A Guide Book For Newcomers To The Connected Countryside

In the 19th century, there was a movement to reject the then developing modern industrial society and live in nature as isolated individuals.
Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” provides a bit of the flavor of that world view.

That’s clearly not our world. In the past several years, a massive global migration to cities has been part of the conventional wisdom and has been frequently cited in various media.

But less noticed, although as important, is the exodus by young professionals from cities to the countryside. In various workshops, presentations and blog posts, I’ve pointed out that while many rural areas are dying, others are flourishing.

These newcomers to the countryside are not going there to reject our technological world. Instead, the 21st century world and its advanced communications capabilities are what make it possible for them to live in a place where they prefer the quality of life. They are living in the countryside, but very much a part of the world.

A Stateline article, “Returning to the Exurbs: Rural Counties Are Fastest Growing”, highlights the relevant comments of Professor Joel Garreau, comparing this to the earlier exurbs of three decades ago:

“workers no longer need to be confined to one place. Professionals with certain skills could work and live where they wanted—and the world would come to them in the guise of a brown UPS truck … today’s urban exiles aren’t looking for a lengthy commute from the far suburbs to a downtown office. … They’re looking to completely eradicate the notion of commuting to work and toiling from 9 to 5.”

Moreover, this is a phenomenon in many technologically advanced nations, as noted four years ago in William van den Broek’s article, “Toward a digital urban exodus”.

One of the sites on the internet that documents the successes, challenges and hardships of these new residents is the Urban Exodus. It was created by one of them – Alissa Hessler, who moved from the high-tech center of Seattle to rural Maine several years ago. On the website, there are already stories of about 50 couples and individuals who made the move.

Recently, Hessler wrote what amounts to a thoughtful, practical and well-illustrated guide book based on what she has learned from her own and others’ experiences – “Ditch The City and Go Country: How to Master the Art of Rural Life From a Former City Dweller.”

This is required reading if you’re considering such a move full time, or even living in the countryside for 2, 3, 4 days a week.

If you’re a confirmed city dweller, it is still an interesting read. Especially the last two chapters on “earning a living” and “enjoying the good life” in the countryside can more sharply define the impact of technology and trends today than the cities that still are partly living off the inherited capital of the 20th century industrial age.

© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

A Small-Town Tech Program That Enables People To Make A Living

There’s been lots of talk about our transition from an industrial manufacturing economy to a digital economy. Many people have been caught in this transition, just as many young farmers were caught in the transition to the industrial era and ended up filling the slums of rapidly growing cities more than a hundred years ago. While we see low earnings growth in cities and suburbs, this has been especially a problem in small towns and rural areas.

With all the talk about the issue, there’s been very little action considering the size of the problem – particularly impactful programs to help these folks. And those that do exist usually deal with part of the one problem, say training but not placement or the other way around. That problem is in part due to silos that have been created by our laws.

Nevertheless, there are some programs worth watching, expanding and emulating. Digital Works, a non-profit organization which currently operates in Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, Ohio and Texas is a good example.

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This is not about creating more computer programming and other high-level jobs in big cities. Nor does it work on helping low-income people in areas with concentrations of traditional metropolitan city corporate employment, such as the successful Workforce Opportunity Services.

Instead, as you can tell from where they operate, Digital Works focuses on rural areas and small towns with high unemployment – the part of the economy that has been most left behind. As an example, one of their locations is Gallipolis, Ohio, about forty miles from the West Virginia border in southeastern Ohio. At its high point in 1960, almost 8,800 people lived there. The Census Bureau estimates there are fewer than 3,500 people there now.

These are also the places that require residents to travel the most to get to big (or even bigger) cities that have concentrated traditional employment in factories, offices and stores. So being able to make a living, by working digitally, in or near your home opens up all kinds of new economic opportunities.

Digital Works trains local people for contact center work that can be done anywhere there is sufficient Internet connectivity, either at home or at a work center. The goal is that the work pays better than minimum wage, with performance-based raises and promotional opportunities.

Digital Works handles the whole cycle that is necessary for the unemployed – recruitment, screening, training, placement, mentoring, development and retention. (It reminds me a bit of the transitional work programs for urban poor and ex-convicts that I helped run much earlier in my career.) They even work with their graduates to obtain the National Retail Foundation’s Customer Service Certification.

They will create remote work centers in partnership with local governments in those areas where broadband is not yet widely available. It’s worth noting that Digital Works is a subsidiary of Connected Nation, which itself is focused on increasing broadband deployment and adoption.

Digital Works is fulfilling the vision of the Internet as the foundation for expanded economic growth everywhere it can reach.

And, of course, to complete the circle, a large part of their effort is on developing relationships with companies that would pay the people to whom they are giving several weeks of training. These business relationships also ensure that the training provided is what employers are actually looking for – something that is often discussed in other training programs, but not so closely practiced as by Digital Works.

With a more global vision, one of the more interesting people to participate regularly in the Intelligent Community Forum’s activities is Stu Johnson, who directs Digital Works. He has said:

“There’s no other workforce training program that offers what we do—it’s really groundbreaking. We are able to offer employer-customized training to high-quality candidates, job-placement assistance, on-going mentorship, and even advanced training and career development. There is an excessive demand for these types of jobs, and Digital Works is connecting those employers with eager and trained job seekers.”

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It is hard to find external studies of programs like this, which operate with little overhead in areas of the country that don’t much national attention. But Diane Rekowski, Executive Director of the Northeast Michigan Council of Governments has noted that

“The best part about this program is that it is free to anyone, and the success in Ohio has shown a 97% placement rate in a paid job upon completion of the training. Whether you are a recent high school graduate or enjoying your retirement years, this is an opportunity to have a flexible career and potential for earning much more than minimum wage.”

Digital Works’ data shows that the program has an 85% graduation rate and that 91% of their placements retain employment for more than a year.

While this program won’t work for everyone, everywhere and it certainly isn’t turning its graduates into millionaires, it is the kind of thing that can make a tremendous difference in real lives as this video shows – https://vimeo.com/150681091 

© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved @NormanJacknis

The Rural Summit Of Europe

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The first of its kind European Rural Summit was held in Eindhoven, Netherlands on March 22 and 23.   This conference was hosted by the Netherlands’ Brabant Kempen region in collaboration with the Intelligent Community Forum.  

Attending were a couple hundred public officials, rural entrepreneurs (farmers and others) and experts in economic development, rural development, technology and telecommunications.  

Although proximity guaranteed a number of Dutch would be there, participants came from many European countries, including nearby ones like Denmark and Germany, as well as those much further away like Slovenia and Russia.  There were even a few Americans and a Canadian.  

