Communities

This is the latest overview of the town commons for Tantramar, part of our business plan that is progressing:

In 2005 the Atlantic Wildlife Institute (AWI), based in Cookville, began looking at building office space for its Wildlife Emergency Response Network, to be located in Sackville. Discussions over the past year have indicated a need and a desire for individuals and organisations to share space to further several initiatives aimed at sustaining this community economically, culturally and environmentally.

These discussions have led to the idea of a physical space with a key difference: a place for the community to build, a gathering place for emerging businesses to form partnerships and friendships, and an appealing setting to think and interact with other creative people.

Objectives

The objectives for our Commons are:

• Foster cooperation between entrepreneurs and non-profit organisations.
• Provide space for the increasing number of environmental and cultural organisations in our area who need a more permanent address.
• Reduce the barriers to self-employment .
• Bolster the establishment of a diverse cultural space to attract and retain a large number of creative people in the Tantramar region.
• Provide home-based businesses with a place for local networking.

Research, innovation & culture – a cooperative endeavour

Three vital sectors of the community are excited about sharing a flexible space and will form the key elements to its culture. These are the environmental, cultural and entrepreneurial sectors; key parts of our local community and economy.

The Atlantic Wildlife Institute forms the core of the environmental pillar, promoting learning and awareness of the direct links between environmental health and human wellness through its work in wildlife rescue, rehabilitation and research. It is joined by other environmental organisations who are looking for shared space.

A lively community of artists and artisans will form the cultural pillar of the commons and reinforce local galleries and artists by providing a space for education and artistic expression.

The entrepreneurship pillar will see innovative ideas taken into action by providing a space for independent working professionals to meet and develop new business models, consult with clients, and enjoy a social space that reflects the energy and innovation of the new world of work.

A New Town Square or Third Space

If a community is to thrive in the Internet Age, it must be attractive to knowledge workers. Recent data [PDF] show that environmental and cultural factors are critical in attracting and retaining knowledge workers.

These workers need to be connected to other knowledge workers so that they can stay creative. They need to have constant access to fresh ideas. One way to attract knowledge workers is to offer the right physical space and connections.

Because many knowledge workers are not employees, they don’t need conventional office space. Many are starting to create their own alternative spaces in cities such as London, Toronto, Vancouver and Charlottetown.

Beyond the Caf̩ РDesigning the Space

The design of the Commons building will create flexible, multi-purpose spaces to accommodate the needs of its members. Its design will encourage the flow of ideas between diverse disciplines. The aim of the Commons is to provide a space so that individuals and organisations have an opportunity to try out new ways of working, creating and learning together.

We foresee these spaces as fundamental to the complex:

• Shared office space for use by all members, including meeting rooms, common areas, workspace and Internet access
• Learning space for members to teach and share with others.

We expect that space use will change with the needs of the members but initial discussions within the community and with other commons show many options:

• A local consultant booking a weekly meeting room.
• A farmer from outside town using office space on bi-weekly trips to Sackville.
• A solar energy consultant exhibiting the use of solar heat for the building’s hot water.
• A dance instructor giving lessons in the loft learning space.
• An artisan mentoring novices.
• A group of independent professionals gathering to discuss business issues and ways of sharing resources.
• A retired teacher tutoring students.
• University researchers working with a local environmental group on a joint study.
• Students and graduates using a sponsored membership to explore how to start a new business.
• Use of the learning space for a “reciprocal learning network” (a parallel initiative in Sackville).

Individual Membership – Common Space

Members of the Commons will manage themselves as a cooperative and be afforded space within the Commons. No member will have dedicated space, as this is not an “office space for rent” model. Only individuals will be members of the Commons. Non-profit organisations will be provided with a number of individual memberships as well as some space that they may have to share with other organisations.

The New York Times reports [why do they require a login?] that towns around colleges are just as important as the colleges themselves in attracting faculty and students:

Colleges have traditionally tempted top students with ivy-covered campuses, towering Gothic buildings and up-to-date student centers. But nowadays, there is a sense that a beautiful campus is not enough. An alluring college town is seen as necessary as well.

Our small town has a university but the town itself has had some difficulties over the past few years, with business and store closures. This past weekend, a 150 year-old building, on the main downtown corner, burnt and was completely destroyed. No one was injured.

[Note: Project Rebuild is focused on helping out those who were left homeless by the fire.]

Perhaps this is also an opportunity for us to rethink the important connection between the university, the town and what attracts and retains people. What could be built on this key intersection that would enhance a sense of community? Should it be retail; residential; a town square?

Via Christian Long, at Think: Lab

I’m working on an introductory piece (about 2 printed pages) for people who know nothing about the Commons. My aim is to explain enough so that people are interested and will ask more questions. Feedback is always appreciated.

Our Commons

For a long period of time, human economic development was tied to the land. The elites owned the land, and various types of workers, from serfs to sharecroppers, produced crops for the landowners. During the Agrarian Age, land was the most valuable commodity.

