Tag: countryside

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Urban-Rural Interdependency

Much of the discussion about economic growth and the availability of
broadband assumes there is a vast gulf between rural and urban areas.
I’ve written before about how, in some ways, trends in this century seem to be leading to something of a convergence of rural and urban areas.

So
I thought it especially interesting that the NTCA–The Rural Broadband
Association yesterday hosted a policy meeting in the US Capitol that was
titled: “Beyond Rural Walls: Identifying Impacts and Interdependencies
Among Rural and Urban Spaces”.

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I was there for the panel
discussion, along with Professor Sharon Strover of the College of
Communication at University of Texas in Austin and Professor Charles
Fluharty of the Department of Health Management and Policy at the
University of Iowa (who is also the CEO of the Rural Policy Research
Institute).

We covered the changing demographics and ambiguities
in the boundaries between urban and rural, broadband deployment and
adoption, and how to measure both the interdependencies between these
areas as well as the impact of broadband communications. Perhaps there
were too many knotty issues for one morning!

Since the NTCA will be making available further information about this, I’m now just going to highlight my own observations.

There
are many examples of rural communities using broadband in innovative
and intelligent ways. One example is the work of the counties in
Appalachian Kentucky, one of the poorest parts of the US.

But most
of these communities don’t know about each other, which means that each
has to re-invent the wheel instead of learning from others’ experience
and experiments. That’s one reason ICF is planning a global virtual
summit for these communities.

The limited distribution of this
news also encourages major national/global philanthropic foundations to
give up hope for rural areas in the US. Dr. Fluharty noted that less
than five percent of philanthropy goes to American rural areas, although
twenty percent of the population lives there.

He also emphasized
that doing something about rural broadband and development is a national
issue, not something to be merely dealt with locally. He even
classified it as a national security issue because the countryside holds
so much of the country’s critical resources – our food, not the least.

The
problem is that for many national leaders, especially members of
Congress, the mental image of the countryside is of past decline and
abandonment. The national media reinforce that image. So they may feel
it’s a hopeless problem and/or have no idea what might be happening that
ought to be encouraged.

Many of our current national leaders also
have forgotten the common understanding of the founders of the USA that
a large country would only succeed if it was brought together. That’s
why building postal roads is one of the few specific responsibilities
given to Congress in the constitution. It’s why the Erie Canal was
built, the Land Grant colleges, etc. We seem to have forgotten what led
to our success. In this century, physical roads aren’t enough. Digital
communications are just as important.

Of course, not all public
officials are oblivious. There was a keynote by Lisa Mensah, Under
Secretary for Rural Development of the US Department of Agriculture.

Representative
Bill Johnson (Republican of Ohio’s 6th District) opened the conference
with a statement about the importance of rural broadband for urban
economies. Senator Al Franken of Minnesota closed the conference by
saying he viewed rural broadband in the same way people viewed rural
electrification decades ago – a basic necessity and common right of the
American people. Or, as he said “A no-brainer”.

Along with these
misperceptions on the part of media, national officials and foundations
is the failure to recognize the increasing integration of rural and
urban areas. The boundaries are getting fuzzy.

Even residence is
no longer clear. There are an increasing number of people – especially
knowledge workers and creative folks – who may spend 3-4 days a week in a
city and 3-4 days a week in the countryside. They may contact you, via
broadband Internet, and you won’t know which location they’re in. Are
they rural residents or urban residents or is that an increasingly
meaningless question?

Finally, in the question-and-answer part of
the conference, one of the many operators of rural communications
companies there pointed out that they know how to deploy broadband and
run it, but that their communities need help figuring out what to do
with it. Of course, that provided me an opportunity to discuss ICF’s
accelerator program and workshops that help community leaders do exactly
that.

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

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The Digital Imperative Of Rural Libraries

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The maker movement is one of the hottest trends in the public library world. Maker spaces in libraries have the latest in 3D printing technology, digital media tools and other tools for the creative person who wants to make things. These are full-fledged STEAM (science, tech, engineering, arts and math) labs.

