The National Rural Telecon Congress met last week in Mesa, AZ and the meeting was a very interesting gathering of folks discussing how to promote access and use of broadband in rural communities. I have been involved with the Congress for about 10 years and it was good to renew acquaintances with some of the other old-times. Many of the old-timers are affiliated with either land grant colleges or small non-profits. An infusion of new faces also occurred as the Congress made a strong effort to recruit those engaged with broadband mapping; these are mostly state government officials who shared their introductory language of “I have only been in this job for x months.”

The format of the Congress was very participatory. Over the three days, people could choose to join in on discussions on five topics dealing with converged technology, collaborative engagement, governance, anchor institutions and mapping. I was a subject expert in the collaborative engagement group. Our group was the largest to begin with and grew over the two days of discussion.

Key themes emerged – collaboration and messaging were two that rose to the top. We talked both about infrastructure deployment and building demand/community education.

One of the goals at the beginning of the conference was to build a best practices toolkit for rural broadband advocates. By the end of the conference, that goal had been modified to develop a tool that would point people to the various existing toolkits. Some of the toolkits identified as best practice were the Blandin Foundation’s and resources created by E-North Carolina and the State of California.

Learn more at www.ruraltelecon.org.

Yesterday I attended MTA’s Telework seminar. It provided a foundation on which to build some local or statewide efforts by MTA members. I could see a number of economic developers wanting to join in a collaborative effort. As I listened to the presentation, I came up with some ideas that might help community leaders to get a local teleworker program started:

1. Survey non-homestead property owners for business owners and flexible workers for teleworking promotion opportunities.
2. Create a space for co-working to host teleworking residents and visitors; provide bandwidth, professional networking and tech support.
3. Offer and promote advanced services to your teleworker customers – data back-up, IT support.
4. Open provider networks (within exchanges or groups of exchanges) to very high speed networking to connect collaborating creative home-workers. (For example, within all Federated or CTC exchanges, thereby avoiding off-network transport).
5. Harvest statewide remote worker job openings from the DEED database or Monster.com on an ongoing basis and promote these opportunities to local job seekers.
6. Implement joint marketing efforts by local telcos and economic development authorities to Twin Cities and very large regional center companies about capabilities of rural telecommunications and workforce. Bring metro companies to rural regions for job fairs. Host them in nice places!
7. Create a local fact sheet on local telecommunications capabilities that job seekers can take to job interviews to show telework capabilities. Distribute from local workforce centers through job counselors and on display racks.
8. Work with DEED to create a telework class offered at Workforce Centers.

Telework is a great focus for local telcos and EDA folks – because we share the same goal – rural economic vitality. If would be great to see some of these folsk get together next week at the Blandin Broadband Conference next week (Oct 13-14) in Baxter. There will be time and space for attendees to address ideas such as telework.

Suwon, South Korea was named the Intelligent Community of the Year last Friday. They won over the other six finalists, including some of my favorites – Dublin, Ohio; Tallinn, Estonia; and Eindhoven, Netherlands. Stockholm, Sweden was the 2009 Intelligent Community of the Year. Suwon is just 15 miles from Seoul. South Korea has now produced three of the last five Intelligent Community winners.

What I find most fascinating about this competition and these communities is how it reveals the culture of the participating communities and countries. “Happy Suwon” is the marketing tagline for the winning community. “Fast-fast” is their operating style. They get input from the people, make decisions, do things, measure results, move on. Always fast-fast. Eindhoven and Tallinn are fiercely strategic and highly encouraging of collaboration and innovation. The US communities seem more haphazard and free-flowing. In the European and Asian communities, there seems less conflict about the proper government role in moving a community forward. They seem to talk more about what should be done rather than to argue the proper approach to getting it done.

All of these communities put a strong emphasis on world class infrastructure – telecommunications, transportation, and education systems. They are working hard to put these in place and to make use of them to increase their economic competitiveness.

Given a chance, what would you say to a top federal policy maker about rural broadband? I had my chance at the Broadband Properties Summit this week in Dallas with USDA Rural Utilities Services Administrator Jonathan Adelstein. I first saw him in the elevator and he asked me what I wanted to hear from him during his keynote. I asked him how we will get broadband to the countryside surrounding RBOC-served communities that have been CLEC’d by smaller independent companies who have cherry-picked the significant customer base in the town but are unable to overbuild the countryside. He told me that this was too hard of a question! As we got off the elevator, I saw that he was heading to the restaurant for breakfast alone. I overcame my natural shyness and asked him if I could join him and he welcomed me to his table. What followed was a very interesting discussion (at least for me!).

He was a very good questioner. We talked about the marvel of cooperatives as a model for rural broadband development. We talked about the appropriate scale for this type of cooperative development and whether new cooperatives could make it economically today as start-ups. Necessary scale versus local control – how does one find that balance. As Minnesota’s telecommunications providers get larger through acquisitions (CenturyLink purchasing Embarq and Qwest, growing independent telcos like ACS, Iowa Telecom and New Ulm Telephone), will the connection to the local community remain a priority?

The Broadband Properties Summit includes a focus on the business linkages between real estate development and telecom services. Telecom providers like ATT and Verizon pay real estate developers commission when tenants sign on with these providers. This got me thinking about if there was any real differences between an apartment building and a community? If communities are actively working to boost broadband adoption and subscriptions for community economic vitality, what is the proper role between communities and their providers on broadband promotion initiatives? I will be meeting with Minnesota’s telecom providers to discuss this very topic as we prepare to implement the Blandin Foundation’s MN Intelligent Community NTIA BTOP program.