Even though large engines and other physical capital had been around in the 18th century, it was not until the early 20th century that a large number of workers were able to leave the farm. The automobile and highways made it possible for many people to commute to factories to work as employees. With the arrival of the tractor, one person was able to farm much more land than was previously possible with a team of horses. Larger farms were now viable and farm workers were lured to higher paying factory jobs. During the Industrial Age, physical capital, such as a factory, was the most valuable commodity.

Today, less than 2% of Canadians work on farms, yet we can all eat. At the same time, the industrial sector is shrinking, but there is no shortage of manufactured goods. The only sector that is growing is the knowledge sector. At some time in the near future, knowledge work will outnumber manufacturing jobs. I say knowledge work, not jobs, because much of this work is not as salaried employees.

Knowledge work is not information work. It is work that creates something new, such as a story, a design, or a service. Some knowledge workers can create new services, such as a digital photo sharing service. This is the case of Vancouver-based Flickr, whose husband and wife founders sold their service to Yahoo for $30 million. In the Internet Age, the most valuable commodity is human creativity.

If a community is to thrive in the Internet Age, it must be attractive to knowledge workers. These workers need to be connected to other knowledge workers so that they can stay creative. They need to have constant access to fresh ideas. One way to attract knowledge workers is to offer the right physical space and connections. Because many knowledge workers are not employees, they don’t need conventional office space. Many are starting to create their own alternative spaces in cities such as London, Toronto, Vancouver and even Charlottetown. Take a look in any city and you will see people working with wireless enabled computers in what has become the default third-space – the coffee shop.

Now, a new third-space, the work commons, is being created where workers pay a monthly membership to have access to shared work areas and business services. No one owns an office, because no one needs a full-time space. It would be a waste. The idea behind the Tantramar Commons is to provide the physical space in Sackville for a work commons. The model for the work commons has been established and is successful, covering its costs, nurturing innovation between sectors and growing entrepreneurs; all at a minimal capital cost.

The presence of a work commons will encourage communication between entrepreneurs, who need additional space, and will be a focal point to attract knowledge workers from outside the area. Other commons are currently looking at creating a worldwide network to share ideas and services.

In addition to a work commons, the Tantramar Commons will offer space to non-profit organisations in the environmental and cultural sectors. These sectors are important to ensure our sustainabilty as a community. Sackville has a certain critical mass of organisations in these two sectors already, but we need to sustain it. There are many potential benefits of local entrepreneurs working in the same space as environmentalists and artists. The cross-pollination between sectors that don’t usually intermix will be fertile ground for innovation.

Much as the town square was the common space for community development in early America, so will the interconnected, but locally grounded, Tantramar Commons be our space for problem-solving, celebration, consolation, and knowledge creation.

In speaking with Robert Paterson about the many commons blossoming across the country, I was reminded about this statement made by John McKnight, in Community and its Counterfeits in 1994.

McKnight was referring to de Tocqueville’s famous book, Democracy in America, recounting his travels across the new country in 1831-32 (as cited in Ideas: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds (2005) Goose Lane Pub., p. 116). My emphasis added.

The book, Democracy in America, is, I think, the most useful book I know to help understand who we are. And he says, if I can summarize him in a rather gross form, that he came here and he found a society whose definitions and solutions were not created by nobility, by professionals, by experts or managers, but by what he identified as little groups of people, self-appointed, common men and women who came together and took three powers: the power to decide there was a problem, the power to decide how to solve the problem – that is, the expert’s power – and then the power to solve the problem. These little groups of people weren’t elected and they weren’t appointed and they were everyplace, and they were, he said, the heart of the new society – they were the American community as distinct from the European community. And he named these little groups “associations”. Association is the collective for citizens, an association of citizens. And so we think of our community as being the social space in which citizens in association do the work of problem-solving, celebration, consolation, and creation – that community, that space, in contrast to the space of the system with the box at the top and lots of little boxes at the bottom. And I think it is still the case that the hope for our time is in those associations.

I cannot think of a better description of what our Commons could be.

From NineShift is this interesting statistic:

Corporate offices in New York City grew to 602 last year from 274 in 1990. But while the head office is moving to New York, the average number of jobs in those head offices declined to 78 from 127. All the other employees are staying in cheaper locations. The NineShift lesson for today folks: business relocation in this century does not mean job relocation. Just like the CEO is moving to his/her favorite city today, more knowledge workers will relocate wherever they please. Disconnecting the job from the business location-wise.

Combine this with the other statistics I recently noted, that show how young people first want to choose where they will live, and then decide what kind of work they want to do and for whom. Location is still very important; just for different reasons.

As I develop the business plan for our Commons, I have this strong feeling that if we can make our community an attractive place to live and work then the economic development will follow. This is not a traditional strategy, particularly in the Maritimes, where our politicians are usually chasing larger companies to locate a plant or branch office here. I’m focused on people, not companies.

A key difference in a knowledge economy is that the workers truly own the means of production. Low cost tools, such as computers and other hardware, make the barriers to entry into the knowledge economy relatively low. Low cost hardware has been the prime reason for our recent economic growth, according to Mark Cuban:

It’s not the net, it’s the applications stupid !

Falling costs to create, host and deliver digital bits enable entrepreneurs to be entrepreneurial. Kids can save enough money these days to buy a computer and create applications their friends can use and maybe even buy year round for less than they can buy a decent lawnmower to mow lawns with only in the summer.

