Communities

Richard Florida may be coming out with Who’s Your City? but some of us prefer towns. I know that Florida is positive on the potential for small towns, as this comment in the Telegraph Journal shows;

But Florida told reporters at a reception after his speech that it’s not just big cities that are creative. He said people in big cities are looking to get away to “cosmopolitan country towns” like Sackville.

“There’s a study in the United States that shows that certain rural areas actually have higher levels of creative economy than urban centres like Manhattan,” he said, sipping a glass of red wine.

“My students in Toronto” are complaining about the erosion of natural amenities in Toronto: no parks, no place to get to the water, it takes four hours to drive to the lake. People are looking for places that they can go and work and chill,” he said. “What I see here is a place that’s at the cutting edge. It has a fabulous university that’s top-class. It has great natural amenities and has, for its size, outstanding cultural amenities.”

Being a small town means that you don’t have to be attractive to thousands of “creatives”. A few people can make a big difference in a small town. I just read that Hugh MacLeod, of GapingVoid fame, is considering Alpine, Texas (pop. 6,000) as his home base in the US:

5. It’s not official, and I’m just going to play it by ear, but I’m thinking of making Alpine my permanent US base. A lot depends on how many gigs I get this side of the Atlantic in 2008.

6. If I ever end up living permanently in the US again, it’ll be here. Nowhere else.

The best marketing strategy for small towns who don’t want to be left out of the creative economy is to have one-on-one conversations with potential residents. Everyone is miscellaneous and everyone wants to be special, so a broad-based marketing campaign just won’t work. It will take individual relationships and the right circumstances on a case by case basis. On top of that, each newcomer could have a significant impact on the town, so the rules change with each addition. Imagine getting Peter Jackson to move to your town. One person has the potential to create a social and economic tipping point.

Update: Hugh goes on in a subsequent post to show the key to success for small towns:

10. Though this part of the world went into economic decline after the World War Two [like every other ranching culture in North America], I can already see it coming back, I can already seeing green shoots springing up. Sick and burned out of big-city life, people are starting to move to places like here, more and more. And they’re bringing what they learned in the big city and applying it to a place more suited to their individual needs. Hence the trattoria’s, the microbreweries, the coffee roasters, the art galleries and yes, the internet cartoonists turning up. And the internet and the global microbrand make all this even more viable, even more exciting. Alpine, Texas is no longer in the middle of nowhere; Alpine, Texas is in the middle of EVERYWHERE, if it wants to be. Rock on.

Last night I attended our town’s Business Retention & Expansion briefing, which reported on findings from a study conducted last year. One of the findings was that the local business priority is to attract industry to the town. Key issues for local businesses were cost of leasing space; municipal taxes; availability of zoned land and land costs. The local economic development agency stated that it would help businesses in the area through training, mentorship and supporting tourism. The town’s strategy will be a “build it and they will come” approach, focusing on a few key sectors and attempting to attract businesses in those areas.

I contrast this with Richard Florida’s presentation in Sackville two weeks ago. First of all, I noted that 64% of total employment in the town is in what Florida calls the creative economy [I added up – Health & Education; Professional & Information; Finance & Insurance; Other services]. According to Florida, “People don’t move to the jobs – the jobs move to the people“. He also said that we are currently going through a fundamental economic transformation and that the key to economic success will be to stoke the creative furnace of each and every citizen. However, no one asked how Sackville could grow its three T’s (technology, talent and tolerance). For example, municipal wi-fi was not seen as a business need; supporting arts & culture is not a business priority and attracting immigrants did not even get discussed. As I walked home, I was thinking that there is a significant difference between asking people their needs and doing what’s needed.

Last night’s discussion was about supporting existing businesses and I likened it to a similar discussion that could have taken place 100 years ago, with concerned business leaders trying to determine how best to support the local carriage factory. Balancing current demands while looking to the future and preparing for a changing world will be a major challenge for all communities in North America. For instance, how will tourism change with a US economy in recession and fossil fuel prices continuing to increase? Would improved broadband access and capability be a better investment than an industrial park? I don’t have the answers, but I know that business as usual is not the solution.

That means 1,184 posts; 2,392 comments and counting …

Photo by cactus22minus1

Last night was the first General Meeting of Sackville’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) initiative, with about 60 people in attendance in spite of the bad road conditions. Kent Coates, Director of the CSA and a local farmer, gave a good overview of why we need sustainable, local agriculture and what we can do.

We will have 60 memberships for local produce this year, up from 20 last year, and will stay there unless we get another farmer selling produce. We also have some local cattle ranchers offering natural beef.