I was asked to set the tone for the conference as its initial keynote speaker.    My themes, familiar to readers of this blog, were that:

• The increasing importance of the digital broadband-connected economy offers rural areas new opportunities that had been precluded by the industrial era’s requirements for mass, density and physical proximity— requirements far better satisfied in urban than rural areas.  This will be especially clear as full video interaction becomes more common, but it’s already starting.   As an example, since 2000 the rural population of France has increased after 150 previous years of decline.

• While broadband alone is not sufficient, if a rural area is connected, there are all sorts of applications to improve life — re-invigorating Main Street with augmented reality and new retail technology, tele-health, online education, precision farming and the like.  

• With a bit of creativity and flexibility in both technology and organizational structure, rural broadband is not an insurmountable challenge.  Indeed, under the umbrella of the KempenGlas cooperative effort, broadband is being installed not far from the site of the Summit in the more rural areas of the region

Although this message about the potential for a renaissance in the countryside has not been the one generally portrayed to city dwellers, it resonated quite well with the attendees who work with and in rural areas.  And these themes were picked up by other speakers.

Also at several points over these two days, people emphasized the interdependence — and, as I have noted, even the convergence — of rural and urban areas.    Drs. Elies Lemkes-Straver, General Director of ZLTO (Southern Agriculture and Horticulture Organization) took up this idea. Her organization of 15,000 farmers, operating under the motto “farmers connect and innovate”, has established relationships with green entrepreneurs, consumers and social organizations.

Although all the presentations were interesting, one particularly unusual talk was by Professor Nico Baken, professor at Delft University of Technology, focused on the changing nature of the economy and our current failure to properly measure what’s going on since we still use industrial era concepts.   He passionately advocated for not being limited by traditional measures of return on investment and instead considering the value of broadband in rural areas for the lives of people there and in cities.  This pleased many there for it makes it easier to get broadband deployment in the countryside.  

It may be surprising, as well, that one of the presentations at this rural conference was on AI and robotics, courtesy of Professor Maarten Steinbuch of the Eindhoven University of Technology.

Since I was in the Netherlands, I took the opportunity to do some exploration of the countryside in relative nearby areas of the Netherlands, France, Germany and Belgium.  The story in Europe, as elsewhere in rural areas of advanced economies, was one of increasing contrasts between the rural communities that are already showing strong evidence of growth and those that lag.  

While I had heard stories of abandoned farms from some participants, from what I could see along country roads, most of the arable land seemed to be under cultivation and the residents appeared to be relatively prosperous.  It helps that this area is a major wine producer, but that wasn’t all that farmers were growing or doing.  

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Aside from rural tourism in a land of chateaux/castles and the kind of manufacturing that is often placed on the far outskirts of cities, it was hard to tell whether the nascent digital economy seen in the rural US has a counterpart in Europe.

The Rural Summit wasn’t only for speeches, workshops and the various side trips attendees took.  There was also a strong desire to take action by establishing a network of rural leaders across Europe to help each other.  

Of course, I encouraged the leaders gathered in Eindhoven to go beyond that and help create a Virtual Metropolis that would connect their residents — and rural residents outside of Europe — for mutual economic, cultural and educational benefit.  This too received a positive reaction and do I’ll be moving forward to build the platform to make this possible.

© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

The Seeds Of Rural Economic Growth

I’ll be speaking at the Rural Summit for Europe to be held in Eindhoven, Netherlands tomorrow — I’ll be writing more about that later.  Coincidentally, last Friday, the Aspen Institute’s Community Strategies Group and Rural Development Innovation Group hosted a very good panel on rural entrepreneurship in the US.  

In addition to the Aspen folks, the panel consisted of:
• Lupe Ruiz, Co-Owner, Wing Champs
• Ines Polonius, CEO, Communities Unlimited
• Dennis West, CEO, Northern Initiatives
• Jeffrey Lusk, Executive Director, Hatfield McCoy Regional Recreation Authority

There are many potential entrepreneurs in the countryside.  If you think about it, the family farm is an example of entrepreneurship.

Even more so today, entrepreneurship is essential for the economic viability of rural areas in the face of the relatively shrinking rural population in the US because the traditional approaches aren’t working well.  

Two or three decades ago, some manufacturing plants moved to rural areas to save costs, but then manufacturing shifted further to low cost countries.  And now, with the increasing use of robotic devices, factories aren’t big employment generators.

Moreover, the use of incentives to get big companies to move to rural areas has been shown to be of limited and ever decreasing value in helping long term economic development.  Unlike multinational businesses that rural areas have tried to attract, local entrepreneurs are committed to their communities.  

Ms. Polonius noted that every dollar of sales that go to local entrepreneurs is spent several times over before it leaves the area, whereas sales at multi-national companies in rural areas leave much more quickly.  As a case in point, Mr. Ruiz noted that when it came time to build his restaurant, he felt an obligation to buy lumber from another local entrepreneur rather than make the drive to Home Depot or Lowe’s where he might have saved a few bucks.

The panel went on for than an hour, so I can only highlight what struck me as the most critical points.

First, without any prompting from me or anyone else, the panelists stressed the importance of broadband for both local business success and also being able to reach markets beyond the local area.  Mr. Ruiz was especially proud of the fact that his small town of Raymondville in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas had better broadband than the state capital of Austin did.  The service is provided by the Valley Telephone Cooperative – in yet another example of how cooperatives have moved broadband forward in rural areas as the big telecoms companies abandon those areas.

Second, creativity and counter-intuitive thinking are necessary to turn around rural areas.  Mr. Lusk pointed out how his area of southern Virginia had a concentration of some of the longest lasting poverty-stricken counties in the US.  Where once extraction industries, like coal mining of the mountains, provide some boost to the local economy, that had been on a downturn since the 1950s.  Local people wanted to have factories come there, but highway transportation wasn’t great and the land wasn’t flat – it was the Appalachian Mountains after all, very pretty, but not great industrial territory.

They finally turned things on their head and realized that the thing that was preventing industrial development – the mountains – was the basis for future growth of rural tourism.  Mr. Lust described the ingenious ways that the Hatfield McCoy Regional Recreation Authority went from ATV off-road trails to encourage other economic development.

Third is the need for risk capital.  Although local business folks often think first of going to the bank for funds, there are many fewer local banks around and banks of any kind aren’t generally in the business of helping startups.  So, other sources of funds are needed.  That’s where non-profits like Northern Initiatives come in.  The non-profit organization proclaims that it

“provides loans to small business owners and entrepreneurs in Northern Michigan that might not qualify for loans from traditional banks for a variety of reasons.”

Fourth, the development of rural entrepreneurship cannot end with the money, also needs training and coaching.  Communities Unlimited offers a cash flow tool to keep entrepreneurs on an even keel.  And, as with Wing Champs, they provide a variety of other services to help new business get over the inevitable rough spots.  

