Questions And Answers

Andrew Cohill of Blacksburg, Va

Monday Conversation: Andrew Cohill, Ph.D.

Dr. Andrew Michael Cohill is the President and CEO of Design Nine. He is an information architect with an educational background in architecture, ergonomics, and computer science. Cohill has an international reputation for his work advising rural communities on technology and telecommunications issues. In the United States, he has worked with rural communities across the country, with recent work in Virginia, Illinois, New Mexico, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

He was the Director of the world renowned Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV) at Virginia Tech from 1993 to 2002. He lectures regularly on community technology, economic development, and information architecture regularly. He is a widely published writer, and author and co-editor of the popular book about Blacksburg (Community Networks: Lessons learned from Blacksburg, Virginia), now in its second edition. He served as co-chair of the Governor's Task Force on eCommunities for the Commonwealth of Virginia for the duration of the task force (2001-2002).

    •   He is a member of the Wireless Future Advisory Board.

    •   He is a member of the National Advisory Board for Communities of the Future, a national coalition of thinkers and policy makers concerned with the sustainability and health of communities.

    •   He is a member of the Association For Community Networks, and has served two terms on the Board of Directors and two terms as President.

    • He is a member of the Rural Telecommunications Congress, has served on the Board of Directors, and is currently Secretary.

    • He is the founder of the Knowledge Democracy Center, a think tank looking at issues relating to communities, governance, and technology in the Knowledge Economy.

    • He is a founding member of the International Community Learning Centers group, and is a member of the International Futures Network.

    • He is working on a new book on communities and technology that will be published in the fall of 2004.

    • He is works as a consultant to communities and is in wide demand as a speaker on technology issues.

In the nineties, Blacksburg became widely known as the "most wired community in the world." In the fall of 1999, more than 87% of the town's residents were using the Internet, and over 75% of the town's businesses had made the Internet a regular part of their marketing. Today, virtually all of Blacksburg's businesses and residents are estimated to have one or more broadband access options at home, at work, or at both. Cohill served as Director of the community network project since July of 1993; he was responsible for the design and development of electronic village services, supervised a research and development group, and managed an operations group that manages the BEV office and administrative services. He also directed the long range planning effort for the group, and served as an advocate for networking in the university and around the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Cohill's work at the BEV became a widely copied model for "connected communities" around the world. Cohill was the architect of the now widely imitated MSAP (Multimedia Services Access Point) concept; Blacksburg was the first community to have a working MSAP. A community MSAP can dramatically improve intra-community network traffic, and positions the community to make full use of broadband connections. Much of Cohill's recent work has been closely connected to telecommunications master planning and economic development. He presents seminars regularly to communities leaders and economic developers on strategies for getting communities connected to the new Knowledge Economy.

He is wide demand as a speaker on economic development issues and technology because of his clear explanations, shrewd insights, and engaging manner. For more information about Cohill's work, send a note to cohill@designnine.com.

Last week, Dr. Cohill agreed to share his insights in an interview with Lafayette Pro Fiber. Here's the full text of that exchange:

1) You led the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV) for about a decade. What was the purpose of BEV and who was involved?

Simply put, the goal of the BEV was to get everyone in Blacksburg (and the entire county) connected to the Internet. By 1999, 87% of Blacksburg residents were using the Internet for personal, business, and civic uses. Virginia Tech started and still supports the project. The BEV is partly self-supporting through fees for some services (strictly cost recovery). The Town of Blacksburg and the phone company were important partners when we started out.

2) What are some of the broader, not necessarily economic benefits to communities from having universal access to affordable bandwidth?

What we've found in Blacksburg and in many other communities with active community network projects is that getting people online and providing ongoing support and services from a community network gets people out of their homes and more involved in community activities across the entire community. It's important to note that a community network is not just a Web site--it's staff, services, training opportunities, ongoing content development and support, and especially a focus on entrepreneurship and economic development. Many communities have a "visitor's brochure" Web site that they call a "community network," but that's not what community network projects are.

3) What is the role of technology in building or strengthening community and in creating common goals?

Technology by itself does not solve any community problems. I've seen too many communities pour money into technology projects without taking the time to answer these three questions:

--Where are we now? (not just with respect to technology, but broadly across the community, including commerce, economic development, quality of life, governance, etc)

--Where do we want to go?

--How do we get there?

Many communities will engage in some assessment activities or a feasibility study to answer the first question, but few take the time to create and sustain a shared vision of the future for the community, and to tie technology investments to that shared vision of the community. The key success factor I've found for technology projects is having a shared vision for the future--about the community broadly. If that is in place, technology investments are much more likely to pay off. But few communities want to take the time and do the hard work to create that shared vision.

Once the vision has been defined and articulated, it's relatively easy to answer the last question.

4) Specific interest seemed to have been placed on building tools for community building into BEV—tools to connect citizens to each other as well as the outside world. What were some of those tools? Were there surprises in the way they were used?