As Kent said last night, “Fresh and Local Food requires Canadian Farmers to receive a fair price for their produce. The alternative is non-controlled imported food.” He went on to present these facts about imported food in Canada:

• Most Imported Food is not Inspected in Canada
• Less than 10% of imported food is inspected and it is not mandated to meet Health Canada Guidelines for Food production in Canada
• No Processed Food is inspected unless a complaint has been received
• The country of origin is not mandated on food labels

There was much food for thought last night …

Just back from a polished presentation by Richard Florida, hosted by Mount Allison University and the town of Sackville. Florida covered many of the basics from his previous books. I picked up Flight of the Creative Class (now in paperback) and will check out his new book when it’s on the shelves – Who’s Your City.

Florida reviewed the basic five pillars of any prosperous community, based on 30,000 surveys, from least to most important:

1. Basic Infrastructure
2. Opportunity to do what one wants
3. Leadership at all levels
4. Open minded and diverse culture
5. Quality of place

He also discussed the role that Canada can play in fostering prosperous communities for the post-industrial era because we seem to be more open to experimentation. It was good to see many members of our community attending the lecture and I feel that we may be ready to work hard at creating a more open and diverse town, because as Florida says, “People don’t move to the jobs; the jobs move to the people”. That would put New Brunswick’s recent population growth strategy as a step in the right direction:

The growth strategy has four areas of focus:

• increasing and targeting immigration;
• increasing settlement and promoting multiculturalism;
• retaining youth and repatriating former New Brunswickers; and
• adopting family-friendly policies.

Rob Paterson talks about the power of social media, especially Google Maps and Twitter, in a case study of San Diego’s KPBS Public Radio during the recent forest fires.

Social media are serious tools that can be used to address many of the needs of our communities, but they haven’t been adopted because they are not accepted by the organisational culture. Luckily for KPBS, several decisions helped an already open culture to meet the needs of their community.

The technologies called social media are highlighting the constraints of the industrial mechanistic model premised on Taylor’s, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), which has informed management for the past century:

To explain briefly: owing to the fact that the workmen in all of our trades have been taught the details of their work by observation of those immediately around them, there are many different ways in common use for doing the same thing, perhaps forty, fifty, or a hundred ways of doing each act in each trade, and for the same reason there is a great variety in the implements used for each class of work. Now, among the various methods and implements used in each element of each trade there is always one method and one implement which is quicker and better than any of the rest. And this one best method and best implement can only be discovered or developed through a scientific study and analysis of all of the methods and implements in use, together with accurate, minute, motion and time study. This involves the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.

There is no single best way to address our pressing business, societal or environmental issues. The majority of our challenges are not Simple (addressed with best practice, as Taylor prescribed) nor are they merely Complicated (addressed by good practice) but more of our issues are Complex (addressed through emergent practice) and Chaotic (addressed by novel practice). Here is the Cynefin model:

The use of social media within and without an organisation allows a free flow of conversation and knowledge-sharing and better enables emergent and novel practices. As Deanna Mackey of KPBS said, “It was not business as usual and the site had to focus on the job at hand”. Social media help you deal with “not business as usual“.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m getting a lot of questions about creating “facebook-in-a-box” applications for industry niches or associations. Everyone wants a social network, but on their own terms.

I was commissioned to get a community going around the learning industry in our province in 2003, but that endeavour failed, for reasons I’ve noted. I also worked on a walled-garden healthcare community, and it was relatively successful, especially for the the mental health workers who took up wikis with a passion, and that was several years ago, before Wikipedia became a household name. I also helped develop the initial concept for a green building community, which is still a work in practice. Currently, I’m working with a collaborative community of senior public servants, who are taking a course over several months. It will remain to be seen if this walled-garden will continue as a venue once the course is over. One of the more resilient communities I know is the InternetTime Ning site. This is a grassroots initiative, based a lot on Jay’s personal and professional contacts.

All of these “communities” have been work or business focused. Some support existing organisational structures, while others are separate ecosystems. At OpenBusiness, a new world of guilds is seen as the future organising structure:

I see the emergence of a world of guilds of specialists, similar to the ecosystems that John Seely Brown describes in his book The Only Sustainable Edge. If this is where we are going, what else do we need to make the guilds system completely functional?

When I think of guilds, I see closed systems that control the knowledge of the discipline, with long apprenticeship periods and control of the labour supply. Is this where we are going? Will our online communities become closed, medieval-style guilds, or will the dominant model be more like the open source community with free movement in and out?

As there is more interest in supporting online business communities it will be important for those with experience (and a vision of the democratising and empowering opportunities) to help shape the conversation. If not, certain interests may hijack the conversation, much as e-learning turned into “shovelware” for the masses.