to deliver a working model and set of pilot projects to support ultra broadband infrastructure to the front door of our inner-city neighborhoods.

Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
November 10, 2009

Time for Higher Education To Step Up on National Broadband Strategy

Blair Levin is a man on a mission with a major Tylenol three headache. Levin's day job these days is Executive Director of the Omnibus Broadband Initiative for the USA. He has less than 160 days to deliver a national framework. The challenges are considerable. The broadband czar is not hiding his angst.

We are looking for creative solutions from everyone – government, think tanks, spectrum license holders, wireline providers, cable systems – that will help deliver the synergies of broadband to the entire nation. ... we need everyone to be, shall we say, “constructively worried”. So let’s be creative and find a solution together so that five years from now we don’t have to worry about the ramifications of our failure to plan ahead.

More recently, he added, "It is striking how the parties [in broadband comments] have stayed within the same framework in looking at a problem that is evolving; seeing things only in the light of long-established patterns that are tied to preferred policy outcomes, not analysis."

I have had limited direct exposure to the inner workings of this effort but I have a wide range of trusted colleagues who are actively and tirelessly working to constructively engage and position the Omnibus Broadband Initiative for advancing the birthing of national broadband policy for the United States.

Given the historic opportunity, in view of the national need, because this is so important to the future, it is high time for higher education to become actively and constructively engaged in the national broadband policy making effort. The futurists in academe have offered their crystal balls to the FCC panels. Higher education, and in particular our research and education networks, have much, much more to offer. In turn, we have much to gain from active and constructive engagement with Levin. Hyperbole aside, this may be the single most important moment in the Internet's short history to reposition the future of the era which I think future historians will rightly call the Broadband Epoch. I have no doubt that our research and education networks will be around 25 years from now. I think we should be recasting the question and ask 'how relevant will our research and education networks be' if we continue to think, build, and operate a national and regional set of shadow network infrastructures as in 'our interest' somehow separate from the 'national interest'.

The time has come to offer leadership and commitment to contribute to the designing and ultimately build out an integrated national broadband fabric. We should begin by placing our coveted publicly-funded research and education networks on the table as the foundation of a national public broadband infrastructure. We should offer up the billion plus dollar State and Federally funded investments in the more than 30 regional optical networks in 37 states, reaching more than 55,000 community institutions. We should offer up our two national backbone services in Internet2 and NLR with investments totaling well in excess of another quarter of a billion dollars over the past decade. The infrastructure assets entrusted to and built by higher education over the past twenty years are the single most important catalytic resource available to the nation in the pursuit of a national public broadband strategy.

Ed Lazowska from the University of Washington in Seattle outlines the tradition of innovation and the contribution of higher education to our nascent and current broadband state as a nation in a submission to the Department of Commerce (in the context of NTIA Broadband Technology Opportunity Program).

Colleges and universities are innovation incubators. They brought us ARPANET in the 1970’s, the Internet in the 1980’s, the graphical World Wide Web browser in the 1990’s, and Google and Facebook in the current decade. These and other transformative innovations from America’s colleges and universities have generated countless millions of jobs and countless billions of dollars in economic growth, making America the world leader in information technology. We would not be here today, were it not for these engines of innovation.
College and university applications drive advances in networking. These institutions are the heart of demanding, advanced scientific applications. The data-driven experiments, simulations, and analyses of science today require high-speed broadband to move data from remote instruments to the lab and to share massive data sets among scientists globally. Why does this matter? Because these scientists will help us model climate change, discover genetic markers for inherited diseases, and explore the potential of low carbon and renewable energy sources. Colleges and universities are also the source of innovation in America’s health care system, providing cutting-edge health research, medical education, clinical care, and rural telemedicine. The bandwidth demands of today’s advanced scientific applications – tens of gigabits per second – foreshadow similar bandwidth needs in homes and businesses in the future.

Colleges and universities have a four-decade proven track record in deploying, managing, operating, and continually upgrading advanced networks. With seed money from NSF in the 1980’s and 1990’s, CSNET, NSFNET, and Internet2....provided neutral territory for open, non-proprietary, unclassified advances, fostering close partnerships with and among industry and government and across all sectors ranging from education to health care....

Two lines of questioning emerge. Why and how could the Higher Education network infrastructure become the basis of a national public broadband framework. Second, why and how would Higher Education leverage these stewarded infrastructure assets in support of the research and education mission of their respective organizations and the national imperative for research and development a global competitiveness.

