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Glocalization? On Neighborhoods, Communities, and Cities

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Back from a week's R&R with the family (oxymoron?), I'm chomping at the bit to get back into the swing of things. What better way than to start blogging? While on vacaiton in Palm Dessert (golf and beautiful weather) and LA (swimming pools, movie stars), I thought a lot about neighborhoods, communities, and cities, and how they all work together.

I especially got busy on my thinking in the still of the early morning, while my family slept and I drank coffee in the lobby. All these terms we use in our discussions about metropolitan broadband tend to get used interchangeably, although they are distinct, if subjective. Do you relate more with your neighborhood, your community (which one?) or with your city? Is that a fair question? I think it depends on the size of your city, and how long you've been in your neighborhood, and the strength of the bonds you have made with different communities, both on-line and in the real world. It's easier to have an affinity for a smaller town, for instance, and it's easier to consider your neighborhood your community if you've been there a while and know lots of people. When out of town, I claim Austin as my home, but day-to-day, I reference Westlake Hills, and my neighborhood of Davenport Ranch, sometimes referring to the local elementary school, Bridgepoint. It depends on context, but I veer towards more local interests when I consider how I spend my energies.

So, let's fast forward to a year from now - its March 2007 - and let's assume that we have all been wildly successful at what we work at - deploying wireless municipal networks to get more people access to high-speed broadband. What will the world look like? How will the networks have been deployed? How will we get people to use them? Have incumbent providers countered this new competition by dropping their access fees to the floor? (they can do that, and they will).

I would propose that it is inevitable that we all begin to pursue a neighborhood / community development strategy if metropolitan broadband is to succeed in its lofty goals of ubiquitous connectivity. The ROI business cases for these networks involve getting either retail or wholesale customers to sign on to brng in subscriber revenues, and the greater the ratio of subscribers to homes passed by the network, the more successful the network is. With such goals, it makes sense to go local and go native - find out what makes a community tick and use local knowledge of those issues to sell the new network approach and optimize network traffic. It's a guerrilla warfare, where local knowledge trumps aerial bombardment (mass marketing and low prices).

For just that reason - the need for community adoption - I have long promoted community involvement up-front, so that there is widespread buy-in on such a dramatic project as a community network. That requires education, promotion, in short, an all out effort to open people's eyes to the possibilities of Last Mile Connectivity. For planning purposes, I believe it starts at the metropolitan level - thus, the Metro part of MetroNetIQ.

For deployment purposes, however, I think it will be best to go down to the neighborhood level, to give priority in building out networks to those areas where penetration will be the highest, and to where the needs for network connectivity are the greatest. Such discernment only comes from on-the-ground intelligence that is best derived from local community relationships.

For more on this concept that some have labelled G/localization, I recommend Danah Boyd's excellent speech at the recent ETech Conference in CA. See also Danah's wonderful blog apophenia for more such musings on community, culture, and social networking.

Posted on March 20, 2006 at 09:32 AM

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