Our Commons will comprise a work commons, like the Queen Street Commons, but will also be open to non-profits in the environmental and cultural sectors. These are two areas that are of great interest, and passion, for many educated younger people. They are also the strengths of our community. I think that this combination of entrepreneurial work commons, combined with an active social sector, will help us to attract a critical mass of people. We have additional challenges, compared to larger centres, in growing our knowledge sector in Sackville (pop. ±5,000). My aim is to be a choice living destination for a few dozen more creative people, and I’m sure that we can do that.

The business plan development for the Commons is moving forward, and I hope to be able to post a summary of our business model here shortly. That should be followed with the announcement of a location, but these things always take longer than anticipated.

Michael Geist thinks that the CBC needs to be reformed, or it may become, “the broadcaster formerly known as the CBC”:

The CBC can chart its own path by rethinking what it means to be a public broadcaster in the Internet era. Notwithstanding the importance of providing greater access to its content on all media platforms (the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation provides a model by featuring an online portal with more than 20,000 video clips and access to 12 radio channels), the CBC would do well to innovatively collaborate with Canadians to bring their creativity to a wider broadcast audience.

Robert Paterson has just gone through a process of looking at the future of public radio in the US – a different kind of public radio from our publicly-funded model. Robert and his team worked for 10 months in engaging over 1,000 members of the NPR family and engaged them to create their own future, in light of their current situation:

The audience for public radio has grown substantially in the last 10 years from about 15 to 30 million. It is comprised of well educated people on the whole but its main characteristic is that its audience are curious. They have become fed up with the pablum, inanity and spin of commercial radio. Public Radio has become the most trusted source of news in the US and has been attracting some of the best journalists to its ranks such as Ted Koppel – who themselves are fed up with spin and trivia.

In the last year however, listener growth has halted. Some say that public radio has become too middle aged and too bland. With more choice, maybe people are going elsewhere? Many stations and NPR are trying new avenues such as Podcasting and Vcasting. Some are trying Blogging. Some like MPR have enlisted 17,000 volunteer Public Insight Journalists to help augment their newsroom.

I know that in its early days as a our national radio broadcaster, the CBC actively engaged a broad segment of the population. Two of the more populist programmes on early CBC radio were the Citizens’ Forum and the Farm Radio Forum.

Farm Forum innovations included a regional report-back system, whereby group conclusions were collected centrally and broadcast regularly across Canada, occasionally being sent to appropriate governments. In addition, discussion – leading to self-help – resulted in diverse community “action projects” such as co-operatives, new forums and folk schools. Farm and community leaders claimed that the give-and-take of these discussions provided useful training for later public life. In 1952, UNESCO commissioned research into Farm Forum techniques. Its report was published in 1954, and consequently India, Ghana and France began using Canadian Farm Forum models in their programs. [source no longer available]

Even as a one-way medium, CBC used innovations such as programme guides by mail one week in advance, local discussion groups and national feedback on individual responses that kept people actively involved. Imagine a group of farmers gathering at a neighbour’s house, bringing food for a communal supper, and then discussing issues of great social relevance, like the possibility of medicare.

If the CBC is truly to rethink its role in our society then it needs to engage in a process similar to what Robert did with NPR. The last thing we need is an internally focused review or something akin to a royal commission (remember how the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was lampooned on the Dead Dog Cafe?).

So here’s my question. Can our government and the CBC establishment actually carry off something that is open, engaging and transparent and truly rethink the CBC?

CEO’s for Cities has a recent report on Attracting the Young, College-educated to Cities. I l looked at the summary data (this is US data, not Canadian) from the perspective of a small town trying to attract this demographic (the new generation of knowledge workers), which is part of what our Commons is about. The report covers responses from 1,000 college-educated 25-34 olds.

“Two-thirds of college-educated 25 to 34 year-olds report that they will make the decision of where they live first, then look for a job within that area.” To be considered, small towns had better get on the mental maps of young people. In Sackville, we have a university where we can make a positive impression on a select group of young people.

Half of married people or those with children under 18 would definitely/probably consider a small town. Therefore small towns should focus on being family-friendly and consider what resources couples, parents, and children need.

In response to, “If you were to consider moving to a city, which of the following sources of information might you use to find out more about the city?”, 65% cited Go to local website. Towns need comprehensive, accurate websites, and I believe some two-way interaction such as blogs or social networking to connect real people with real needs; not just marketing hype.

The report shows a hierarchy of needs (à la Maslow) of this group:

1. A clean and attractive, safe and green place to live the life I want to lead.
   
2. A place that will allow me to grow professionally and personally, and raise a family
3. I want an interesting and diverse place to live that has space for social interactions and is close to family.

I think that the major challenges for small towns are the second and third points. We have to show that it is possible to grow professionally. This requires a critical mass of professionals in the area (a subjective number, depending on individual needs) as well as an excellent networking and Internet connectivity infrastructure. We also have to diversify our population by attracting more immigrants from other regions and cultures. These are our challenges, if we want to be viable Internet age communities.