As you might expect, there are maker spaces somewhere in most major urban and suburban libraries.

But what is perhaps surprising and intriguing is the growth of maker spaces in small towns and rural areas — and why maker spaces are especially needed in those places and why those areas are fertile ground for maker spaces.

The countryside is known for the mechanical skills of many of its residents. Perhaps these skills were developed in response to distance from major service hubs and the necessity to keep farm and household equipment going.

For at least the last ten years, much traditional mechanical equipment has become computerized. And engines have become more reliable. So mechanical skills just aren’t as useful anymore.

Or maybe they are. That is what I think has caught the attention of rural librarians. Leah Hamilton, the manager of the Phelps Library in a small upstate New York town that had one of the first makerspaces in the USA, puts it this way:

“The library is a place for idea-sharing, … Our region has a wealth of manufacturing industries, and these businesses require well-trained, highly qualified employees. … We can provide the tools for inspiration of invention and the betterment of people’s livelihoods.”

Considering their limited budgets, it’s amazing how many of these libraries in rural areas have built makerspaces.

These are in small towns in Wisconsin, with populations well under 10,000 residents, like Sauk City’s 3D printer or Lomira’s MediaLab. They’re in the old, but small (population 12,000), city of Beaufort, South Carolina.

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A couple of years ago, the Idaho Commission for Libraries began its “Make It At The Library” project, a network of makerspaces in small libraries across the state.

There are small and rural libraries with makerspaces arising in places as widespread as Maine, Montana, New Mexico, small town New Jersey, Canada and as far as the United Kingdom and New Zealand!

As interesting as the adoption of makerspaces is, it is part of a larger picture about the technology and leadership role of libraries in small towns and rural areas.

A few months ago, Professor Brian Whitacre of Oklahoma State University and Professor Colin Rhinesmith of the University of Oklahoma published interested research that dealt with another part of this larger picture:

“Rural libraries have long been a crucial part of the small-town way of life … Now we’ve found through a new study that rural libraries may also provide another important benefit: They may increase local rates of household broadband adoption.

“Our study found that, even after controlling for other things that likely influence broadband adoption (such as levels of income, education, and age), an additional library in a rural county was associated with higher residential broadband adoption rates … libraries were the only type of ‘community anchor institution’ to show any kind of relationship.”

Whether it is makerspaces or enabling necessary connections to the global Internet, these rural libraries are playing the role that all libraries should — fulfilling their potential as the central institution in a digital world and a knowledge economy.

© 2015 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/131154892399/the-digital-imperative-of-rural-libraries]

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Collaboration vs. Competition For Economic Growth

Lots of talk about the economy focuses on how individual businesses compete.  Generalizing from the situation of individual businesses, public officials who are responsible for the overall growth of their local economy also often talk about competition.  Making their cities “competitive in the world economy” or enabling their “residents to compete" are frequent phrases you hear.  

And they worry about where they stand in the competition with other cities.

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Even in today’s global economy, the biggest cities still envision themselves as standing alone, in competition with all other jurisdictions.

And, of course, with cash, tax and other incentives, local economic development officials will try to steal – i.e., compete – with distant or even nearby jurisdictions.

Granted that sometimes the word “competitive” is used merely to mean prosperous or good or something else positive.  But the use of the metaphor of competition can be misleading, even in those cases.

The fact that individual businesses often find themselves competing with
each other doesn’t mean that regions as a whole thrive by focusing on
competition with other regions.

Getting back to basics, an economy grows as people develop and exchange
specialized services/products and, in various ways, create new ideas and
services/products.  The better connected and more collaborative the residents of a region are with everyone else, the more likely they are to be creating more wealth and income for themselves.  This means that
overall economic growth of a region is much more about collaboration than
competition. 

The value of collaboration has begun to be heard
in some parts of the economic development profession. For example, John Jung, Chairman of the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF), wrote “Collaborative Innovation – the New Competitive Edge for Economic Development”.  From a conference on Global Competition and Collaboration in 2011, there was “New Building Blocks for Jobs and Economic Growth”.  The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania affirmed this idea: “We Need More Collaboration And Less Competition For Economic Growth”.