Similarly, Northern Initiatives puts it this way:

“Each one of our loans comes with access to business services which includes a suite of practical trainings, tools, and resources on topics that matter to every business owner.”  

And they even provide a coach to each company they give money to.

Mr. West also noted that some coaching comes from modeling – seeing other local people making money by starting businesses provides both encouragement and education to potential entrepreneurs.

Although these efforts don’t have quite the focus on gazelle second-stage growth companies that the Economic Gardening movement does, they share in common the idea that long term economic growth comes from entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs need help.

Here’s the overall lesson of this panel:  

The seeds of entrepreneurship are in the countryside already.  For economic growth, those seeds need to be fertilized by the combination of broadband, creativity/counter-intuitive thinking, risk capital and training/coaching.

[You can see a recording of the event at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMIjJMEbzsI  ]

© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

The Virtual Metropolis Moves Forward

The NTCA-Rural Broadband Association held its annual meeting and expo this week in San Diego with more than 2,000 people in attendance.

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I was on a panel to discuss the idea of a Virtual Metropolis, a topic I introduced to the Rural Broadband Association and have written about here.

The idea is simple. In the pre-internet days, cities — especially big cities — brought together lots of people. Because these peoople were near each other and could casually interact, these cities became hotbeds of innovation and economic production.  Along with increased agricultural productivity, this led to the shift of population from rural to urban areas that has threatened many small towns.

As a sort of last gasp, after World War II, many small outlying towns tried to substitute factories as a source of employment.  In the face on increasing automation and cheaper labor markets elsewhere, that strategy crumbled too. In the last couple of decades, the drop in small town and rural population has increased. Many bright, ambitious young people can’t wait to move away to a big city.

And, if you’re an entrepreneur with some great new product or service, it’s easier to start up in New York or Silicon Valley or some other equivalent place. Why? Because no single person has all the skills they need to succeed and it’s easier to find skilled people in those cities than in your small town.

When I write this, you may be thinking about high-tech entrepreneurs. But the historic limitations of small town life affect everyone, even artisans or those in other low-tech businesses.

This all may sound bleak and many people share that bleak outlook.  Even some of the members of the Rural Broadband Association can be overwhelmed by this picture.

But what I’ve described is about the past, not the potential for the future. In this digital age, if you’re connected by broadband you can live anywhere. If you enjoy country living and love the quality of life there, you no longer need to compromise your economic prospects by continuing to live in the country.

We’ve seen some of the positive impact that broadband can have on those rural communities who have invested in broadband, but that impact has not been widespread enough for people to take notice.

Partly this reflects the lack of reasonably priced broadband in many rural areas.   The Rural Broadband folks are working hard to fix that.

More important, there hasn’t been a digital platform devoted to the needs of people in the countryside that would provide a substitute for the casual face-to-face interactions and the breadth of the skill pool that people in big cities take for granted.

That’s where the Virtual Metropolis comes in. We are building this platform to make it easier for people in small towns and rural areas to see and talk to each other about how they can work together for mutual economic benefit.

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Broadband makes this possible because it provides the bandwidth that’s necessary for visual chat. Visual chat is especially critical in helping to establish trust, compared to email, messaging and other forms of communication that are limited to text.

The shared small town experience is also an essential basis for mutual understanding and trust.  That common experience gets drowned out in the overwhelmingly urban outlook of much larger social media and job services.

If even 10 or 15% of the people living in more rural areas join in for business purposes, they will be virtually part of a metropolis of more than five million people. In that way, they can achieve many of the same benefits of physically residing in a big city.

(While my focus is on economic opportunity, broadband will also give these folks access to great educational, cultural and medical resources.)

In addition to creating and setting up the technology for a Virtual Metropolis, we need to build a community — to get people to participate.

In part, that’s where the NTCA plays a key role.  They can reach out to the early adopters, the innovators in their regions and let them know that the days of isolation are over. Clearly, from a business viewpoint, the Virtual Metropolis provides their customers and potential customers with a strong business justification for increasing their bandwidth.

One of the panelists, Dusty Johnson of Vantage Point Solutions in Mitchell, South Dakota.  Despite Mitchell’s selection among the ICF’s Top 7 most intelligent communities in the world, he was initially skeptical as a self-described “cranky old man.”  But as he thought about others in Mitchell, particularly his own children and other young people, he realized the value of the idea.

The other panelist, Michael Burke, CEO of MTA, the local broadband provider for 10,000 square miles of Alaska is already an unusually innovative leader. MTA goes way beyond merely providing connectivity in many ways, for example providing customer training on new technology and funding coding classes in the schools.

Mr. Burke quickly championed the Virtual Metropolis. Of course, considering the distance from the lower 48 and the nature of winter in Alaska, the necessity of being part of a much larger virtual community is crystal clear.

[If you’re interested in joining and helping to build this virtual metropolis, please contact me.]

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© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/156987590937/the-virtual-metropolis-moves-forward]

Doing More Than Just Remembering The Forgotten America

Much has been written about how the results of this year’s Presidential election reflected the feeling on the part of people who live in rural areas and small towns that they have been overlooked and that the severe problems in those areas have not received sufficient attention by public and business leaders.

This Washington Post story, sub-headed “How an electorate fed up with the elite propelled Donald Trump to victory”, is a good example.

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Although we frequently hear that 80% of Americans live in cities now, that still means there are 60,000,000 Americans in the countryside – not an insignificant number as we saw last month.

Even the news stories that feature broad economic trends don’t highlight the uneven nature of those trends in these areas. For example, the decline in manufacturing employment was a standard talking point on the recent campaign trail. But many observers seem to have forgotten that many bigger manufacturing plants had long since departed cities for the countryside. So when manufacturing employment declined, it hit the countryside more deeply, even while that pain was less visible.

So, sadly, the feeling in rural America of being forgotten is not unfounded.

To make matters worse, in too many small cities and rural areas, many people speak negatively of the prospects for the area. This helps create a downward spiral by persuading the brightest young people to leave.

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As sociologists, Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, wrote in their 2009 book, “Hollowing Out The Middle:

“The biggest question facing anyone who grows up in a small town is whether he or she should leave or stay. A little further down the road, those who make the initial decision to leave, usually after graduating high school, must decide whether to return to the cozy familiarity of their hometown or to continue building lives elsewhere. The fact that this small-town rite of passage should be so intimately bound up with the very future of the Heartland allows us to see how the hollowing-out phenomenon plays out in the lives and decisions of young people, and how their pathways are shaped by the communities and people who surround them as they grow up.”

“The Heartland’s most valuable export is not crops or hogs but its educated young people.”

