Virginia

In a just released Forbes survey, Blacksburg, Virginia is ranked tenth in the nation as one of the best small places to live and to work. If you live in a small community, it is worth spending some time reviewing the Forbes study. Of the nine factors they use to rank communities, four of the nine are related directly to quality of life. These factors are Culture and Leisure, Crime Rate, Educational Attainment, and Cost of Living.

Among the other factors, Cost of Doing Business is one that any community can work on quickly. Our work at Design Nine takes us to small communities throughout the United States, and one of the most glaring problems I see over and over again is the lack of good "Class A" office space in smaller towns and regions. Too many communities are still trying to bring retail back to Main Street, when they should be rehabbing storefronts and second floor space for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

When Norton, Virginia rehabbed an old downtown hotel for high tech start ups, including affordable fiber to the building, Main Street blossomed as the office workers in the building shopped and ate downtown. The spacious lobby of the building regularly hosts community dinners, weddings, and special events, so the investment does double duty--how many weddings have been held in the typical industrial park incubator building?

The biggest mistake a small community can make these days is to put too much emphasis on business and industrial parks far from traditional downtowns--by making modest investments in high quality office space in traditional downtowns, you get a much bigger community and economic development impact. And as always, fiber has to be part of the mix.

A group of economic development and technology organizations are holding a reverse job fair tomorrow (February 5th) in Blacksburg. A traditional job fair has employers at booths, and job seekers walk around looking for a job. In this reverse job fair, graduating students (mostly from Virginia Tech) are at tables, and the employers walk around.

This is an interesting idea born out of the understanding that many workers are now picking a location and lifestyle first and then looking for a job. The advantage to employers who attend is that there is a room full of prospective workers who are interested in living and working in the area.

The City of Danville, Virginia has a backlog of businesses waiting to get connected to its brand new open multi-service network (also sometimes called an open service provider network). Two service providers are offering business services on the network, and a local provider is delighted with being able to offer fiber services to its existing customers.

Two years ago, the City decided to leverage its existing city fiber infrastructure to make it available everywhere, but with a special focus on being able to provide any level of bandwidth a business wanted, and the city's fiber infrastructure is able to deliver it. Danville has a very simple definition of broadband:

Broadband in Danville is any amount of bandwidth your business needs to be competitive in the global knowledge economy.

Notice there is no number attached to that definition; any time a community defines broadband as a specific number (e.g. broadband is 2 megabits, or ten megabits, etc.), from an economic development perspective, the community is telling some businesses, "Don't locate here because we don't have the capacity to serve you." It's no different than not having enough water or sewer capacity.

More information about the project is on the nDanville Web site. Disclaimer: Design Nine is providing broadband architecture and consulting services to the City of Danville for the project.

Here is an interesting analysis done by Stuart Mease, who works for the City of Roanoke, Virginia. Mease's job is trying to recruit young people to live and work in the Roanoke area. He has provided a cost of living comparison between Roanoke and some of the bigger towns and cities that are more likely to attract younger workers.

Roanoke compares very favorably; you can make less money and still live as well or better than you could in some bigger towns. Most smaller towns and cities would also fare very well with this kind of analysis, and could be an important factor when trying to convince a business to relocate to your area. The ability to pay lower salaries but still offer employees a great standard of living could be very attractive.

The tragedy here in Blacksburg earlier this week highlights the dark side and the bright side of technology and the Internet, and is a useful reminder that technology is neither good nor bad--how people use it--for good or for evil--determines its value at any point in time.

Part of the dark side is the intense and almost suffocating media coverage, which began while events were still unfolding. Just a few years ago, this would have been a largely local event for at least a day or two, but with satellite and Internet technology, news organizations were covering this before it was even over. There is something surreal sitting in your office listening to the sirens wailing almost continuously as they carry the wounded to local hospitals--and watching live news reports via the computer and Internet. I could have walked over the scene, taken pictures, and uploaded them to this site or to others, and indeed, others did exactly that.

