Last week the Minnesota Intelligent Rural Communities partners met to kick off their NTIA-funded initiative. We were excited to get some words of encouragement from Senator Amy Klobuchar on our efforts. It was inspiring to hear how much Senator Klobuchar “gets it” in terms of understanding about broadband access and adoption as advantages that will help Minnesota flourish. We are thankful that she was kind enough to allow us to share her video here…
It was great to get all of our project partners in the same room; truly the whole seems much more powerful than the sum of the parts. We are very optimistic about how broadband and the MIRC community can support Minnesota – especially rural Minnesota. Thanks to the Ultra High Speed Broadband Task Force Minnesota now has specific broadband goals to shoot for, and we are eager to add MIRC’s “horsepower” to that effort.
It was an intense meeting, but energizing. Many participants showed up with a vague recollection of what they had signed up for last summer – but the details, practicalities and even partners were less familiar. So we slogged through the nitty gritty details such as reporting required for a federal contract – made understandable and even friendly by some of our fine Blandin accounting experts. Then we used some of the Open Space techniques we learned last year at the Minnesota Voices Online Unconference to introduce the partners to each other and initiate relationships that will hope and think will pave the road to collaboration for this project and beyond. In fact, one of the ways Blandin will define success for this project is the strength of relationships built among the partners of Regional Development Centers, town leaders, business service providers and others.
We asked partners how they would define success for this project and capture their answers on video. (One non-video answer we have to share was a hope for serendipitous results – love the idea and the eloquence.) You can see all of the videos on our YouTube channel. Here’s a sample…