First, the debate in Washington on the future of broadband is bounded by the view from 'inside the beltway'. Make no mistake about it, as intelligent, objective, and visionary as the FCC and the architects of the Omnibus Broadband Planners may well be, policy making is the extension of politics and interests by other means (to bastardize von Clausewtiz's well known idiom about war). As Levin notes in his comments quoted above, much of the policy debate and thought leadership is bounded by what "is" and the inherited sense of "self interest" which leads to a pervasive condition of incremental and bounded policy making. The future vision of the policy possibilities are extensions of and highly constrained to what we see in our rear view mirrors. Those charged with policy development end up being self-hostaged to their perception of the limits of the policy options as articulated by the delimited set of self-interested parties.

Second, America's research and education networks offer an existent proof point of a very different vision of the future of broadband. Ours is an integrated, national, regional, and local set of inter-connected advanced network infrastructures built to advance a public services set of needs and requirements. Today, a wide range of education research, learning, teaching, and outreach activity is supported on the only truly globally competitive broadband infrastructure in the country. It is globally competitive not because of the size of the bandwidth pipes. It is competitive because the range of educational research and development services, educational learning technologies, educational teaching innovation, and the abundance of Net-based education experimentation is world class.

Third, the public services platform can be and should be extended as part of an integrated effort to extend to a vibrant and transformative set of network-based activities ready for take off in the health and wellness eco-system. Our national broadband policy should aspire to leverage network-enabled health and wellness technologies and services to create efficiencies and to service the nation's diverse and multi-faceted health and wellness agenda for the 21st century. If health care and wellness follow the higher education network deployment architecture we will have a world-class infrastructure not because of the size of the pipes (or the number of lambda waves we light up). We will be competitive because health research activities, consumer and public health education technologies, health and wellness advocacy and a wide range of health economic efficiencies will make our integrated public services platform second to none in the world.

A national broadband policy which does not begin and remain constrained with the assumption of an incumbent-only provider set of policy options can include not only education and health care but also our national interest in energy management both across the grid and within communities and neighborhoods across the country. An integrated public services grid can and should include a strategy for not only network-based and home-attached utility readers to support the objectives of efficiency on the energy grids. Energy management can and should extend through a smart-home sensor network to enable household energy management. If energy management, designed as end-to-end energy management follow the higher education network deployment model we will have a world-class infrastructure not because of the number of smart grids or the size and speed of our grids. We will be competitive because energy research in both the commercial and university labs will be integrated with consumer and public energy management education technologies in home, integrated education programs, and a wide range of energy management sensor-based technologies that will make our integrated energy management the most innovative and consequential to Americans from coast to coast to coast.

There are additional public sector services, such as public and neighborhood safety, environmental and home health, smart and connected public and private real estate, and transportation grids that together with education, health, and energy form the basis for an integrated and public national broadband future. Our broadband future becomes informed by a national consensus to build, manage, and operate a smart, green, and connected infrastructure to service the needs of communities both urban and rural, aged and young, rich and impoverished, new immigrant or well established families. The architecting of a public services network can leverage and scale on the foundation of the research and education networks that touch tens of thousands of communities across the country. The new 21st century community emerges as an integrated, dynamic eco-system whose DNA is knowledge and innovation in support of and delivering against articulated community needs.

The broadband policy debate about our future must extend beyond the rear view mirror image of current 'triple play' services offering. Architecting next generation ultra broadband connectivity is a necessary but insufficient condition for a globally competitive America. Becoming globally competitive is not a debate about whether incumbent providers do or do not provide broadband services to America's underserved. Serving America's needs today and tomorrow is intertwined with advancing and sustaining an open and inherently generative platform that continues to enable innovation and unconstrained experimentation. The threads interwoven with the platform will hopefully be an integrated approach to providing broadband services for education, health care, energy management, public safety and so on. The broadband technical requirements are an extension of, not a substitute for, our common vision of a smart, green, and connected future.

Some might well ask, why should the research and education networks place their assets into national play? How does an integrated public sector platform advance the dynamic and important network-based research activities that are the raison d'etre of our networks? R&E networks is one of relatively few things in the national and globally competitive broadband space that we can proud of. Why screw it up and let our relative advantage devolve into a dumbed down version of, fill in the blank's, commercial provider service? There are probably a dozen other expressions of cynicism, horror, and disbelief. At the very moment that the R&E community is driving towards a new 100 Gig national backbone standard, why at this very moment would we want to 'give it away'.

First, our networks are public networks. They have been funded with public tax dollars and entrusted to higher education. By and large, we have been good stewards of that investment and created leveragable value. Second, we need not 'give it away' our access to commodity, research and development, and experimental use of the networks. The governance authority for provisioning tiered public access from institutions, consumers (outside their institutional relationships), and commercial users is both attainable and can and will lead to win-win-win scenarios. Third, the University's sphere of influence and interests continue to bleed well beyond the confines of the University's physical plant footprint. Fourth, our long term health and well being is intimately and perhaps inextricably linked to the well being and health of the communities around us. And fifth, and finally, it is in on our selfish and narrow interests to be part of, rather than separate and apart from, the single most important set of investments in broadband in our generation.

