Developing Community Technology Leadership

Those places that do the most with technology will be the winners in the digital economy. The power of gigabit broadband — and other digital technologies — is realized when it enables better decision-making, more informed, inclusive, and effective action, and solutions to real world problems. You can't use it if you don't have it, but just having it doesn't do much good. You have to use it! That's where technology leadership is critical.

It can be difficult to really use digital technology because there are so many uncertainties about costs and results. Use of digital technology often involves profound change to what you do as well as how you do it, and such changes can be really scary. Effective use of technology requires vision, discipline, and ability to rally others to action. In other words, it requires leadership.

Typical "great man" command-and-control leadership doesn't work; it results in incremental uses that don't meet evolving needs, generate excess costs without capturing the key benefits, and are quickly out-dated. Technology experts tend to get too deep into the technology itself.

I have seen many communities with wonderful broadband assets fail to develop simply because they did not have the technology leadership necessary to capitalize on their assets. In contrast, I've seen apparently disadvantaged communities do amazing things because they had people who could connect with prospective users, understand their concerns and needs, and bridge the gap between traditional leaders and technology experts.

That's why I am delighted to announce that Eduity has received support from the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund — a joint initiative between Mozilla, US Ignite and the National Science Foundation — to take the technology leadership program model from the corporate setting and adapt it to the community setting.

Over the next few months we'll be working with Hive Chattanooga to take ideas about what technology leadership is and how to develop it, and test them in Chattanooga. Strategic Networks Group, which conducted the State of Tennessee's broadband assessment last year, is providing critical data to identify "problem owners" and "solution owners," and will help us evaluate the results of the pilot.

While Eduity is a platform company rather than a program company, we feel strongly that this type of program is essential for communities. Our platform is designed to facilitate and support programs like this, but as with other technologies it's not the platform that matters, it's what you do with it.