Sustained education and training programs that adjusted to the interests and needs of the community over time, were, I believe, a keystone in our success. Investments in infrastructure are often wasted because businesses, civic groups, and citizens don't know how to use new services and technology.

A heavy focus on rich, vibrant local content was also a key to our success. Local content gives people a reason to get online. The importance of content and an active effort to develop and sustain is also frequently overlooked, at great risk.

The tools and interests change over time--it is very important to have flexibility in your technology master plan and to review and update it at least twice a year. A technology master plan provides a framework for effectively integrating infrastructure, education and training, entrepreneurship development, and local content development.

5) What is the role of private sector providers in BEV? After your experience at BEV what do you think is the best mix?

Contrary to persistent myths, the BEV had no direct funding for infrastructure. We had to rely almost entirely on the private sector to wire Blacksburg. The community network (i.e. the BEV project) helped attract private investment by creating a marketplace of savvy residents and business customers who knew how to use technology (education and training) and were anxious to access information about the community (rich local content). Community networks create and/or expand the marketplace for services. If a market exists, the private sector will fill it. But that marketplace is not necessarily created just by community infrastructure investments (which are still important); it's a series of parallel and concurrent efforts--infrastructure, entrepreneurship support, content development, education and training--that create the conditions for success.

For most communities, I recommend modest community investments in infrastructure that help lower the cost of entry into the marketplace for private sector service and access providers. There are very few cases where I think the local government ought to be selling services to end users--that's better done by the private sector.

Community investments in infrastructure should aim to create the equivalent of a community road system. Local government does not own the businesses and trucks that deliver goods and services over our roads, but the community road system makes it less expensive for private businesses to offer goods and services in the community. Indeed, good roads were a cornerstone of economic development in the past, and still are. Communities with a common digital transport system (e.g. telecom duct, dark fiber, wireless tower sites, wireless towers, an community colocation facility, a Multimedia Services Access Point) will lower the cost of doing business for broadband companies.

6) What has the impact of the consolidation of corporate ownership of telephone and cable companies been on availability of affordable bandwidth in communities that are not the largest markets in the networks owned by those companies?

I don't think that consolidation has been an important factor. Most communities have one "old media" cable company and one "old media" telephone company, and consolidation has not affected that, nor is it likely to in the future. The real question is whether or not the community is taking steps to attract additional competitors into the region.

7) You've now left BEV (but not Blacksburg) to form your own company. What are the trends in community networking that you're seeing? How do they differ from those that led to the creation of BEV?

With the collapse of the dot-com era, there was reduced interest in community network projects, largely because they have been consistently misunderstood. They are still frequently characterized as either purely infrastructure projects or simply as Web sites, and neither view is correct. The best community network projects have been true collaborations among nonprofits, the business community, and local government, with adequate levels of staffing and funding available to support meaningful programs. Each community is unique, and so community network efforts have to be adapted to the needs of the community, rather than trying to use a cookie cutter or rubber stamp approach. This takes us back to the critical importance of a clearly articulated vision for the community that looks out at least twenty years--without that, it's hard to know what kinds of technology, infrastructure, and services will actually get the community where it wants to go.

8) Design Nine also focuses on community and economic development issues related to bandwidth availability. How can affordable bandwidth help communities grow and prosper? Are there real economic advantages to be gained by having access to affordable bandwidth before other communities? If there is an advantage how much bandwidth at what price point is optimal?

If a community is still having a debate about the value and importance of broadband to the economic future of the community and the region, then there are some serious problems that have to be addressed before any money should be spent on broadband.

Affordable, universal access to broadband is to economic development today what water and sewer was to economic development forty years ago. In other words, it is a business requirement. Communities that don't have a plan in place to get affordable broadband to every home and business in the next 5-10 years simply are not competitive in economic development terms. It's important to remember a few economic development facts:

--Industrial recruitment as an economic development strategy peaked in effectiveness in 1984 (per Rick Smyre at Communities of the Future). In other words, basing your entire economic development strategy on simply trying to attract businesses from somewhere else stopped being a good idea about twenty years ago.

--Most jobs today (75-90%, depending upon whom you ask) are created by small businesses (25 employees or less). These companies rarely relocate. In other words, most of the jobs that will be created in Lafayette over the next two years will be created by businesses that are already in the community. This means your economic development strategy should be spending most of its funds on small business enhancement and entrepreneurship development. Another way to put it is that if your economic development strategy is relying primarily on industrial recruitment, your region is missing as much as 90% of its potential job creation.

One of the most common mistakes communities make when planning telecommunications and technology investments is to put a traditional IT person in charge. Community network projects are at core community and economic development efforts, not nuts and bolts technology projects. Few IT managers or network directors have any experience designing and supporting communitywide technology efforts, which require the ability to work with and collaborate with disparate organizations and groups of people, each with varying goals and resources. Institutional and corporate networks look nothing like a communitywide network, and few IT people have the skills or capacity to work in this very different problem space.