OneCommunity 2014 Annual Meeting

OneCommunity's work is interesting and important!

 
ABOUT ONECOMMUNITY 
 
MISSION: OneCommunity is expanding high-speed broadband access and adoption to strengthen Northeast Ohio.  
 
VISION: Advanced digital capabilities and effective use of technology will help transform the region and establish Northeast Ohio as a national hub for innovation and economic growth.

History

Enlarge OneCleveland Website Logo - 2003 and early 2004
Note the animated gif
 

Enlarge OneCleveland Website Logo - Late 2004

The first time I heard of OneCommunity (@OneCommunity), it was called OneCleveland. I was on the board for the Great Cleveland PC Users Group (@GCPCUG), and OneCommunity's founder came to do a presentation for GCPCUG on this new nonprofit serving Cleveland with high speed Internet access. Since OneCleveland/OneCommunity was established as a nonprofit in 2003, I assume the presentation must have taken place around 2004.

I remember being immediately fascinated by the potential. Here was an organization that would make use of underused, pre-existing fiber-optic cable to provide faster connectivity to benefit Greater Clevelanders!

Recent History

Fast-forward to last year what I attended OneCommunity's 2013 Annual Meeting, and learned about their partnership with LaunchHouse (@LaunchHouse) in Shaker Heights (@ShakerOnline) to create the first "fiberhood" in northeast Ohio . . .

• Shaking things up with style Shaker LaunchHouse is becoming home for revived neighborhood of hopeful entrepreneurs - By Chuck Soder (@ChuckSoder) in Crain's Cleveland (@CrainsCleveland). Published: May 27, 2013 4:30 AM Modified: May 28, 2013 4:11 PM

• LaunchHouse Starts EntrepreNeighborhood in Northeast Ohio - Posted by Maddie Simens (@MaddieSimens) on June 17, 2013

• Shaker Heights is getting first "fiberhood" in Northeast Ohio: tech jobs may follow - By Robert L. Smith (@rlsmithpd), The Plain Dealer (@ClevelandDotCom) on September 18, 2013 at 6:45 AM, updated September 18, 2013 at 8:12 PM

• OneCommunity partners with LaunchHouse to create First NEO “Fiberhood” Adds high-speed fiber to Lee and Chagrin corridor to attract new businesses - OneCommunity (@OneCommunity) and LaunchHouse (@LaunchHouse) press release

• Gigabit Fiber - OneCommunity banners in Shaker Heights - VIDEO by Dan Hanson (@DanHanson) of Great Lakes Geek (@GreatLakesGeek)

. . . and now there was even more exciting news at their 2014 Annual Meeting! In this blog post, I will share what I learned at OneCommunity's Annual Meeting.

Now - OneCommunity's 2014 Annual Meeting

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The September 10, 2014, OneCommunity Annual Meeting started with a presentation by Sightdeck (@SightDeckKC) from Kansas City, Missouri. With the high-speed access provided by OneCommunity, the attendees were able to watch an interactive demonatration connecting Los Angeles, Kansas City, and Cleveland. Thank you to Dan Hanson (@DanHanson) of Great Lakes Geek (@GreatLakesGeek) for allowing me to share this video of the demo:

Here is my vine video of the remote medicine demo from the annual meeting:

OneCommunity CEO Lev Gonick's Remarks

OneCommunity's Chief Executive Officer, Lev Gonick (@LevGonick), touched on these points, to which I have added some information:

• Learn about ten years of serving northeast Ohio by reading the 2014 Annual Report here or on OneCommunity's website.

Read 2014 Annual Report PDF

• OneCommunity has built one of the largest broadband networks in the United States, and the largest run by a nonprofit. (The following broadband network growth video only covers up to 2012, but I like how it shows the progress over time.)

OneCommunity Network Map: How We Have Grown, and the Communities We Serve

• OneCommunity is preparing the high-speed broadband infrastructure for the 2016 Republican National Convention. This will mark the third time Cleveland has hosted this event, and the first since 1936.