Unfortunately, most of the huge global cities have not yet seriously adopted this approach.  In contrast, an increasing number of smaller cities, towns and rural areas have come to the realization that they have a better future if they cooperate, collaborate and network.  

An interesting example is Mitchell, South Dakota, which has 15,000 people, but was among ICF’s Top 7 Most Intelligent Communities this year — among cities like Rio, New Taipei and Columbus Ohio.  They were in trouble a decade ago.  They had lost 30% of their population, especially young people, like many other small communities in the countryside.  

Mitchell turned that situation around.  They have three Internet service providers that deliver gigabit bandwidth.  They’ve seen the growth of tech companies and precision agriculture.  Their unemployment rate is 3%, with hundreds of open jobs.  Unusual for a small city, it has its own workforce development director.  

At the recent ICF Summit in Toronto, Bryan Hisel, Executive Director, Mitchell Area Development Corporation, put it simply: “entrepreneurship is our way of thinking here.”  So the leaders of Mitchell view their small size as an advantage, not a disadvantage.  That entrepreneurial culture of its people came before they had broadband.  

With that entrepreneurial spirit, you’d think that Mitchel is all about the competition.  But Hisel pointed out that all the things people elsewhere have started to talk about — especially collaboration — comes naturally to small communities.  So Mitchell has extended its service to nearby communities and even provides advice to small cities that others might see as competitors.

Perhaps the tradition of collaboration in parts of the countryside is also why there was increased interest at the summit in my proposal for a global virtual metropolis that connects small cities like Mitchell – a connection for economic success that arises from collaboration rather than competition with one another.

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/122336332341/collaboration-vs-competition-for-economic-growth]

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The Decentralization Of Health Care

Eric Topol is a physician and editor-in-chief at Medscape.  He was interviewed on the Colbert Report last year.  His new book, published last month, has been reviewed in the major newspapers.  Yet this book, “The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands”, hasn’t received the attention it deserves.

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The book is about the future of health care – what’s already happening and what could be coming that’s even better.

Topol’s theme is that new technology and practices make it possible to democratize medical care – to move away from the traditional, paternalistic, hierarchical relationship between doctor and patient.

Hence the title which inverts the traditional words of a medical receptionist that the “doctor will see you now.”

Here’s a sample of some of his key arguments:

“… the world is changing.  Patients are generating their own data on their own devices.  Already any individual can take unlimited blood pressures or blood glucose measurements.”

“We are embarking on a time when each individual will have all their own medical data and the computer power to process it in the context of their own world.  There will be comprehensive medical information about a person that is eminently accessible, analyzable and transferable.”

“Today patients can rapidly diagnose their skin lesion or child’s ear infection without a doctor.  That’s just the beginning.  … your smartphone will become central to labs, physical exams, and even medical imaging; … you can have ICU-like monitoring in the safety, reduced expense, and convenience of your home.”

“The doctor will see you now via your smartphone screen … they will incorporate sharing your data – the full gamut from sensors, images, labs, and genomic sequence, well beyond an electronic medical record.”

The book is very well researched and comprehensively covers all kinds of ways that technology is interacting with and affecting health care.  Dr. Topol provides dozens of examples from all over the field – a laboratory on a chip, smart phones with all kinds of attachments that enable easy measurement of health conditions anywhere, etc.

As a physician, he rightly is concerned about the doctor-patient relationship.   As a sometime patient myself, this is of course of personal interest to me as well.

But more than that obvious reason, why else is the picture he presents so important?

With my perspective on how technology will affect where andhow we will live and work, his story is as much about the decentralization of
medical care as it is about the democratization.

With this decentralization, Dr. Topol envisions the
patient’s home becoming an instant medical lab or even a temporary hospital
wing.  This means that you can dramatically
improve the quality of your health care even if your home is in the
countryside, miles from a major medical center in the center of a metropolis.

And it’s this distance from medical care that frequently
worries those who live in the countryside. 
So when the transformation of medical care becomes more common, one more
traditional disadvantage of rural living that will disappear.