For the last couple of years, I’ve been working with the Intelligent Community Forum helping these communities to take advantage of new opportunities open to them in a new century in which close physical proximity of millions of people is not necessarily the only strategy for economic success.

I’ve written before about how technology enables rural residents to take advantage of the kind of resources that you used to be almost exclusively available to residents of big cities — global economic connections, education and culture, even world-class health care — while maintaining the quality of life that draws them or keeps them in the countryside.

With all this on my mind a few weeks ago, I was asked by the Aspen Institute to keynote a community dialog in Sutter County (Yuba City), California. This was part of my participation in the small working group advising Aspen’s project on the future of libraries.

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Although Sutter County is not, by any means, among the most devastated of rural communities, it is still concerned about its future. My observation was that they had some strong assets that are otherwise underappreciated in the conventional economic development perspective.

First, I was impressed by the local leadership, which seemed to have its act together. Leaders who have vision and an understanding of where the world is going are essential for community development.

Second, they have a diverse population, with a variety of experiences including an understanding of entrepreneurial success. Like some other flourishing small cities around the country, Yuba City also has its immigrant groups. It is, for example, known all over North America and India for its long-established Sikh community, which draws tens of thousands of people to the city each year – and can be a connection to the global economy.

Third, they have a library that is prepared to play its role as the central institution of the knowledge economy and help the residents of Sutter County take advantage of new opportunities that I see in a new connected countryside. Much of the Aspen workshop/dialog was focused on the steps the library can take to make this a reality.

It will be interesting to see how well Sutter County achieves its vision and what other communities can learn from it.

And, perhaps for a short time, the situation in the countryside will get a little attention among public officials and the media. But even being remembered, once in a while, really isn’t much of a program.

While Sutter County and places like it across the country are trying to assure their future, it would be easier if national policy recognized and helped them respond to the socio-economic-technological challenges and opportunities facing them. More than merely reducing the sense of being forgotten, it could help accelerate a renaissance in the countryside.

© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/154180196592/doing-more-than-just-remembering-the-forgotten]

The Internet Is Already Reinvigorating The Countryside

The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) held its annual summit last week in Columbus, Ohio.  As I’ve done in the last couple of years, I ran a workshop for small cities and rural areas.

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Unlike
past years, this time I didn’t only focus on the potential that the
Internet provides for the countryside, but also showed the ways that
some – but not all – of those communities are already being
reinvigorated.  This post will provide a summary of my presentation
during the first half of the workshop.

In addition to the
usual background about ICF, I let people know of the establishment of a
new ICF Institute that is specifically devoted to the study of rural
communities.  It’s based at Mississippi State University and is led by
Professor Roberto Gallardo.

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I quickly outlined the reasons why
changes in technology and the economy enable small towns and rural areas
to flourish again in this century:

  • Now and in the future, size and clusters count less than connections
  • Broadband enables economic growth in the way that proximity enabled urban economic growth in the industrial era
  • An
    ever increasing percentage of people can make a living by providing
    intangible products and services that can be delivered from anywhere to
    anywhere
  • A life-long 9 to 5 job in a big company is being pushed aside by the freelance economy
  • Visual communication will intensify the trends — although we are still only in the early stages of its use

But
I noted that only some small towns and rural areas have taken advantage
of these factors.  As a result, growth is very uneven in the
countryside as reported  by the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.

Then
I reviewed the kinds of community building services that the leaders,
in contrast to the laggards, are providing on top of their broadband and
technology foundation.

That was all prelude to the main topics of the day:

  • the
    development of a new urban exodus by digital millennials from high-tech
    cities into those parts of the countryside that provide both a better
    quality of life as well as Internet connectivity
  • the need for
    residents of the countryside to participate in the global economy and
    not limit their horizons to their local areas or even just their region

The new urban exodus to the countryside is a phenomenon that is not only in

the US, but has also occurred in France and the UK.  Nor is it like the migration to exurban homes of more than a decade ago.  As a Pew study has reported:

But
to call these rural hot spots “exurban,” Garreau said, is missing the
point.  As he sees it, today’s urban exiles aren’t looking for a lengthy
commute from the far suburbs to a downtown office.  They’re seasoned
professionals with big incomes who’ve grown tired of the urban rat race,
he said.  They’re looking to completely eradicate the notion of
commuting to work and toiling from 9 to 5.  Rich greenery and wide-open
vistas are a must.

For a better understanding of this phenomenon, I showed a few minutes from Alissa Hessler’s very compelling video explaining what her Urban Exodus website and life is like.

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Then
I reviewed the evidence showing the greater growth path for those
participating in the global economy, even in rural areas.  However,
rural residents are at a competitive disadvantage compared to their city
cousins if they try to do this in isolation.

For that reason, I
emphasized the need for rural residents to achieve scale and influence
by working together in a kind of virtual metropolis
or global virtual
Chamber of Commerce where they can meet and, more important, find
business partners, services and even customers.  Partly, this can work
is because it is also built on the shared experience and perspective
that comes from living in the countryside.

If you or the residents
of your community are interested in joining in this virtual metropolis,
please contact me – njacknis at intelligent community dot org.

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© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/146306552640/the-internet-is-already-reinvigorating-the]

White House Rural Telehealth — Continued

Two months ago, in “The Last Big Barrier To A Rural Renaissance: Healthcare”,
I reported on a White House meeting on rural telehealth that I
participated in.  On June 1, we had a follow-up conference call.

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This is sort of a report on that call, intertwined with my
observations from this call about why it’s hard to get things done in
the Federal government.

First, there was some encouraging news, including these items:

  • The
    White House is starting to fund research on how telehealth improves
    medical outcomes, which will be important for future changes.
  • Because
    of changes in Federal law and market conditions, there has been such a
    rapid growth of integrated health care systems that, on their own, some
    are now reaching out to serve rural areas.
  • In various ways,
    there was agreement that telehealth is now expanding into remote patient
    monitoring. This is especially good news for rural residents who may
    have to travel miles even to get to a local clinic which is in turn
    connected to a major medical center.

This last item also reminded me of Longfellow’s Little Girl:

“There
was a little girl, and she had a little curl right in the middle of her
forehead.   When she was good, she was very, very good, and when she
was bad she was horrid”

At the same time the Veterans Health
Administration has had its problems with waiting lists at some
facilities, it is has taken the lead in innovations, like tele-health, to bring health care to veterans at work or at home in small towns, rural areas and other places where it is difficult for the veterans to get to major facilities.

I’d
note that I’ve spent much more time with local and state government,
where with good leadership, things can get done fairly quickly, even
when major innovations are involved.  Many of these governments are at
least as efficient, if not more efficient, than most large
corporations.  As we’ve heard and seen many times in this election year,
the Federal government is another story.

Here then are some relevant, if not new, observations based on the rural tele-health work:

  • It’s very hard to get things done even if you’re sitting in the White House.
  • To
    some extent, this is built into the constitution, the system of
    government, which divides power and ensures that Federal agencies almost
    suffer from a kind of matrix management with multiple parties having a
    say about what happens.
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  • And when the Federal government gets
    around to doing something it needs to be very careful and thoughtful
    about the rules because its impact is so outsized – part of its slowness
    is to ensure it doesn’t behave like a bull in a china shop.
  • There
    are millions of Federal employees to contend with, each of whom has
    his/her own sense of what their public responsibility calls for. This
    can lead to a silo effect where people in different departments don’t
    work with each other or even know each other are working on the same
    issue.  As an example, psychiatrists who are encouraged by one part of
    the Federal government to provide face-to-face services through
    videoconferencing worry about running afoul of the concerns of the Drug Enforcement Administration about electronic prescriptions of controlled substances.
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Having said all this, the White House staff should still be applauded
for continuing to push these innovative tele-healthcare services,
despite the built-in obstacles and the short time they have left.

© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/145558168934/white-house-rural-telehealth-continued]

The Last Big Barrier To A Rural Renaissance: Healthcare

I’ve written before about the ways that small towns and rural areas
can take advantage of broadband Internet connections to gain access to
global economic opportunities, educational and cultural resources, even
the virtual equivalents of coffee shops that used to be only available
in big cities.

Perhaps the biggest remaining barrier to a 21st century rural renaissance is access to world class health care.    

With
that in mind, President Obama’s Rural Council brought together about
three dozen experts to the White House complex last week to identify
innovative ways of bringing health care to the countryside and to
establish a “community of practice” that will help the Obama
administration and hopefully its successor to address the problem. 

The
group included:

  • Federal officials from various agencies, including Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack
  • Leading broadband providers and the Rural Broadband Association’s CEO, Shirley Bloomfield, and Joshua Seidemann, Vice President of Policy (who helped organize this meeting)
  • Exemplary providers of tele-health, and
  • A
    couple of other experts, including myself (in my role as Senior Fellow
    of the Intelligent Community Forum and director of its New Connected
    Countryside initiative)
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This “convening” was led by Doug O’Brien, Senior White House Advisor for Rural Affairs.

It
was noted, although not news to those around the table, that the nearly
60 million Americans who live in rural areas were hit especially hard
by the Great Recession.  Their local economies have taken longer to
recover, still not back to pre-recession employment levels.

But the comparisons of rural versus urban health care were most striking.  Here are just some highlights:

  • Rural areas have higher rates of disease and higher mortality rates than urban areas. In 1980, the rural mortality rate was 2% worse than the urban rate and now it’s 13% worse.
  • While
    approximately one in six Americans live in rural areas, only one in ten
    physicians practice there. There are even fewer medical specialists per
    capita.
  • Suicide rates are higher and getting worse in rural
    areas. Along with a growing drug abuse problem, this is a reflection of a
    growing need for mental health services.

None of these
medical problems are helped by the fact that rural residents are poorer
and less likely to have health insurance.  Of course, given the lack of
sufficient nearby medical resources, rural residents need to travel
further – often hours further – than their urban counterparts.

In
the Internet age, that last problem should be able to be mostly overcome
with health care delivered remotely.  So most of the meeting was
devoted learning about the use and deployment of tele-health care.  In
this post, I won’t be able to describe all of them or any one of them in
detail, but here are some that stood out to me:

  • Using cost-effective solutions, like iPads, Vanderbilt University Medical Center
    has established a network of rural tele-health services. This even
    includes virtual group sessions for people with drug addictions.
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  • The
    US Department of Veterans Affairs has pioneered the use of virtual ICUs
    in its rural clinics and facilities. With a fully developed set of
    tele-health tools, to the patients and local staff, it’s like having the
    expert ICU doctor at the bedside.  As a byproduct of these virtual
    ICUs, the medical staff at these facilities are also getting an
    education in newer and better medical techniques.
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  • Through East Carolina University School of Medicine, there is now a tele-psychiatry network in North Carolina. The relatively low cost of making tele-psychiatry available is helpful, given the increasing need for mental health services.
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Obviously,
many rural areas do not yet have the broadband which is necessary to
deliver these services.  But there are clearly broadband providers,
especially telecommunications coops, which are up to the task.  We heard
about just two of those who had completed gigabit deployments to every
household in their rural areas in Kentucky and North Carolina.  One of
those, Peoples Rural Telephone Coop was reported on in a Daily Yonder article last month, “One of the Nation’s Fastest Networks Serves Two of Its Poorest Counties”.

Even
before the recent recession, there were long term trends in rural
America that called out for a different and new economic strategy.  In
his closing remarks, Secretary Vilsack noted that, since 1950,
agricultural productivity has increased a hundred fold on 27% less land
and with 22 million fewer farmers.  So the challenge today is what
opportunities and quality of life can the remaining families have.  

The
people around that table last week and ICF believe that a revived rural
community can be built upon the intelligent and creative use of
technology – and improving access to quality healthcare is just one very
important example.

© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/142294161516/the-last-big-barrier-to-a-rural-renaissance]

Broadband And An Open Internet

Six US Senators, mostly from small rural states, wrote recently to the FCC about the inconsistencies they found between its recent report on broadband progress and its Open Internet order that was issued last March.

The
FCC’s stated:

“We find that advanced telecommunications capability is
not being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion…
… many Americans still lack access to advanced telecommunications
capability, especially in rural areas… the disparity between rural and
urban Americans persists”.

The Senators:

  • objected to the FCC’s view that broadband is not being deployed fast enough
  • expressed their “concern” that the FCC’s broadband benchmark (25 Mpbs download and 3 Mbps upload speeds) “discourages broadband providers from offering speeds at or above [that] benchmark.”
  • pointed out difference in broadband definitions between the Open Internet proposal and the broadband report
  • questioned why the Connect American fund only subsidizes rural broadband at speeds of 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload.
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This post is not primarily about the issue of net neutrality, as important as that is. Instead, hopefully I’m giving an objective, third party view of this debate about broadband from the perspective of the Intelligent Community Forum’s more than fifteen years of working with communities around the world and seeing what level and kind of broadband they need.

As might be expected, both sides of this dispute are somewhat off the mark.

Despite the progress that is being made in some parts of the USA by private companies or municipal agencies, the FCC’s statement that broadband is not being deployed in a timely fashion is essentially correct.

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The Senators’ assertion that maintaining a 25/3 broadband benchmark discourage telecommunications companies and other Internet Service Providers from delivering more than this minimum benchmark does not make a lot of sense and is not supported by any evidence. Our observation is that, in areas where these companies feel under competitive threat, they manage to find the money to invest in upgrading speeds on their networks.