To be sure, it is possible that our siloed approach to securing broadband network funding from NSF, NIH, DOE, and so forth might have some short term legs. However, there is growing evidence that, at least under this administration, there is an effort to orchestrate, coordinate, and leverage major policy objectives, especially in the infrastructure arena. Working together, we should be able to make the case that it may well be within the institutional self interest of the federal funding agencies to also join and lock arms in trying to work with one another, as well as the FCC, Commerce, and the White House on an integrated approach to public sector investments in broadband. Making an effort to align Federal and State agency interests, higher education research interests, and the interests of the provider and managers of the higher education network infrastructure is as difficult as it is important if we are to keep an eye on the challenge facing Blair Levin and the nation as a whole.

Finally, a word about the incumbent carriers and the presumed insurmountable interests of the telecommunications industry. Advancing the cause of a next generation ultra broadband public services platform is not antithetical to the interests and position of the incumbent providers. The notion of binary choices between the incumbent provider or a public services platform is a framing that is simply false. Many off the record conversations with leaders within the telecommunications industry suggest that the 'either/or' framing is simply 'more of the same political posturing'. Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence that the telecom industry will continue to pursue the "Janus" approach of breathing fire on anything smacking of public sector investments in the public policy 'dialog' while, turning around, presenting a willingness and interest to advance collaborative approaches to public and private investments to reach new communities and to enable new services. Embracing that ambiguity is an art form, especially when it is underwritten with very substantial financial resources and long standing political influence. An integrated public services platform will create new dynamics in the marketplace. As long as there remains a commitment to an open and neutral network platform, there will be competition, innovation, and service options to the consuming public. That's generally thought to be a good thing.

It is quite reasonable to assume that there will not be consensus on every last detail of an advanced, ultra broadband future for the United States. There is, however, plenty of evidence that there is significant consensus on many of the goals, including a portfolio of approaches to investment, adoption, use, and accountability. The time for higher education and in particular the higher education regional optical networks and the national backbone providers to engage in the effort to design a comprehensive broadband strategy is now. We should do so because we have much to offer. We should do so because we have much to gain.

Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, OH
September 12, 2009

College Advice from the Technorati on Campus

The NYTimes asked nine distinguished scholars for their advice to incoming college freshmen. No arguing with many of the solicited pieces of advice including the value of great teachers, read newspapers, read books, remain open to new ideas, engage and find your passion. In the Book Review section of the same Sunday Times, Harvard President, Drew Gilpin Faust writes a provocative treatment on the crisis of identity and purpose of the University.

All but absent from the advice columns and from the analysis of the crisis of purpose of the University is the impact of information technology on the University campus and its antinomies in dislocating much of the received wisdom about the university ideal. Most everything defining the 'multiversity' has been impacted by information technology over the past 15 years, including what entering freshmen should know about their journey of discovery over the next 4 or 5 years and beyond. Multiversities offer liberal undergraduate education, professional education at both the undergraduate and graduate level, research driven education for students through the doctorate, applied research opportunities, and a wide range of research, scholarship, and creative pursuits. When President Obama calls on academe to be 'part of the solution' the role that we are to play is multi-faceted and indeed contradictory.

While incoming freshmen are part of a great tradition tracing its origins back 800 years or more, in reality, their experience, not withstanding the sage advice and wisdom of their elders will be very different than the post-war retiring faculty cohorts, the baby boomers, and the technorati who still regale in tales of coding their own html 'back in the day'. Information technology on the university campus is often delimited in terms of its essential qualities; big bandwidth, enough freedom of use to get into trouble, redefining the meaning of procrastination from the last hour to the last second possible, and a bevy of new excuses to the old 'the dog ate my essay' for why stuff happens. In addition to its essential features, information technology is both a strategic lens and a platform for exploration that can help engender a robust and vibrant multiversity. Here are 5 initial and perhaps not so sage suggestions for incoming freshmen. Your suggestions for additional advice for freshmen are welcome in the comment section.

(1) University is about the challenge of ethics, ethical behavior, and finding out something about your own ethics. Blog a dialog about software piracy between yourself, Socrates (self-knowledge), Cyrenaic hedonism (immediate gratification), and Kant (the pursuit of inherent good). Which two of these philosophers would you vote off the island?