• A high-speed medical corridor is being built. Victory Center, where OneCommunity's 2014 Annual Meeting was held, is the first of seventeen developments within the new Health-Tech Corridor (HTC). 
   
  I was fortunate to talk to Scott Garson (@garsrealestate), who represents Victory Center. He told me that not only is the building outfitted with the high-speed broadband access, but that it also has special wiring and special air conditioning/air purifying systems to accommodate high-end medical research facilities. 
   
  Here is a quote from OneCommunity's 2014 Annual Report that describes the involvement of City of Cleveland (@CityofCleveland) and The Cleveland Foundation (@CleveFoundation) in supporting Cleveland's Health-Tech Corridor (learn more at: HealthTechCorridor.com - @CleveHealthTech):

The Health-Tech Corridor (HTC) spans more than 40 city blocks and 10 distinct neighborhoods in MidTown and is the focus of collaboration with the City of Cleveland, the Cleveland Foundation and others working on turning the brownfields of the HTC into a new neighborhood attracting tech start ups, health care spin offs, and cloud service providers. While the HTC already boasts an impressive concentration of world-class healthcare institutions, major academic institutions, cutting-edge business incubators and thriving healthcare and high-tech companies, there are areas for growth and development that, when done collaboratively, will result in innovation and progress for NEO.

• In January 2014, OneCommunity launched Everstream (@EverstreamNET) which is dedicated to providing services to the private marketplace. It is the for-profit division of OneCommunity. To date, Everstream already has 70 customers and serves 230 locations across northeast Ohio.

Everstream is a Cleveland, Ohio based network service provider focused on providing fiber based Ethernet and Internet services to business customers across Northeast Ohio. With over 2400 miles of fiber across 24 counties and comprehensive data center connectivity at 10 Gigabit speed, we provide the fastest, most reliable network in the region. Our 24 / 7 network operations center is staffed and operated by certified technical staff based in downtown Cleveland.  
 
Everstream shares infrastructure and support teams with OneCommunity who since 2010 has invested $100 million in Northeast Ohio. This arrangement provides the same customer support, operations, construction and engineering team that has added hundreds of on-net customer locations for 90% of all health care providers, majority of colleges and universities, and wholesale carrier customers. Our senior leadership team has decades of experience designing, building and operating fiber based networks ensuring that Everstream is positioned to provide the service level agreements, flexible solutions and installation timeframes needed for business.

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• Big Gig Challenge - This is a two-million-dollar grant from OneCommunity that will fund up to 25% of total project costs for building networks to community anchor institutions (CAI’s), government facilities, and business districts. Approximately 24 letters of interest have been submitted, and all are due no later than midnight on Friday, October 3, 2014. 
   
  Learn more at: OneCommunity.org/Big-Gig-Challenge 

• The Connected Health pilot telepresence technologies (video conferencing) is a program for high-school students at the Cleveland School of Science and Medicine and Cleveland Early College High School at John Hay High School (@CLEMetroSchools). The program focuses on health issues in Cleveland. The students are engaged with medical students from the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, and health professionals from the Cleveland Clinic’s Office of Civic Education through an infrastructure donation by Cisco. Learn more about this program in the following video, Ohio Connected Health, by CWRU, and on OneCommunity's website.

Ohio Connected Health

After reading this, you can see why I am so excited that we have OneCommunity in Cleveland. We are the only city in the United States to have a resource like this!

You can view a video of the annual meeting created by Dan Hanson (@DanHanson) of Great Lakes Geek (@GreatLakesGeek) here: One Community 10th anniversary annual meeting highlights

Awards

I did not have time to view these videos about the award winner, but figured I would include the links if you are intersted:

• Annual Meeting Award Winner: The Collection Auto Group
• Anual Meeting Award Winner: Ohio Telecom
• Annual Meeting Award Winner: The City of Cleveland
• Annual Meeting: Dr. Michael Schoop of Tri-C
• Annual Meeting: Jeff Epstein, Health Tech Corridor

Gigi B. Sohn - “The Art of the Possible”

Enlarge to read Gigi B. Sohn bio

It was great to hear Gigi B. Sohn's (@GigiBSohnFCC) keynote presentation after communicating with her via Twitter (see my FFC blog posts: Comment to @FCC on #NetNeutrality and Take Action! @FCC and #NetNeutrality).