It’s also worth pointing out that the speeds that are promised by ISPs are seldom delivered, as anyone who has used Speedtest or similar services can attest. This reality seems unrecognized by both the Senators and the FCC.

The focus of the FCC and the Senators on download speeds ignores the need for upload speeds, especially for those who want to use broadband for business, health care and education. In some respects, it is best to look at the combination of upload and download speeds. The FCC’s discussion about fairness to big content providers might have misled them into thinking mostly about delivery of content from a central source and not to consider the world we have, where people are both consumers and producers of content.

The Senators’ statement that they are unaware of any application needing 25 Mbps ignores the demands of even the near term future. Broadband projects, according to the telecommunications companies, are major investments — presumably made to meet the needs of more than the next six months.

There was a time perhaps a decade ago when people couldn’t figure out why they needed more than dial up speeds. Now they know and demand broadband. The FCC, the Senators and telecommunications companies all need to realize that even speeds that are above today will seem way too slow for the applications that are coming in a few years.

The Senators are correct that there is no good public policy reason to accept different broadband speeds for urban versus rural areas. Our work with rural areas, if anything, would lead us to believe that the reverse is true. Those in urban areas can still seek out a large number of customers and business partners the old fashioned way, in person. To succeed in the global economy today, those living in rural areas need higher speeds to connect with people far away.

Although the Senators brought together the FCC’s Open Internet policy and broadband assessment to criticize the FCC, there is an interplay between net neutrality (the FCC’s Open Internet) and broadband which goes beyond the FCC’s contradictory statements. Simply, if the bandwidth is sufficient, then there would be less reason to throttle any consumer or content provider — and thus less reason for concern about how Internet service providers could be hurt by Open Internet requirements.

© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/139911411379/broadband-and-an-open-internet]

Lessons From The Intelligent Community Forum Summit

Last week, the Intelligent Community Forum held its annual summit in Toronto.  The underlying theme was “How Intelligent Communities Are Re-Inventing Urban and Rural Planning”, so much of the discussion was about re-invention and innovating.  

In addition to the all-day workshops for large urban jurisdictions and smaller cities/towns/rural areas, all of Friday was devoted to Ideas Day – with a slew of presentations sharing novel approaches to local government and planning.

On Thursday, capping his successful 16 year run as mayor as he retires, Mayor Michael Coleman proudly accepted the award to Columbus, Ohio as the world’s most Intelligent Community this year.

(You can see the full agenda at icfsummit2015.com.  The presentations, including mine, will be available on intelligentcommunity.org in the coming weeks.)

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One of the other highlights of the week was the keynote speech by David Johnston, the Governor General of Canada spoke on June 10th.  Before that, he was the President of the University Of Waterloo, Canada’s premier engineering school.  

Since it was established in the late 1950s, it has become the cradle for a thriving tech innovation community – Blackberry being one if the best known examples. In part, for this reason, he was part of the team in the City of Waterloo who succeeded in being named the most Intelligent Community of the year in 2007.  

He attributed its success to two policies that stand in contrast with the way that many universities try to contain the fruits of innovation within their campuses – thus actually diminishing their innovation.  

The first policy is that the university makes no intellectual property claims on the research done by faculty, researchers or students.   Instead they encourage them to commercialize their research and reap the rewards for themselves and the community.  

The second policy requires coop education of all students.  Each year, every student spends two trimesters in class and one working in a company (for pay) to apply what they’ve learned.  

Finally, it’s worth noting that all of this – the need for innovation, the changes in ways in communities have to plan – is not happening in a vacuum.  

To provide some urgency to these discussions and in case you don’t realize how fast things are changing in what are still the early days of the Internet, Rob McCann, President of ClearCable, gave an interesting presentation on the growth of Internet usage — increasing roughly 50% per year.  (He also made a strong case for the involvement of local government in building out broadband networks, especially in less dense, more rural areas.) 

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/121755138995/lessons-from-the-intelligent-community-forum]

Countryside Complaints Collapse?

You often hear how the countryside is collapsing in various ways.  And clearly the remaining sixty million Americans who live in small towns and rural areas have faced a variety of challenges. 

As I described in my presentation at the Walsh University Leadership Academy a few weeks back, I’ve heard eight major complaints to explain why rural areas are in trouble.  While each of these has been true over the last few decades, increasingly the changes in our world mean that these complaints themselves are no longer relevant – the complaints are collapsing, while the countryside has new opportunities for renewal.

Let me address each of these, briefly, one at a time.  (If you’re interested in a fuller explanation, I can send you a copy of the whole 80-slide presentation.)

1. “We’re not big enough to have sustainable business clusters.”

So many economic development officials have had the cluster strategy drummed into their minds that they don’t realize how out of date it is.   As economist, Paul Krugman, said when he was given the Nobel Prize for his early work on economic geography, “[Clustering] may describe forces that are waning rather than gathering strength.”  My favorite example is the growth of the BATS Exchange at the expense of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street.  BATS is headquartered in Lenexa, Kansas.

2. “We’ve lost most good-paying manufacturing jobs.”

So has everyone else.  Just as economic changes over the last hundred fifty years meant that we need very few people on the farm to produce the food the rest of us need, so too productivity in manufacturing means fewer people are needed in plants.  That is part of the growth of the economy.  But there has been a parallel increase in the service sector of the economy and the Internet has made possible a new range of intangible, digital products and services – from which people can make a living.  That, of course, doesn’t even account for the many unmet needs of our economy and society – for example, curing major diseases – that will generate employment.

3. “We don’t have skyscrapers filled with office workers.”

But work is no longer tied to these “places of work”.  Many people can work from home, without the need for a cubicle in a skyscraper.

image

4. “We’re isolated in the middle of nowhere.”

You may be physically far from large metropolitan areas, but digital communications connects everyone everywhere, even face-to-face through video-conferencing.  (Of course, this assumes you have broadband connectivity sufficient for video – but that’s part of the point of this argument.  If you get the connectivity, there are all kinds of options open for you, even in the countryside.)

5. “We don’t have a major research university.”

There is an incredible amount of learning available on the Internet, including courses from traditional universities (like edX) and non-traditional sources.  And most of the research at the major universities is now available online, especially the kind of later stage research that is most easily commercialized.  So what you need is not the research university, but people with sufficient entrepreneurial imagination – and those folks can be found all over.

image

6. “Whenever we get sick we need to go to a big city for care.”

With telemedicine (and even remote surgery, in the longer run), not all health care requires a visit to a big city.

7. “We can’t participate in developing new ideas and our innovators have no one to talk to (so they leave).”