(2) The idea, contribution towards, and impact of the 'global village' is a major theme that draws many young people to University campuses to explore and have their world changed. The rise and interest in environmental studies, public health, international trade, and architecture for sustainability, to mention but a few, are majors worth exploring that were probably not part of your high school curriculum. Use your knowledge and interest in the theme of a 'global village' to organize and make a video montage among young people. Here are some popular examples and here.

(3) One of the goals of coming to University is to become more literate. Many of your professors would probably tell you that literacy is a prerequisite for a democracy society. Some would argue that the way you and your generation 'view the world' is a series of windows on a screen filled with semi-complete sentences, disjointed ramblings, music blaring, and video streaming. Is multi-tasking incompatible with literacy? Do the ideals of a democratic society change with a civil society more attached to their computer screens than perhaps protesting in the street for civil rights or marching on the State capitol? Some one once said that "the medium is the message" (Marshall McLuhan). Use your preferred medium to share your message.

(4) The challenges facing your generation, as you enter university, are daunting. From the environment, to health care, from wars in places that many of us would have a hard time finding on the map to global financial crises the opportunity to make a difference is every bit as noble as is the prospects of growing discord and the loss of civility. Your judgment and your ability to engage in critical analysis is something that many of your professors think is important to explore while in University. Before "Google Search" developing critical insights and judgment was often the product of reflection and time on task. Take one of the 'big' questions above (or another one that you think matches the ones above) and use "Google Earth" to create a KML project that explores and reflects your judgment on one of the 'big' challenges. Here is a gallery of KML projects to give you a taste of what is out there and possible.

(5) Many of our major multiversities are located in major urban centers. Most universities are surrounded by moats that separate themselves from the realities of urban life around them. The 'backs' of our buildings face the communities around us. Look around your university. The technologies that you will experience in your University careers connect you to the world around you with the click of a mouse. The power of the technology has potential to change the relationship of your university to the immediate neighborhood around you in many different ways. Design a service or community outreach project for you and your residence program to help change the lives of the neighbors around you. You never know, the experience might just change your world too.

President Faust concludes her essay in the Times by suggesting "as a nation (we) have embraced education as critical to economic growth and opportunity, we should remember that colleges and universities are about a great deal more than measurable utility. Unlike perhaps any other institutions in the world, they embrace the long view and nurture the kind of critical perspectives that look far beyond the present." The embodiment of those multiple commitments find their way into innovative new general education curriculum, the values and commitments of individual faculty members, and the potential strategic alliance between technology leaders and other members of the senior leadership of the university. The stakes reduce to the search for relevance in the 21st century for both the incoming freshmen class of 2013 and the role of the multiversity in society.

Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio
September 7, 2009

Connecting a Community Like Cleveland for Tikkun Olam

(An edited version of this blog entry was published in the Cleveland Jewish News. Thanks for the feedback on the first blog. Intentional community building has always been of considerable interest to me. The feedback from readers and commentators suggests a general view that the current state of the Internet is less enabled to support community building than it is self expression and individual discovery. In this piece I try and outline some opportunities for more intentional community building in a Jewish and Cleveland context. I trust the themes have some universal interest as well. As always, thanks for the feedback).

It's Time to Be First Again, for Tikuun Olam

Greater Cleveland should become the first geography in the United States to embrace and commit to legislative and community-based initiatives to design, build and operate a ‘fiber to the premise’ infrastructure that can re-imagine, re-invent, and ultimately re-invigorate both our Jewish and broader communities in pursuit of tikkun olam.

We need to bring fiber optic lines, which transmit more Internet data more quickly over long distances than cable or other methods, to the front door of every home and community facility like schools, libraries, health care facilities, and museums. Fiber connectivity is our generation’s version of rural electrification or the inter-state highway system. All over the world communities, cities, regions, and whole countries are competing to win in the 21st century with advanced fiber infrastructure.

Cleveland has a long and distinguished history of infrastructure firsts. Charles F. Brush’s arc at Public Square in 1879 brought urban lighting to the world. The first electric streetcar in 1884 introduced a new infrastructure for public transportation. The Old Arcade downtown in 1890 introduced a radical way to think about the exchange of goods in the marketplace. The foresight in opening the first airport and air-traffic controller tower in 1925-27 ushered an infrastructure that for most of us is the default way we think about enabling how we do business all around the world.

The cost to do the initial deployment of fiber is on the order of $1,500 per household if we scale it to the entire region. Better yet, northeast Ohio has an internationally recognized leading effort through the nonprofit organization OneCommunity, which already connects more than a million users in 1,500 education, health, non-profit, and government buildings in 26 counties in the region. Successful “networked improvement communities” -- like-minded people who share knowledge, experience, and caring and work together to contribute, learn and reciprocate to improve the world -- will depend on such next generation infrastructure. The Jewish community can help strategize how to blueprint this infrastructure build-out for the region by beginning to connect our own community facilities to fiber optics, perhaps most importantly our education facilities.

