Urban Broadband Users in Minnesota

Sorry about the tardy post.  The week kinda got away from me.  But today is our last meeting and I expect it to be a short one.  We've got a really-close final draft to review and the only thing I found were nits.  We've bashed through to consensus on all the hard sections, now we're reviewing summaries, introduction, etc.

Fingers crossed, we'll be heading into announcement/rollout/press-release/joint-legislative-hearing a week from today in downtown St Paul.  Nearing the end of the trail.

Hmmm.  Click HERE for the list of applicants for mapping money from the NTIA.  Notice anything interesting?  Looks like Connected Nations isn't the only possible solution for coming up with state-level mapping of broadband availability.  Remember my "cranky" post?  Where the University of Minnesota got stiffed by the Pawlenty administration because they "couldn't assure the providers of confidentiality"?   Well, it sure looks like lots of other states figured that equation differently.

And gosh all fishhooks.  The NTIA has just released the first 4 grants for mapping money to non-Connected-Nations states.  The story behind that link says that the reason that the NTIA favored those applications was this;

According to the NTIA, these states’ applications stood out from the rest because they plan to get data from sources other than the usual suspects (incumbent telecom and cable operators), verify the data they collect, and collaborate with other state agencies.

Y'know...  If they'd asked us Task Force folks (instead of just handing the deal to Connected Nations), we could have told the state bureaucrats that.  Maybe we've moved from the front of the line to the back of the line?   Clever us.

I remembered to bring the dang MP3 recorder with me this time, so here are the recordings of the meeting yesterday

Click HERE for the recording of the morning meeting

• 0:04  Ongoing Counctil
• 1:04  Ubiquitous Broadband
• 1:26  Break
• 1:40  Security
• 2:05  Economic Development
• 2:39  Benefits to Organizations and Institutions

Click HERE for the recording of the afternoon meeting (I had to scoot, so the last 10 minutes of the meeting wasn't recorded)

• 0:01  Security
• 0:55  Connected Nations
• 1:07  Report-drafting details

It's getting to be crunch time as we wind down to the final report.  We're on an every-two-week schedule now and things are feeling a little pressured as we finally get to the point where we have to face and resolve some fundamental questions.  The one that's likely to dominate the meeting tomorrow is the question "what is this here Council you're proposing actually going to do?"  Opinions vary (to commit violent understatement).  A lot of us want to make sure that this report doesn't just become Report Number Nine (number nine, number nine, number nine...) on the pile of reports gathering dust and the key to that is FOLLOW THROUGH by all us stakeholders.  To do that, we need a mechanism to stay focused, come together, figure out Right Action, and keep things moving.  We'll see how it goes...

Click HERE for the info and agenda for the meeting tomorrow.  I'm on deck for three agenda items in a row in the morning.  I'm probably going to need a beer by lunch time.