Again, anyone with an innovative disposition can now reach out to others on the Internet.  Moreover, with the growth of the open innovation movement in corporations and governments, there are a variety of opportunities for people who live in the countryside to offer their new ideas – and be rewarded for them.

8. “There are not enough customers nearby and many of the business skills we need are also not nearby.”

Yet, economic opportunities and services are global.  All you need to be is connected to the global economy.  By the way, this isn’t limited to people who want to write computer software.  There are all kinds of interesting examples of people who live in the countryside making a living outside of the tech industry – for example, by teaching English to foreign students, or selling their works of art and craftsmanship, or providing help desk/customer support or even selling lobster bait bags.  Now the market is not limited to the small number of people who are nearby.

image

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So before people in the countryside give up on their futures, they should consider how these old obstacles of the past will collapse in the future.

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/104844439162/countryside-complaints-collapse]

The Intelligent Community Movement In Universities

The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) has been around for more than a dozen years and has developed a large knowledge base about the pre-conditions for creating an intelligent community.  But, over the last year or so, ICF has expanded its reach and enlisted various universities in the effort.

Last month, for example, I was at Walsh University in the heart of what was industrial Ohio.  It has become the first of the academic settings for the intelligent community movement.

I was there as part of Walsh’s 3rd Annual ICF Institute Symposium, whose focus was on “Brain Gain and Innovation: Creating Growth in an Age of Disruption”.  There were a variety of interesting speakers and topics:

  • In different ways and with different perspectives, both Christian Long, Co-Founder, Wonder By Design and Google’s Jaime Casap spoke about schools and cities
  • Alvaro Albuquerque, Chief of Staff to the President, The Brazilian Small Business Agency, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, described their “knowledge squares”
  • Tim Jones, CEO, Artscape Toronto, Ontario spoke about creative place-making in cities

You can see these at http://www.walsh.edu/institute

In my presentation to the new ICF Leadership Academy there, I laid out eight obstacles that people in the countryside often cite as to why their areas are destined for decline.  Then I showed how changes in the economy, society and technology have diminished each of these obstacles and opened up new opportunities for a rural revitalization.  You can see the slides here: http://www.walsh.edu/uploads/116031415201951.pdf

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Related to my presentation is the creation of a second ICF Institute at Mississippi State University.  Its focus will be on rural communities.  For some background, see this report in the Mississippi Business Journal – http://msbusiness.com/blog/2014/10/17/msu-extension-named-intelligent-community-institute/

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There’s also a video describing the focus of this new institute, with Professor Roberto Gallardo and ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysF1MCm2Syw

And finally within the last few weeks, as well, the University of Oulu in Finland announced an ICF project to “examine innovation platforms and innovative approaches” in three of ICF’s top level smart communities worldwide – Taichung, Taiwan, Eindhoven in the Netherlands and Oulu.  See http://www.epressi.com/tiedotteet/telekommunikaatio/oulun-yliopisto-ja-intelligent-community-forum-aloittavat-tutkimusyhteistyon.html  (Google Translate does a passable job with this, if you don’t read Finnish 🙂

I’ll keep you updated as these three universities start to generate more about intelligent communities.

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/103553994529/the-intelligent-community-movement-in-universities]

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]

Presentation On Technology, People & Rural Prosperity

Previously, I mentioned that I gave the opening keynote presentation at the final annual conference on Rural Prosperity in Canada, held at Queen’s University of Kingston, Ontario. 

Jeffrey Dixon, Associate Director of the Monieson Centre which has run the project, was very kind in his feedback:

Norm Jacknis provided an inspiring presentation at our 6th annual rural economic development conference. He helped a group of community leaders, business people, policymakers and researchers consider new opportunities for rural prosperity and to think creatively about how they can use technology to transform their economies.

A video of the presentation, including questions and discussion, is now available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7PmYBxcqgA&index=3&list=PLc4qJ1UgXeFHWsWwtzQm5TvfeNuDvfRad and also as the Tumblr post just after this. I went into a fairly deep explanation of the trends occurring in the economy and technology – and why and how these trends open up new opportunities for small towns and rural areas.  It’s about an hour long video, although the actual presentation starts about two minutes into the video and ends about forty minutes later.  (Sit back and relax – I tried to make it as entertaining as possible.)

You can see the printed handout at http://business.queensu.ca/centres/monieson/events/Economic_Revitalization_2014/Presentations/2014%20conference%20presentations/Norm%20Jacknis.pdf   Of course, if you only read the handout, you’ll miss the videos and also what I say about each slide since I don’t really read them.

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Also, in conjunction with the conference, the university staff issued a series of research papers that you can read in the Journal of Rural and Community Development at http://www.jrcd.ca/viewissue.php?id=20

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/93308163833/presentation-on-technology-people-rural-prosperity]

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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Pictures via:

©2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/89157915184/only-one-way-to-get-broadband]

Mapping The Future: Technology, People & Rural Prosperity

This Tuesday, Queen’s University of Kingston, Ontario held its last annual conference on Rural Prosperity in Canada.  As Senior Fellow leading the Rural Imperative for the Intelligent Community Forum, I was asked to give the opening, keynote speech. 

My overall theme was that the countryside has a new opportunity to flourish, considering developments in technology and broadband, as well as the major post-industrial trends in North America, Europe, Japan and elsewhere.  I also emphasized that broadband, while a necessary condition for community development, is not sufficient and must be integrated with other elements that build quality of life.

I won’t go into more detail here, since my presentation will be posted on their website.  Instead I’ll report on some of the items presented by others that caught my attention.

1. Research on the economic impact of broadband

The researchers at the Monieson Centre of the university’s Business School presented the results of their analysis of the impact of broadband on employment and wages.  They found that broadband deployment, from 1997-2011, had only a minor positive impact on employment in urban areas, but had a significantly more positive impact in rural areas.  However, broadband was associated with wage increases in both rural and urban regions.

Moreover, they found there was no impact on employment at firms producing physical goods, but a major positive impact on employment and wages for services (although not all services). 

Although we didn’t coordinate, it was nice to see results that tracked with the broad trends I’ve been highlighting for the last few years.  In a way, my presentation explained the research results.

2. Rural broadband network in eastern Ontario

The association of the key leaders of rural counties in eastern Ontario (called the Eastern Ontario Wardens Caucus), with others, have spearheaded a project called EORN that is wrapping up its initial deployment this year.  The Eastern Ontario Regional Network is building out rural areas with broadband that provides its 500,000 residents with 10 megabit connections – much more than is common even among most urban users of the Internet in North America.  EORN officials think it is the most ambitious project of its kind in the Americas or possibly the world.  They are certain it is the “most sustainable rural network” in the world.