Education matters

Twenty-first century learning and innovation will be guided by peer-to-peer discovery, mentoring, and a portfolio of experiential and structured opportunities that provoke self-reflection, re-cognition, and a wide range of literacies, including screen and new media. While it is anything but a foregone conclusion, the underlying philosophical basis for 21st century learning and innovation could be tikkun olam or networked improvement communities.

The future of our community is intimately and inextricably linked to education. That is as true for the Jewish community as it is for the broader community. Sparking innovation in learning is the journey to the Promised Land – and will have to occur in spite of our school system. Twenty years ago the definition of technology in education was to add computers to the school computer ‘lab.’ Fifteen years ago, teachers began to get a computer station at the front of the class. Whether the teacher had the skills, inclination, or incentives to use the tools, the computer sat next to the teacher’s desk where most of the learning continued to get organized and transmitted. Ten years ago, computers were added as an activity pod in the back of the class, so as to not disturb the real learning going on in desks and chairs nailed to the floor.

In the past number of years, one to one laptop initiatives have begun to pepper the landscape. Having access to a personal digital, Internet-enabled learning device is a necessary but insufficient condition for 21st century learning. Indeed, traditional school systems will continue to grapple with the transformational potential of the Internet. The most compelling opportunities for sparking innovation and learning for the next 10 years will happen outside the formal and traditional school systems: community centers, museums, libraries, camps, Sunday schools, after-school, healthcare educational outreach opportunities, virtual schools, gaming clubs, user groups.

Cleveland Jewish Video Project

What if we established a Cleveland Jewish community video channel on YouTube (or another current or future online platform for community building)? Learning and innovation in the 21st century has shifted from millennia of oral traditions, to a few centuries of written traditions, to an emergent tradition of rich media and video-based learning and literacy.

One million videos are loaded onto the Internet every day. We are living through the transition from the priesthood and the period before the Guttenberg press to the democratization and the broad availability of reading materials. The difference is that it took the written tradition more than 250 years to hit the inflection of creating a mass market. The transition to rich media and video literacies is happening right in front of us. But it is not only the medium. Storytelling and re-telling over the past decade are intersecting with what we call a mashup culture of re-mixing stories with simple and incredibly powerful tools. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people re-mix pieces of other people’s stories on the Internet through video editing tools. Sometimes this is for aesthetics like adding a new track for layering an additional instrument. Sometimes it’s the community service of translating a compelling video in one language to another.

The Jewish Cleveland Video Project could be a video repository about the community by us for us. An active project for bubbies to tell their stories of early Cleveland, Jewish jocks and wanna be sports heroes, musicians, storytellers, professionals, world travelers, community activists, and devout scholars. No producers, no TV guide, no experts. We could create a series of simple incentives including ongoing competitions and rewards excellence, creativity, and inventiveness. The video project would be augmented by video blogs, community wikis embedding video content, and a wide range of collaborative technologies such as mobile smartphone. In a matter of a year the project could aspire to one million stories and re-mixed episodes from the life and times of a vibrant community intentionally engaged in a re-imagination, re-invention, and re-invigoration.

The Video Project could contain both scheduled personalized channels: your Rabbi’s favorite lineup, the top 10 video pieces suggested from your mahjong girlfriend, whatever self-identified sports jocks are watching, or you can simply browse and discover your own experiences. Instead of letting television ‘produce’ the event for us, we can collaboratively produce our own town hall meetings or debates on any topic at any time. We can also re-watch, re-mix, and reuse those episodes anytime in the future.

Learning is Not a Spectator Sport

We celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first man on the moon that gave us the now well-known and famous picture of our world from the outside looking back at us. That map of the world shaped important cognitive worldviews like “Think Global Act Local,” the rise of the environmental movement, and, I think it is fair to say, the resurrection of the Jewish tikkun olam. We’ve all seen John King or another broadcaster use Google Earth to show us a dynamic picture of a hurricane, election result, North Korean missile launch, or a visualization of Osama Bin Laden’s assumed most recent hideout in the mountain ranges between Afghanistan and Pakistan. These incredibly powerful tools inherently call for collaboration and interaction, and not simply one-way communication and demonstrations of events, out there.

What if we took Google Earth and constructed a series of ongoing projects to layer the stories and experiences of our community over space and time? The Cleveland Jewish Community Google Earth Education Project could include the story of every community member’s family tree told in stories, pictures, sounds, and movies, and the ability to travel back through time across the globe.