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis

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A Virtual Metropolis In The Countryside?

People who live in big metropolises, like New York, London or Hong Kong, often say that they can always find someone within a few miles who has a special skill they need to complete some project or build a business.  I’ve pointed out that the close proximity of millions of people with so many different skills is part of what has made cities successful economic engines during the industrial era.

When the population of your town is just a few thousand, there is a much smaller likelihood you’ll find the special skill you need nearby – and thus you’ll be less likely to achieve what you have in mind.

In the US alone, the Census Bureau has noted in its report “Patterns of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Population Change” that 10% of Americans live in one of the 576 small urban areas (where there is at least one urban cluster of less than 50,000, but at least 10,000 people).   That’s about 32 million people.

Another 6% lived in neither major metropolitan areas nor even these small urban areas.  That’s just under 20 million people.

In this century, with broadband Internet, physical proximity is no longer necessary for people to collaborate and share their skills in a common project.  Yet the small towns of these more than 50 million people are mostly not connected to each other. 

So here’s my wild idea for the day: why not create a virtual metropolis of millions from the people in the small towns and communities of the countryside?

Imagine if even half of those 20 million (or 52 million) people who live outside the big metropolises could work together and be combined to act as if they were physically next door – while not actually living in such crowded conditions.

Such a network or virtual aggregation of small towns would offer their residents a much higher chance of succeeding with their business ideas and making a better living.  If someone, for example, had the engineering talents to design a new product, that person might more likely find the necessary marketing talent somewhere in that network of millions of people.

Clearly, anyone connected to the Internet can try to reach out to anyone else whether that person lives in a small town or a big city.  But a network of small towns alone might encourage greater collaboration because of the shared background of country life and the perceived greater friendliness (and less wariness) of non-urban residents.  In most small towns, people are used to working with each other.  This would just be a virtual extension of the same idea.

Initially, of course, people would feel most comfortable with those in the same region, such as within North America.  Over time, as people interact more with each other on a global basis, that comfort level will expand.

Whether on a regional or global basis, this virtual metropolis could compete on a more even playing field and even establish a unique brand for the people and companies located there.  It would make it possible for rural residents to keep their quality of life and also make a decent living.

What do you think?

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© 2014 Norman Jacknis

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Small Town, Big Story?

Can a town of 2,300 people in the countryside of Mississippi create a future for itself with broadband?  The answer is yes if you speak to the visionary leader of Quitman – its Mayor, Eddie Fulton – and about two dozen community leaders from business, education, churches, health care and other fields. 

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Quitman is not what you might think of as the likely star of a broadband story.  It has suffered de-population, economic difficulties, community tensions and all the other problems people in many small towns across America have witnessed.

Then along comes the Mississippi-based telecommunications company, C-Spire, who announced it would deploy gigabit Internet connection through fiber to the home in a small number of communities.  The key requirement was that a fairly sizable percentage of the community’s residents had to sign up for the service in advance.

Quitman was the smallest town to take on this challenge.  It would not normally be considered because of its size, but they had such a strong commitment to building on broadband that the company decided to make the investment.  Now, Quitman is ahead of the others in deployment and plans for developing their community.

Anyone who has ever been involved in a big technology project knows that the biggest obstacles to success are not technical issues, but human issues.  That’s why the chances that Quitman will succeed are good.  They have the necessary leadership, motivation and willingness to innovate.

They’ve also been helped by one of the long forgotten secrets of America’s agricultural and economic success – the extension service.  In particular, Professor Roberto Gallardo  at Mississippi State University Center For Technology Outreach has helped to educate the community and been their adviser.

And so it was that last week I was in Quitman leading what the Intelligent Community Forum calls a Master Class, as part of its community accelerator program. 

I pointed out that, rather than being an anomaly, a small city like Quitman could be the quintessential broadband success story.  I told the community leaders that a number of recent studies have shown that broadband has a much greater impact on small towns and rural areas than in cities.  As I’ve written before, this is not surprising.  Big cities provide many traditional ways that many people can interact with each other.  It is only when residents of small communities get connected to everyone else through the Internet that they can start to level the playing field.