Thanks to Gigi B. Sohn, who provided a full transcript of her presentation on the FCC website. I have also included her “The Art of the Possible” talk in this blog post as a PDF file (click here to read).

I pulled out some quotes of Gigi B. Sohn's “The Art of the Possible” that show the importance of current activities at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) (@FCC):

... FCC has provided hundreds of millions of dollars to connect rural areas to broadband, and will soon be funding “rural broadband experiments” that seek to bring very high speed, scalable broadband to those areas.

...we also have asked more generally whether we should raise our benchmark definition for “broadband” from the current 4 Mbps download speed to 10 Mbps or higher.

The FCC has for the first time made it possible for 10 million students to have access to Wi-Fi in their classrooms and libraries, and we have made other changes to the 18 year old E-Rate program that will get us closer to the President’s goal of connecting 99% of schools and libraries with 100 Mbps speed in the next 4 years.

We have adopted rules that will allow for smaller competitive wireless companies to get access to more spectrum in our first-of-a-kind incentive auction... 
... this auction will allow over-the-air broadcasters to sell their spectrum back to the FCC, which will then auction it to wireless broadband companies. The goals are to have greater competition in wireless broadband access, greater innovation in unlicensed wireless devices and more robust wireless networks.

While it may seem obvious to many of you, for an FCC Chairman to say publicly that meaningful competition for real high-speed broadband Internet access (which he defines as a minimum of 25 Mbps) is lacking and that public policy should help protect, encourage and create competition is a very big deal.

As of early this afternoon, 1,477,301 comments have been submitted in the net neutrality proceeding. For those of you keeping score, that is the highest number of submissions made in a specific FCC matter...

Telephone companies ... are moving to Internet protocol or “IP” networks that use a variety of means of transmission, including fiber and wireless...
...What obligations will attach in an all-IP environment? Will 911 calls be required to go through with the same reliability as old landline networks? Will carriers be responsible to serve far-flung places like rural Alaska, the foothills of the Rockies or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan? Will AT&T be required to complete a call from a Time Warner Cable customer and vice versa? What about protections against privacy violations and fraudulent billing?

But we’ll need your help and the help of others who care as deeply about these networks as we do to turn this possibility into reality. The public apathy and lack of understanding of communications policy issues that marked the first half of my career played right into the hands of the “haves.” We cannot let that happen at a time when access to the broadband Internet has become such an integral part of everyone’s lives. The Art of the Possible starts with you.

Here is an interview with Gigi B. Sohn that OneCommunity provided me from before the annual meeting started.

Annual Meeting: Keynote Speaker Gigi B. Sohn of the FCC

Tweets and Retweets

Here are my @sos_jr tweets and retweets about the annual meeting. If you are on Twitter, please retweet those that provide interesting information or photos, so your followers can learn about OneCommunity:

Because of the new way Twitter displays multiple photos,
it is best to click on each one to view it fully.

Emerge Cleveland at Victory Center

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A week later, on September 19, 2014, I returned to Victory Center for Emerge Cleveland's (@EMERGEcle) opening of artist Steven Standley's installation.

Enlarge Opening Information
  

I want to thank Lillian Kuri and @EMERGEcle for inviting me to attend. The following tweets and retweets will give you a flavor of the evening:

Enjoy my photos from the evening:

If your device does not support Flickr.com photos, please view them here.

Future

With the development of the new Health-Tech Corridor (HTC), other OneCommunity programs, and new FCC initiatives, this is just the beginning of more interesting times. I look forward to the future.