The phrase "too much information" comes to mind in this context. The NBC videos provided by the killer are more than we need to know, and may likely spawn copycats, just as the killer himself was obviously influenced by a dark Korean film of murder and mayhem. The constant repetition of the phrase "country's worst massacre" will likely encourage the next deranged individual to try even harder to surpass the Blacksburg death toll.

On the blogs, there are already countless thousands of articles, mostly playing Monday morning quarterback about what should or should not have happened. At some point, it all becomes noise.

The bright side is that this very same technology, used in precisely the same ways, has enabled an outpouring of kindness and compassion. Email, blogs, and Web sites are being used to help the families of the victims, to organize counseling and support, to reach out to those suffering from the effects, to encourage prayer, and to just send a few words of comfort.

We have a mighty tool in our hands, and how we use it is a measure of who we are and what we stand for.

Unfortunately, the horrific murders here in Blacksburg yesterday highlighted yet again the technical superiority of the Internet during emergencies. For most of the day, it was difficult to make a phone call on a landline or cellphone, with most calls being greeted with "All circuites are busy." But the local public and private Internet networks kept chugging away, providing students and parents a way to connect. Instant messaging also proved important, and the Internet is used as a gateway between different cellphone messaging services.

Rescue personnel, first responders, hospitals, and health officials were using a pre-planned emergency management Web site to help manage the heavy casualties. No one local hospital was able to handle all of the serious gun shot wounds, and four hospitals in the Blacksburg and Roanoke areas were providing assistance and coordinating activities via the Internet.

Public safety and disaster management is a key use of Internet technology for local government. A robust, high capacity, community-managed broadband network can be an engine for economic development and an important tool for public safety.

Last night, I got to see what I think may be one of the best high school technology programs in the country. Mike Kaylor, a teacher at Blacksburg High School, convinced the school to convert the old high school woodworking shop into a multimedia design space, set up for professional digital photography, digital movie making, 3D modeling, online game design, and movie special effects. Kaylor's classes are mobbed--student demand is three times higher than the capacity of his classes. His students are already working in high paying jobs in the movie and entertainment industry. And hundreds more are leaving his courses with a solid understanding of digital technology that will help them be successful no matter what career path they choose--business, government, or the nonprofit sector.

The sad truth is that most of our kids have a grasp of technology that is about as deep as a layer of tissue paper. Being able to text message and find a song quickly on an iPod does not prepare our youth for the work world, and too many adults, who tend to feel a bit inadequate, assume incorrectly that facility with email, the Web, and iPods somehow is enough.

Every high school in America ought to have a program like Kaylor's, and it should have the same vision as Kaylor's. When Kaylor wanted movie special effects software, he did not settle for low budget programs. Instead, he insisted on getting the same software that is used in the major studios to produce the special effects in movies like The Lord of the Rings. So Blacksburg kids in Kaylor's class are leaving with a solid foundation in digital media and the skills and training in demand by potential employers.

Not all of these kids will end up working in Hollywood. Some of them will settle down right here in the New River Valley, and the businesses in the area will benefit from having an ever expanding pool of job candidates with the right stuff.

Economic developers: How about your community? Worried about having a pool of workers ready for Knowledge Economy jobs? How about skipping the next shell building project and starting the kind of multimedia program that Mike Kaylor has at Blacksburg High School? From an economic development perspective, there are few other things that would be more interesting to a high tech business looking at your area for relocation.

With traffic choking the major metropolitan areas of the country, I think that some smaller cities like Roanoke, Virginia and Scranton, Pennsylvania are poised for growth, if they can adequately address a range of quality of life issues. These smaller cities may have a rush hour, but it usually measured in minutes, not hours, and because they are located outside major urban corridors, it is possible to have a nice house in the woods a few miles from town and still drive to work in fifteen or twenty minutes.

But no one is going to move to those places only because of a shorter commute. There has to be enough activity to attract both entrepreneurs and young people. Entrepreneurs want to talk to savvy and well-informed economic developers, they want inexpensive, downtown office space for their start ups, they want good places to eat, and they want great coffee shops. Young twenty-something workers want good shopping, lots of social activities, and some night life.