I reviewed the historical context that is opening up new opportunities for rural communities.  I provided various examples, from elsewhere in North America and beyond, of the ways broadband can make a difference to the countryside.  The point of the examples was to give the community leaders ideas and also to see small towns, like theirs, doing great things with broadband. 

Then to bring the strategy and examples home, I asked them what they would do with broadband when it was deployed.  The community leaders separated into three groups, one each focused on education, health and economic growth.  They had a good discussion and came up with good ideas that will enable them to move fast when the connectivity is available later this year.

The signature line of the old song “New York, New York”, written at the height of that city’s industrial prominence, proclaimed: “If I can make it in New York, I’ll make it anywhere”.  This century, in the post-industrial era, the line should be: if broadband helps make Quitman a success story, then it can happen anywhere.

I’ll keep you apprised of their progress.

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© 2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/97730847152/small-town-big-story]

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Will The Best & Brightest Return To The Countryside?

There have been recent news stories about those coming and going and possibly returning to life in the countryside. 

A couple months ago, the New York Times had a major story about older folks returning to rural life after business careers elsewhere – “A Second Career, Happily in the Weeds”.  (Among others, it featured Debra Sloane, a former Cisco colleague.

Then this past weekend, in a kind of counterpoint, the Times’ Sunday Review section had an op-ed article about a woman who tried and gave up on living in the countryside – “Giving Up My Small-Town Fantasy”.   While she returned to the city, she also wrote that she moved to a small town because:

We were betting on the fact that we wouldn’t be alone in fleeing the big city for a small town. Urban living has become unthinkably expensive for many middle-class creative types. A 2010 study from the Journal of Economic Geography found a trifecta of reasons some rural areas have grown instead of shrunk: the creative class, entrepreneurial activity and outdoor amenities. In 2012, a University of Minnesota research fellow called the influx of 30-to-40-somethings into rural Minnesota towns a “brain gain” — flipping the conventional wisdom on the exodus from the boonies to the big city.

To further the idea that the traditional brain drain from rural areas is changing, the well-respected Daily Yonder had a feature article last month summarizing research on “The Rural Student Brain Gain”.  As they note:

The common wisdom is that rural America’s “best and brightest” want to leave home. New research shows these students are no more likely to want to leave than their counterparts. And when they do go, they have a stronger desire to return.

There is no doubt that many young people who can leave will do so – which more likely means the brightest who can get into major universities.  To some extent, all young people want to see the world beyond where they grew up. 

Almost a hundred years ago, Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis wrote what became a very popular song as many young men went off to Europe in World War I.

How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm
After they’ve seen Paree’
How ya gonna keep ‘em away from Broadway
Jazzin around and paintin’ the town

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By the way, this is not just a rural question.  A generation ago or so, parents in New York City were asking the same question – would the young return after seeing California?  Feeding this concern, for instance, was an article in the New York Times on October 1, 1980 about so many New Yorkers living in Los Angeles that two of the big high schools in Brooklyn held alumni reunions there.

So while we don’t want the young to feel they are being kept captive, the question is will they return to their countryside origins or something like it?

To answer that question, there are others that need to be answered first. 

In a post-industrial, global, Internet-connected economy, can young people still feel they are part of the larger world? Can they have as many opportunities for fulfillment and success back home as in the “big city”?

The answer is yes, the potential is there.  But the young are still leaving because too few rural communities have done the things they need to do in order to open up those opportunities for their brightest young people.  These lagging leaders haven’t built up the broadband necessary to connect both young and old to the world, nor have they helped people understand what they can do with that broadband connection, nor have they focused on the larger issues of developing a community anyone would want to live in if they had a choice in the matter.

And those who have given up hope for their rural communities because they know people there can never earn the megabucks found on Wall Street?  They should be informed by other research, including a fascinating, classic study by Professor Gundars Rudzitis of the University of Idaho, in his article in Rural Development Perspectives, “Amenities Increasingly Draw People to the Rural West”:

More people are moving to rural areas for reasons that have nothing to do with employment.  … the rural West is one of the fastest growing regions in the United States. …  Surveys in the 1970’s began to show that, if given a choice, people prefer to live in small towns and even in rural areas.