For example, my family comes from a small town called Selisht that was wiped off the face of the earth during the World War II. But its coordinates on the map are well known and the stories of the shtetl and the families who escaped are important educational and personal stories that I would like to contribute to my family’s and to our community’s collective memory. We could work on an extended set of oral histories and reconstruction projects with the historical societies and museums and individuals all across our community to recreate the Jewish historical experience in Cleveland, again with pictures, stories, sounds and movies. Jewish summer camp experiences over time and across space, the stories layered across space and time of Jewish sports heroes, entertainers, labor union organizers, scholars. A Google Earth project with our sister city in Bet She’an, Israel is a natural. Google Earth projects are an invitation for young people to discover and participate in their own education. Learning, it has been said is not a spectator support.

A community-based Google Earth education project could become its own eco-system thriving with user contributions, much like the Apple iPod phenomenon. Every community center, library, museum, Sunday school, or health center, for example, could have a Cleveland Jewish Community Google Earth education projection system that illuminates the surface of a large piece of educational furniture. Hands-on individual or group activities change the projected images from street-level images to riding a magic carpet at 50,000 ft above the earth.

To make learning more relevant, it must be engaging and connected to our values of sharing with our young people their connection to the long and varied stories of Jewish life through the ages. This type of project is also an invitation for inter-generational learning and strengthening the bonds among grandparents, parents, and children. The education gained by participants includes research skills, documenting, reflecting, synthesizing, developing narratives, reasoning, and effective communication. The project could be replicated and re-mixed by communities both near and far.

Economic Development and Technology Commercialization

Over the past 50 years, and for the next 50 years, the center of gravity of human interaction in the urban setting is shifting from European and North American cities to the megalopolises of Asia, Latin American and soon in parts of Africa. Cities of 10 million or more will shift the center of the world economy forever. A growing middle class in these cities will redefine the meaning of fashion, music, food, entertainment, and mass culture. The social chaos occasioned by this dynamic will disrupt traditional norms, values, and social patterns everywhere. We will necessarily become more connected, multi-cultural, with a broader appetite for culinary choices, palate for fashion and aesthetics, consumers of world music. If we are forward leaning we will also find ways of becoming co-producers of the emerging forms of mass culture.

The economic future of Jewish Cleveland and Greater Cleveland at large is linked to our ability to think strategically and create a broad vision of the future of our community. Technology needs to be an integral part of the vision, not placed into its own silo so we can ‘check off” technology on a grocery list. The vision must include a self-conception of our community as forward thinking, technologically savvy and committed to seeing itself as capable and determined to intentionally embrace the new technologies as a vital part of our very future.

Right now, the most common meeting place for technology professionals in Greater Cleveland is the check-in line at Continental Airlines on Monday morning, as they leave families, civic interests, and the local economy for 4 days, most every week for assignments outside the region. We should embrace an innovative and unorthodox set of practices to create incentives that attract hundreds of new IT entrepreneurs to Cleveland, perhaps through successive rounds of international competitions for great technology ideas that will change the world and Cleveland too. New ideas, risk-taking, social networks in new markets, access to new sources of capital, and different supply chains are all parts of the approach we can and should take. There are relatively few incentives for the current establishment to take this leap of faith. The alternative is for communities and community-based social networks to launch and model this activity in concern with community foundations. Certainly the Jewish community of Cleveland, through its own means and in collaboration with other resources like TiE Ohio (Talent, Ideas, Entrepreneurship; see http://ohio.tie.org ) with its origins in the Indian community can be at the forefront.

This community’s commitment to tikkun olam should include supporting those most at risk. However, if the community itself is not to be a recipient of someone else’s charity, we need to have our networked improvement community also include a commitment to tikkun olam through innovative practices that incentivize new ideas, ties them to relevant challenges here and elsewhere to produce a catalyst for a new innovation economy.

Whatever It Takes – Final Words

There is a tendency to dismiss the latest technology platforms as yet more examples of nerds amusing themselves. At best, some would say, we technologists are permanently distracted and engaging in obfuscation that does little more than disrupt the remaining remnants of the rational world we once knew. More charitably, Cleveland’s Jewish community and the broader community in Northeast Ohio rarely see our own identities and our vision of our own futures as being tied to the transformational potential of this new generation of advanced technology-enabled collaboration tools and solutions. It may be changing, enabling, or transforming some other community but ‘not here’, not in my back yard.

Yet the mishnaic imperative for tikkun olam challenges us to address in new ways our common future in the face of unprecedented economic challenges, social dislocation, and a way of life at risk.

