Peter Orne Broadband Wireless Communities Blog

OneCommunity to Spur Digital Inclusion in 26 Knight Communities and Beyond

A five-year, $25-million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to OneCommunity will be used to create a Knight Center of Digital Excellence in Akron, Ohio, and to spur digital inclusion in cities around the United States. The initiative includes a $10-million Digital Opportunity Fund that can be tapped to provide challenge grants to the 26 U.S. communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers.

Since 2004, team members from OneCommunity — previously called OneCleveland — have presented at numerous W2i events on their vision for fostering economic and civic progress through the innovative and collaborative application of information technologies. On Thursday, shortly after the joint announcement about the grant, W2i Executive Director Daniel Aghion spoke with OneCommunity President and CEO Scot Rourke about the dimensions of the grant and the journey ahead for his organization.

Daniel Aghion: Congratulations on the announcement. How far-reaching is this initiative?

Scot Rourke: Our goal is to help ensure that communities develop effective broadband and applications strategies that bring value to a community. At the same time, we are sensitive to how human-intensive the education process can be, and we've developed an innovative model to do that. We are IT entrepreneurs who have run big businesses, so we're familiar with the scaling and growing capacity to service this audience. The neat thing about being in a nonprofit is that our only selfish need is capacity. We are going to have the tools and the resources we need to fill in gaps, working with the network and helping communities accelerate their ambitious networks.

DA: How did you get together with the Knight Foundation?

SR: The Knight Foundation has invested in a variety of efforts and communities. Starting about two years ago, they developed investments in places like Philadelphia that have had varying degrees of success, and we're seeing firsthand some of the challenges in these projects. We started a dialogue and discussed the Akron project together. (Akron is where Knight-Ridder was founded.) We listened to what the Knights' interests were, and they approached us about the Knight communities.

DA: How is the grant program structured?

SR: First is a virtual knowledge base of all the best tools, the Center for Digital Excellence. We are funded to build tools, communication resources and white papers to provide nationwide offerings from a neutral vendor- and tender-agnostic perspective, and to coach people through some of the hard questions. For example, when is WiMAX going to be real? When is 700 Mhz going to be real? There aren't a lot of good answers, and people get paralyzed because the data's not there. We need to highlight the different perspectives and resources.

Second are the Community Program Directors, who are traveling consultants to facilitate this process, starting with the Knight communities. They will help communities assess their assets, help them develop business cases and technical expertise to accelerate the benefits of technology for health, education and government.

Third is the Knight Digital Opportunities Fund. Where communities demonstrate an interest, and then build an effort to catalyze local resources, we'll continue to support this through an infusion from this seed fund. We start with the community engagement of building and validating broad interest. It's important to have stakeholders like universities, government, transit authorities, libraries, schools — multianchor accounts. We line those up on the front end.  

DA: If you look at the three pillars, out of the $25 million project over five years, what is the percentage that will go against project and infrastructure versus training and education?

SR: $15 million is for operating expenses for human capacity, the Center, the digital tools, the dialog, and workshops serving all the Knight communities and beyond, while $10 million is for the infrastructure and local capacity-building — the Digital Opportunity Fund. The goal is to take years off this process and provide tools to make this sustainable.

DA: How will your success be measured?

SR: The Knight Foundation is looking for as favorable impacts as possible and in all 26 communities over a five-year period. We go in and assess the community, and our goal is to move them from the “bottom left to the top right” [cites Gartner figure] and to assess value. The first thing communities need to do, to qualify for our facilitators and then our funds, is to meet certain criteria. The Center will be tooled up to educate them on a virtual basis. The Foundation actually has staff and program people responsible for each one of the communities. Those are the keys to these communities.

DA: What do you envision will be your biggest challenge?

SR: My biggest concern is that the demand is going to exceed our ability to scale appropriately. Managing expectations is hard. You've got someone sitting at home, jobless, who thinks Wi-Fi is going to change his life, but he's not changing his behavior. I'm a little intimidated by the task of managing expectations. We know how to connect everybody to resources. We’ve seen how one project can consume any amount of resources. There are a lot of lessons. Knight sees us experimenting. You can't take risks and transform without some wins and losses. We're going to learn from everybody else's lessons, and help the industry move forward and accelerate the adoption and hence the benefits.

DA: I noted that the Center may have an international emphasis?

SR: The UK, in particular, has some models about motivation and defining the digital divide. We've been stuck on availability for a decade. The definition of digital divide evolves, and different divides emerge, so the UK has been our best source for improving our awareness of the digital divide. The messaging is one of the most important things we do — we're going to try to aggregate all the great messaging pieces.

DA: If there was one message you want to get across, what would it be?

SR: We're now resourced to approach this challenging area with the perspective of the public interest foremost in mind. The key thing is a call to arms and what we can all do together to get some more wins out there, document them, resource those that are deserving, and we're ready to become community co-investors.

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