Amenities such as environmental quality and pace of life were becoming important in explaining why people move. The apparent sudden preference of people for rural life shocked many academics and planners because rural areas were thought to be at a major disadvantage compared with urban areas. 

These findings also were a surprise because they conflicted with the major assumptions of migration theory, or why people move. Simply put, people were thought to move because they wanted to increase or maximize their incomes. … This approach, however, failed to explain why people moved out of cities into places like the rural West.

…  People who migrate to high-amenity counties are often assumed to be retirees, as the growth and development of States like Arizona and Florida bears out. In our survey, however, only 10 percent of the new migrants were over 65 years of age. Instead, migrants were more likely to be young, highly educated professionals.

These studies and stories about people moving from city to country and back make clear that these decisions are more complicated than the headlines indicate.  And broadband connectivity will upset these patterns even more. 

Indeed, this new picture of what is going on may tell us why the best and brightest of the countryside might want to return after they’ve seen Paris (or New York or San Francisco).

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/97138255998/will-the-best-brightest-return-to-the-countryside]

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Only One Way To Get Broadband?

For the first time ever, there was a Master Class focused on rural communities held two weeks ago as part of the annual summit of the Intelligent Community Forum.  There were people from Europe, the USA and Canada, Asia and as far away as New Zealand in the class.

Part of the focus of the class was on how rural areas can get broadband.  Too often there is the assumption that broadband and fiber optics are the same thing. 

One of my former colleagues used to describe the passion of some broadband advocates for fiber connections as a kind of “Fiber Taliban”.  But while fiber makes economic sense in densely populated urban areas, it becomes very expensive to deploy in the countryside.  As a practical matter, exclusive use of fiber is a dream that stands in the way of getting broadband to the countryside.  This may be one situation where, as the old line goes, “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”

In the class, I pointed out that just as there isn’t only one way for a person to get from Point A to Point B, there isn’t only one way for a person to get broadband. 

Like many people, I used to think that the laws of physics provide a natural cap on the amount of data that can go through the air.  And, in a theoretical sense, that is still true.  But the engineers have nevertheless made dramatic improvements. 

Verizon Wireless, for example, now usually range of 10-20 MB, although in NYC, it’s been independently measured above 30.  Its 4G is, according to Verizon, ten times the speed of 3G.

A couple of weeks ago, Huawei promised more.

Huawei Technologies officials say the giant tech vendor has successfully tested a WiFi service that hit more than 10 gigabits per second, a speed that is 10 times faster than what is currently commercially available.

There are a variety of ways that data can travel over the air.  The most well-established, alternatives include satellite, Wi-Fi and standard fixed wireless.  Free space optics, pictured below, offers a large pipe that can be especially useful for rugged territory. 

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Also of interest is the future use of “white space” as television goes digital.

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And balloons, which act as flexible and inexpensive towers.  Google has proposed balloons at high altitudes.  But even below the aviation floor of 500 feet, balloons can provide coverage over a wide swath of countryside.

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The Internet protocol doesn’t care what the communications medium is, so you can combine different methods to provide broadband to different kinds of places

By the way, there is also a lesson here in another important aspect of deploying broadband into the countryside – funding it.  The most successful broadband projects have usually combined more than one purpose:

  • High speed communications
  • Healthcare
  • Education and libraries
  • Business development
  • Smart grid and management of other infrastructure
  • Etc.

This combination opens up more sources of funds and means more people have a reason to use the broadband, thus making the project successful and sustainable.

This is a natural approach in really remote places.  A couple of the folks in the class came from Wanganui in New Zealand.  That town’s Mayor described their bottom up approach in which each farmer extends the network further into the countryside.  And, if you’re thinking this is just some semi-rural, small town place, look at this picture of what their broadband project eventually has to cover.

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©2014 Norman Jacknis

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