b.cognosco

In his column on stopping the Cable/TelCo duopoly from capturing our national information infrastructure Dan Gillmore raises several tactics. One is local governement intervention. There's a great example of this right here in Georgia. The little town of LaGrange, GA, about 60 miles southwest of Atlanta, is one of the most wired cities in America.

LaGrange has no big universities, no huge corporate employers. They pretty much did it on their own. Take a look at the IT services the City of LaGrange provides:

The City of LaGrange offers Digital switching service, Multi-carrier POP, Two Growing Networks consisting of a 100 mile commercial network and 150 mile residential broadband network. The City is also a Competitive Naccess Provider for ITC Deltacom, Globe and other interstate carriers. LaGrange also has both CLEC and OCC Certifications and is licensed by the Georgia Public Service Commission fo the entire state of Georgia to offer many traditionally telecom contractor services. Lastly, but certainly not least, the City offers both T1 point to point availability and Raw Internet for businesses.

Not bad for a little country town in Georgia. Broad spectrum wireless may be our ultimate savior from telco feudalism, but LaGrange could teach us all a lesson.

Choice in Broadband as Important as Deployment
[...] There's another party at this table, by the way. Local governments can and should be building their own fiber networks, as some already have done. Unsurprisingly, the phone companies have been lobbying state legislatures to forbid this practice. We need a federal law that explicitly allows municipalities to bypass the monopolists. [...]
[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Mentoring the Community

1:54:30 PM

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Having a highly-regarded community member -- principal, CEO, etc -- comment on participants' weblogs seems a nice way to provide motivation and promote involvement.

Weblog Writing Mentors.
Interesting to read Will and Karen's thoughts on struggling to find the time and "finding the right mix" as Will phrases it. I'm struggling with many of the same issues. As the end of the marking period creeps up on me, I'm spending lots of time closely reading students' work and taking notes. Additionally, my action research notes are helping me see some things I might have missed otherwise.
I'm recruiting some friends, colleagues, and others to serve as weblog writing mentors for my students. After getting my principal to sign on and comment on several of my students' weblogs and seeing their reactions, I'm trying to rope in more adults. The feedback both on the writing itself (mechanics, spelling, etc.) and the content is coming too irregularly from me alone. I've been printing lots of pages and conferencing with students as time allows (and it usually doesn't). Now that they're getting into the habit of writing more regularly, I need to develop a mechanism for more ongoing personalized feedback.
I'm drafting some guidelines for these proposed mentors to help them provide appropriate feedback since many of them aren't educators. Hopefully, this will create a new audience for them while allowing me increased time to work more closely with a some of my struggling writers. [Joe Luft]
Joe is pointing in an interesting and important direction. A learning environment that makes use of Webpublishing and Weblogging is open to all kinds of extensions and participation of a wider community of collaborators. We have already seen the participation of authors (see for example The Secret Life of Bees project), peers, principals, etc. Now what about parents, grandparents, older students, invited professionals, exchange partners at foreign schools, and so forth. There are countless ways of how we could work with distributed roles. Watch Joe's ongoing action research... I am sure he will have interesting things to say about this issue in the comming weeks and months...
[Seblogging News]

Intranet Communication

1:46:34 PM

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Intranets, klognets, projects -- they all need community leaders to set the tone, keep the pace, and guide the evolution.

Roles and tasks of a community manager..
So klognets are little ad-hoc communities in blogspace. Suppose you want to support and nurture them? What do you do?
Sift Online Communities Insider posted these key roles and tasks to the Knowledge Board's Communities of Practice SIG.
Amongst the key roles of the community management function are:

A visible custodian of the user's experience on the site

A focal point for the creation and development of both content and functionality

A driver for 'added value' content and services

A source of leadership, standards and 'netiquette'

A pro-active stimulator for interest, engagement and participation

A co-ordinator of partner relations, contributions and offerings

A public champion for the site

A strategic thinker capable of visioning, planning, reviewing, measuring and developing the community

Depending on the nature, role and audience of your community, the tasks associated with community management can be individually identified:

Strategic planning

Content management

Member relations

Value creation

Event scheduling

Partner relations

Driving revenues

More details on each of the tasks, enough to create a job description.

As klognets are embraced by project management culture, project workers will step into these roles and do this work. Expect a variation of this description to become a project communication checklist.

[a klog apart community]
[a klog apart]