Northeastern Pennsylvania, home to Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, and dozens of smaller communities, is poised for growth. The Wall Street West initiative will bring massive bandwidth into the region to attract larger financial firms, and Scranton's investments in sports arenas and recreational activities (how about skiing ten minutes from downtown?) will help attract and retain workers.

Roanoke, Virginia, nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, has convenient access to some of the best hiking, biking, and whitewater sports on the east coast, with a dizzying array of recreational options. The City's leadership has embarked on a wide variety of initiatives to attract younger workers, including a newly revamped Web site. This week, the City is also announcing a new initiative called MyRetailRoanoke.com, which is designed to help retailers easily learn about the Roanoke area market.

Lively and attractive small cities are also important to nearby rural towns. Not everyone wants to live "in town," and a vibrant small city an hour or two from a rural community enhances the value of that small town as well. Regional collaboration on marketing, recreational activities, and economic development can pay big benefits.

Verizon wants to be deregulated in Virginia for phone service. The company asserts that there is ample competition and that the company should no longer be forced to charge set prices for certain services.

What struck me was the note in the article that the company submitted 2,400 pages of "documentation" to prove its case. If the situation is as obvious as the company asserts, why so much paper? The article leaves some questions unresolved. For example, some phone users get service from a third party like AT&T but that service comes in over Verizon lines. My guess is that in its request, Verizon is counting AT&T as a competitor, but if deregulation occurs, Verizon could raise the rates on its wholesale access to the point that it is no longer profitable for companies like AT&T to do business. This is exactly what happened when price controls were lifted for DSL; across the country, virtually all the third party DSL providers, who had really created the market when the phone companies avoided it, went out of business, leaving the field to the incumbents.

Should Verizon be unleashed? It is likely to be a painful pill in the short term, but partial regulation (of some companies and not others) creates market irregularities that keep communities chained to old technology. In the long term, the best answer is open service provider networks that let any company use the community's digital roads to sell goods and services (and no, the government won't be competing with the private sector). Verizon, among others, could use those community digital roads to keep existing customers and to attract new ones. And prices would go down across the board.

Henrico County, Virginia, has garnered national attention for its program of giving laptops to kids once they reach sixth grade. But if the school system is not prepared to truly transform the teaching and learning process, the results may not be what we expect. In this article, at least one mother made her daughter give the laptop back because it had become a time waster for the girl and her grades had dropped.

It is easy to blame it on kids spending too much time chatting and goofing off on online Web sites, but those are only symptoms of the real problem. I can take some of the blame for all this, as the Blacksburg Electronic Village project helped our county schools become the first school system in the country to have broadband to every school and to become the first school system in the country to have broadband in every classroom. Since then I have worked on many other K12 technology projects--all with the best of intentions, but the results have been mixed at best.

Teaching kids is a complext process that requires years of experience, and you can't just drop a few computers into the middle of a centuries old way of doing things and expect magical results. I have learned that the hard way. In my experience, it is school administrators that are most often at fault. They are eager to win grants and push technology into the classroom; it looks good to parents and to elected leaders that decide school budgets.

But those same administrators are often much less enthusiastic about actually rolling up their sleeves, working side by side with teachers, and trying to figure out what changes need to be made to really leverage the promise of all this technology. And there is what I call the "five percent problem." Dump a bunch of technology into a school, and under any circumstances, you will have about five percent of teachers who are motivated to dig in and do amazing things with the stuff. Those "five percent" projects become the poster children for technology in the classroom. They are used to say, "See what great stuff all this is!"

But those five percenters are the exception, not the rule. Most teachers need a lot of help and support from the top down to get comparable results, and it usually is not there. So while computer manufacturers make money selling computers to schools, our kids are still learning the same old way. If your school district wants money for technology efforts, ask some hard questions about how administrators intend to support teachers with good tech support, appropriate learning resources, and assistance with curriculum changes.