All around the world, and certainly here in Cleveland and in our Jewish community, we see the spirit of tikkun olam offering us an opportunity for what anthropologist Mike Wesch calls a “new conversation” -- a new social pragmatism and call for “whatever it takes by whatever means it necessary.” The networked improvement community approach to building new kinds of infrastructure, re-thinking education, or engaging in unorthodox approaches to new economic development is neither utopian nor technologically deterministic. Rather, an intentional community can be formed and extended with the aid and progressive use of collaborative tools. While anything but a completed blueprint, I hope the Jewish community here and elsewhere, students, professionals, scholars, activists and nerds alike, will reflect and build a more complete and coherent strategy to enable us to re-imagine, re-invent, and re-invigorate our community.

Striving to contribute to the building of a mosaic of innovative, authentic communities bound together through a commitment to the leveraging of new technologies is a noble undertaking that most any rabbi in the Mishnahic or present era would find worthy.

Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, OH

Tikuun Olam, The Internet, and The Future of Cleveland

An edited published version of this piece appeared in The Cleveland Jewish News. I haven't written about the Internet through a Jewish lens before. I welcome feedback. Part II of this piece appears tomorrow in my blog.

The phrase tikkun olam may resonate with many readers of the Cleveland Jewish News as an imperative to repair or improve the world. In the Mishnah, the phrase mip'nei tikkun ha-olam ("for the sake of tikkun of the world") indicates that a practice should be followed not because it is required by Biblical law, but because it helps avoid social chaos.

It’s a big, even audacious idea that informs the history and ethos of the Jewish people.

Fast-forward some 1,800 years to the current era of unprecedented change and disruption. Ours is a global village filled with opportunities for tikkun olam, which today are interpreted as good deeds that inform personal commitments, community action and national and international service, Our efforts often focus outwards to those less fortunate in faraway lands like the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia, and Argentina. Closer to home, tikkun olam finds common expression by our support of the frail, the marginalized, and the at-risk. These important humane acts of charity and kindness are signature features of great Jewish communities like Cleveland.

But the social chaos is not “out there” alone. The Internet began to change everything starting 30 years ago, making the boundaries between ”there” and ”here” less than a click away. The Internet has forever changed the way media mediate our culture. Gone is the era of the television news anchor being the “most trusted man in America.” Gone is the deference to the editorial page. Gone too are the traditional economic models of selling our culture and our news.

For the first time in history we have put our scientific innovation to work to create a worldwide advanced telecommunication infrastructure: the Internet. It has contributed to the massive dislocation of traditional economies and communities like ours; the Internet giveth and the Internet taketh. And while it began by privileging the privileged, the Internet knows no borders, honors no hierarchy or authority, and is fundamentally built on an interactive communications protocol, an entirely new and radical new way for massive numbers of humans to interact and collaborate with each other, whether conducting business, educating, governing, or organizing our communal activities

The Internet helps search and deliver goods and services in a more efficient manner than ever before; from anywhere in the world. It also contributes significantly, and without hesitation, to the decimation of the once invincible bedrock institutional giants like the auto industry. The only certainty that remains is that there are no certainties. The pace of change will continue to accelerate and the quality of life and the very viability of once vibrant communities all around us are at risk. Change brings winners and losers.

Our Jewish community of Northeast Ohio and our Greater Cleveland community face huge risks. Most everyone has a story about loss or fear of losing a child to the opportunities that present themselves in the global internet-enabled economy. As a community we are well beyond collective denial. If we look carefully at tikkun olam, if we are to avoid even more social chaos, we have no choice but to undertake unorthodox actions to engage in a collective set of practices that will, if we are intentional, lead to re-imagining, re-inventing, and ultimately re-invigorating both our Jewish and broader communities. How we use and respond to these new dynamics is ultimately a personal and community-wide set of choices.

Technology and the Land of Giants

Technology, it has been said, is anything that was invented after you were born. Anything that gets invented after you have turned 30 is against the natural order of things. For most of us reading these words in the pages of the Cleveland Jewish News, the Internet represents nothing less than a tsunami facing our cities, regions, and most every way we live our lives and make our livings. Most people’s instincts are to try to outrun the tsunami of technology by deferring the challenges to the next generation and to ride out the storm.

But there is no way to avoid the tsunami and all that lies in its wake. The only way to overcome the epic challenges is to directly confront the technological imperative and apply the genius, faith, gumption, and courage of our individual and collective beings to re-invent ourselves. In the next 25 years, tikkun olam needs to translate into repairing our world, right here, as an integrated and intentional effort in making Cleveland and the Jewish community in Cleveland the most innovative, connected, and Internet-aware community we can. If we are to realize the noble goal of repairing the world around us, we need to be able to balance our instincts to improve the lot of others with the more difficult challenge of realizing the deep and profound challenges we face in improving our own communities.

