Tonight I had the pleasure of attending the Asheville "Town Meeting" about our effort to win the Google fiber initiative. My goal was two-fold. First, selfishly I hoped to actually meet many of the people involved in the initiative face to face for the first time, as I have been part of the google group, facebook group, followed the twitter feed, and more. Second, I am so excited about the process, regardless of whether we get it, this is an amazing participatory drive in our community, and yes I would love to get 1 gigabit fiber in Asheville. About 300 hundred people gathered at the civic center banquet room to discuss how Asheville positions ourselves to get Google here. So, our mayor, a great lady named Terry Bellamy, kicks off the meeting and says "Google needs us", they need our creativity, and our initiative, to show this fiber roll out could work. Well, she thinks big, what can I say. I have to agree that our little hamlet is full of creative types, and not short on initiative, mainly due to the people attracted here by the natural beauty, arts scene, and maybe our 13 micro breweries. There is a local t-shirt that reads "If you are too weird for Asheville, you are too weird", gotta think Google would like that one.
We hear from a panel of local experts, including Hunter Goosman of ERC Broadband. Hunter discusses the "last mile principle". The "last mile" or "last kilometre" is the final leg of delivering connectivity from a communications provider to a customer. The last mile is the most cost prohibitive, sometimes costing more than hundreds of miles of fiber run point to point, due to labor and logistics.
Anyway, my first goal was a great success. I met Jose Ibarra of Applied Solutions Group, or H0zae, as he goes on twitter. H0zae is the key driving force behind the Google Avl initiative. I also meet Gary of gsocialmedia.com, possibly the most prolific tweeter on the planet, certainly in the AVL. I talked to many old friends, and got to finally meet some of the social media gurus of my community. I will be meeting with Jose soon to discuss an education strategy for Google AVL.
I thought the last mile was appropriate for this "tie the worlds" part of web 2.0. Getting together online with these guys is so easy, but actually meeting, and beginning to work together on an exciting project is less so, but once done, it really starts to bring it all home.
I will be blogging more about Google AVL soon......
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment