An Open Letter to Connersville, IN

I sub­mit­ted this to my old home­town’s news­pa­per, the eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment group, cham­ber of com­merce [the online form is bro­ken!] and library [pro­vid­ed email address does not exist], since I was able to accom­plish vir­tu­al­ly noth­ing online this week­end. I did­n’t send it to the may­or’s office because they only sup­ply a snail mail address and a phone num­ber. No won­der every­one leaves town.

An Open Let­ter to Con­nersville, IN.

Dear old home­town,

I know that unso­licit­ed advice is sel­dom appre­ci­at­ed, but while I was home for the Thanks­giv­ing hol­i­day I spent a good while try­ing to find a decent inter­net con­nec­tion some­where in town in order to do a bit of telecom­mut­ing. Fail­ing that, I ulti­mate­ly decid­ed that unso­licit­ed advice is bet­ter than no advice at all. I cur­rent­ly live in Cleve­land, where I can check my email just about any­where in less than two min­utes. In Con­nersville it takes almost three-quar­ters of an hour. While Cleve­land is sev­er­al orders of mag­ni­tude larg­er than Con­nersville, it comes from a sim­i­lar indus­tri­al and man­u­fac­tur­ing back­ground and is going through a sim­i­lar process of rede­f­i­n­i­tion. So I’m going to steal some plays that are cur­rent­ly work­ing for Cleve­land and scale them down to a small town lev­el.

In my mind, the most effec­tive bang for your buck will come through devel­op­ing and enhanc­ing the tech­nol­o­gy of the area. This can be done on an indi­vid­ual, busi­ness, munic­i­pal and even region­al lev­el. You’ve got broad­band, now go wire­less. The Fayette Coun­ty Pub­lic Library would be the per­fect place to set up a free WiFi net­work; and every town that wants to grow into the new tech econ­o­my should have at least one. In a per­fect world an entire town would be wired, but a few places here and there is a good start. Free WiFi acts as a cat­a­lyst for net­work­ing and infor­ma­tion shar­ing.

You’ve got a city web­site, but it is sta­t­ic and neglect­ed and, frankly, about a decade behind the times. A Con­nersville wiki [fun­ny name, I know] would allow the com­mu­ni­ty to give detailed descrip­tions of the area in their own words, and mul­ti­ple users could ensure that infor­ma­tion about the area is updat­ed quick­ly and effi­cient­ly. Check out the Wikipedia for an excel­lent appli­ca­tion of this tech­nol­o­gy. Start your own weblogs about what­ev­er you find inter­est­ing and talk to your chil­dren about this kind of online inter­ac­tion, they prob­a­bly already use free social net­work­ing and weblog­ging ser­vices like Blog­ger, MySpace, Friend­ster, Live­Jour­nal and Upcoming.org.

A few more quick sug­ges­tions: The News-Exam­in­er puts its con­tent online—very good—now make it inter­ac­tive: allow com­ments, free online clas­si­fieds like Craigslist, et cetera. Hon­est­ly, the News-Exam­in­er web­site is already bet­ter than The Plain Deal­er’s site in Cleve­land. There should be a Con­nersville-spe­cif­ic bul­letin board for events and activ­i­ties and a com­put­er club at the high school or formed local­ly that holds com­mu­ni­ty train­ing ses­sions and sets-up web­sites and wire­less net­works for local busi­ness­es.

What are the upshots of all this grass­roots effort? There are far too many to list, but some of the most vis­i­ble and impor­tant ones include increased com­mu­ni­ca­tion among com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers and a mod­ern and tech-smart busi­ness image that will seem much more attrac­tive to pos­si­ble new eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment. IT com­pa­nies or new media busi­ness­es that would be amenable to small town and exur­ban lifestyles aren’t going to look at Con­nersville unless the web pres­ence is there. You’re sit­u­at­ed to tap into mar­kets in Cincin­nati, Indi­anapo­lis and even Day­ton. Dis­tance isn’t real­ly mea­sured in miles so much as megabytes these days. That’s all for now. Hope­ful­ly I’ll see you in cyber­space.

Yours Tru­ly,
Adam Har­vey
aharvey@organicmechanic.org