Douglas Engelbart, engineer and humanist, created the roadmap for a network-based, connected community that can help in our task. Now in his late 80s, Engelbart and his lab in the 1960s at the Stanford Research Institute pioneered almost every major technology innovation we now associate with the Internet Age: interactivity, the mouse, hyper-linking, video conferencing over the internet, social networking tools, blogs, wikis. He discovered and demonstrated almost all of them at the “mother of all demos” in 1968 (http://tinyurl.com/9km7).

Reflecting on the prophetic insights of that demonstration, Alan Kay, co-founder of the personal computer with Steven Wozniak and the pioneer of the graphical user interface, shared “I don’t know what Silicon Valley will do when it runs out of Doug’s ideas. … Doug was like a biblical prophet. His talks were not for information, but to show a promised land that needed to be found and the seas and rivers we needed to cross to get there ...”

Beyond Engelbart’s brilliant engineering was an even more impressive set of philosophical and prophetic insights for technology, a geek version of tikkun olam which he called “networked improvement communities.” The humanist impulse in Engelbart’s life work is that the Internet can be an unprecedented and powerful platform for improving the human condition. It enables like-minded people to share knowledge, experience, and caring in more impactful ways, and work together to contribute, learn and reciprocate in building common destinies moving forward.

A networked improvement community is an intentional community working to re-imagine, re-invent, and re-invigorate its members. Not exactly a Super Sunday event or joining a synagogue committee for a year, building a networked improvement community is a journey to a promised land filled with giants. It starts with embracing new language, new ideas, new tools, and being prepared to at least consider questioning some of the received wisdom, language, and ideas that have long represented our own sacred cows.

Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smart Cities and the University

Today's Chronicle of Higher Education posted this edited version of the blog entry below. As always, thanks in advance for the feedback.

As much as the Internet has changed everything about our lives it is about to change everything about the cities we live in. I think America’s great universities need to embrace a new research and learning agenda that focuses on the engineering, sociology, health, and economy of the ‘smart city’.

The number of people living in urban areas is projected to grow from 3 billion today to 5 billion by 2030. For the first time in our collective experience as humans, more people are living in cities than in rural settings. Urbanization is a global trend impacting citizens, governments, and industries. For most American research universities the topic of urbanization and its future is an externalized condition to be studied as something happening out there. Many of our great research universities are situated in cities that are themselves shrinking. To be sure, there is much active research on the impact of urbanization on critical considerations like the environment. For example, the world's 20 most populous cities alone are responsible for 75 percent of the planet's energy consumption. But not unlike research in the 1950s and 60s on population control and the green revolution, most of the research on the future of the city is directed on the big challenges facing the human condition reflected in the megalopolises of South Asia and the oceans of slums teaming with humanity in “messy” places like India and “dark” places like Nigeria. There is plenty of debate as to whether global technologies based on the Internet will homogenize the human experience across the globe or whether they may indeed exacerbate the divides. A second, perhaps in the long term more impactful trend is beginning to emerge as the Internet matures and expands from being a technology based on connecting computers and mobile devices towards a technology that connect everything, including the rise of ‘smart cities’.

When history is written a hundred years from now, I think the next 10 years, until 2020 will turn out to be pivotal. The new global urbane experience will be undergirded by emergent technologies that are coming out of our labs and new technology ventures which together will make up the DNA of the smart city. Smart transportation systems and buildings that breathe and report their health are only the beginning. Sensors that both intelligently capture data on the quality of the air we breathe and simultaneously becomes the live lab for school children and post docs alike. Healthcare education and much of our health care can become proactive in the smart city as both consumers and providers are able to customize their experience with better intelligence related to the population’s general and specific health needs. The smart city will include not only access to a more transparent government but also enable citizens to participate more actively and directly than ever before.

Smart cities are coming. Whether we turn them into the locus of our future research and learning program is our choice. The integrated and rosy colored vision of the smart city that supports intentional community building and the rise of a new urbanism is contested terrain. As the stimulus package coming out of Washington tries to re-catalyze economic growth, job creation, and new skills for the nation’s future, the University is the recipient of much scarce public investment and the source of much of our country’s collective hope. Before our elected officials demand more accountability on how we spent the public purse associated with the stimulus package of 2009, the time is ripe to commit, among other critical research and learning agendas, to embrace the commitment to re-imagine, re-invent, and re-stimulate the urban experience as one based on a smart city created in the image of the mission of our universities, as a place that attracts the bright, the curious, those seeking inspiration and those committed to changing the world. There may be no better place to launch this university-centered smart city project than in the shrinking cities of America and Europe, home to some of our best universities who greatness was itself the product of a time to define knowledge centers as the cornerstone of the building of the industrial age.

Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University