Later in the day, Bo Beaulieu of Purdue University’s Center for Regional Development spoke about the necessity and value of regional cooperation among rural counties.  My observation was that, with broadband and regional cooperation, these areas can present themselves as the virtual equivalent of a city and be able to compete economically in many ways not otherwise possible.

3. Creative uses of the countryside

There were various presentations on how the new countryside is more than just farming.  One example was a “multi-functional” farm – yes, it grew food for sale, but also was an environmental education center, alternative energy demonstration site, publishing office, and a bed-and-breakfast set up by a “refugee” from Toronto. 

Since, especially in this area of Canada, much of that nation’s history is better preserved in the countryside than in cities, historical and cultural resources have been used as a basis for economic development.  See, for example, History Lives Here which has a variety of products, from videos and guided tours to History labelled wines from local wineries.

All in all, a very interesting day that provided strong evidence of the energy and innovation which is creating the future of rural areas in Canada and the rest of the world.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/82290687838/mapping-the-future-technology-people-rural]

Urban Farming?

Urban farming would seem to be an oxymoron.  Yet, the idea of bringing farming into the heart of urban regions is – pun intended – cropping up everywhere. 

(In this post, I touch upon on a small subset of recent activities on the urban farming front.  If you’re interested, you’ll find lots more urban farming documented on the Internet.)

A couple of weeks ago, a New York Times article “Farm-to-Table Living Takes Root” reported on Agritopia, a neighborhood in Phoenix that focuses on farming. There have been as well reports of other farm-focused urban neighborhoods around the country. 

Lack of available land at street level is also no limitation.  Rooftop farms are being added to the tops of buildings in many cities.  But why just stop with the tops of buildings?

Columbia University Professor Dickson Despommier has been the modern prophet of the vertical farming concept that encourages building agricultural skyscrapers in large cities.  One example – the largest in the USA – is FarmedHere, which last month opened an indoor vertical farm in Chicago.

In a much bolder vision last year, the architect Vincent Callebaut proposed a Dragonfly shaped vertical farm for the south end of New York City’s Roosevelt Island.  (This is, alas, the same location of the future high tech, entrepreneurial campus of Cornell University and Technion Israeli Institute of Technology that former Mayor Bloomberg commissioned to emulate Silicon Valley.  Silicon Valley, in turn, was once filled with orchards, not tech companies.)

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If a real island, like Roosevelt, is not available within the city’s borders, then the answer is to build an artificial island.  The folks at Blue Revolution Hawaii are hoping to do just that in Honolulu and follow in the early footsteps of other cities around the world with farming on artificial islands – see the article “Floating Farms” in this month’s Modern Farmer magazine.

This may seem like some new trend and, in some ways, it is – as it reflects the ways that the Internet is opening up possibilities for people. 

But it is not completely new.  My favorite examples come from New York City, yes, New York City.  In the Queens section, John Bowne High School with a special focus on agriculture – and the program has been around since the end of World War I, originally in the old Newtown High School.  Even in Manhattan, George Washington High School in the north end of the island has a chapter of the Future Farmers of America. 

So the graduates of these schools won’t have to leave New York City to become farmers, even in the densest urban area in America.

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The Intelligent Community Forum’s Rural Imperative Program

Just a short note that the Intelligent Community Forum has asked me to be responsible for its Rural Imperative to build and create a renaissance of rural life through the power of high speed Internet and technology combined with community development. For more details see http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/02/prweb11614027.htm

Also, yesterday, Government Technology magazine’s Digital Communities website featured an article by me about the role that technologists need to play to help rural communities achieve their potential.  See “The Rural Imperative Needs Tech Creativity and Leadership” at http://www.digitalcommunities.com/articles/The-Rural-Imperative-Needs-Tech-Creativity-and-Leadership.html

The Rural Imperative is one of the very few activities that I’m undertaking – projects that will be fun, challenging and help change the world.  What more could anyone ask for?

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Is There A Rural Imperative?

As readers of this blog know, I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years helping cities figure out the impact of new technologies and broadband on their future role in people’s lives and also helping mayors figure out ways of using those technologies to create new kinds of urban experiences and reasons for people to live in their cities. 

Cities were the winners out of the industrial age and attracted vast numbers of people from the countryside.  You can see that pattern repeating itself today in the newly successful industrial countries, like China, or those areas that are just starting to industrialize, like Africa.

In the already developed countries, even though the change from the industrial to the knowledge economy has been wrenching for many cities, urban areas are still ahead of the game by comparison with rural areas and are better positioned to take advantage of these changes.

In theory, though, the global Internet and the increased availability of inexpensive technology should have had an even greater impact on rural areas.  For if it were really true that people can work anywhere and quality of life becomes the key factor in where they choose to live, then many people would choose to live in the countryside and not in the more metropolitan regions.

It hasn’t happened that way.  As you can read from my post last week which, among other trends, noted that telecommuting has increased dramatically among urban residents, but not for those in exurbia.

There are many reasons why the countryside hasn’t realized its potential.  Partly, this is a residue of the industrial age – it is not yet true for everyone that they can take their work with them.  For many without college educations, making a living requires a commute to a manufacturing plant or a service location or a farm.

As has been true for declining urban areas, in some rural communities a social pathology sets in that reinforces decline and is evidenced in the increased use of drugs and other forms societal breakdown.  Even though it wouldn’t be called a pathology, the out-migration of many of their young adults has also been a concern of the remaining residents of rural areas.

Another part of the story is that many rural communities have not yet become fully connected to the global economy.  In his recent rural strategy announcements, President Obama pointed out that there is a 15% gap in broadband between urban and rural households.  Many technology providers have ignored rural communities.  That should change. 

While cities will still be attractive, they are not for everyone all the time.  Many people would indeed prefer to live in the countryside if they had economic opportunity, decent health care, a means to learn and in other ways overcome the sense of isolation that has historically been the downside of rural living. 

Many countries have come to realize that they cannot just move all of their rural residents into cities.  As India has learned, there is not enough economic opportunity in their cities and the urban infrastructure cannot support the migrants who have already moved there.   The New York Times recently reported that, even the Chinese, with a relentless urban focus, have started to worry that their nation’s traditional culture and identity is getting lost in the process.  Indeed, there has been a reverse migration from the cities to the Chinese countryside.

None of this is a surprise to those who live in rural communities.  What may be better news is that there is now an imperative to bring technology and global connectivity to the countryside – and to help them build those communities into attractive and sustainable places for people to stay and to return to.

We’ve seen this in President Obama’s rural broadband program and in the recently announced Canadian rural broadband investment of $305 million.

With this background, the Intelligent Community Forum started its Rural Imperative program last year.  It will apply to the world’s rural areas its unique, global perspective on how broadband and technology can be mutually reinforcing with community development and growth.  This is an important step in helping the new connected countryside go from potential possibility to a reality.

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

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