Hi there, firstly I’d like thank Connecting Bristol for the opportunity to connect with you. I am so excited to be blogging with you and I promise not to ramble too much. I am famous for going on forever once I get on my soapbox, so if you permit me I’d like to break this up in a few posts. I guess a good place to start is myKP, which I hope to you give some personal insight on and an understanding of what motivates us to connect with Connecting Bristol and more importantly you. myKP is a collaboration of many talented people with a desire to make a difference, a group of individuals I can’t possibly give enough accolades to.
My desire with these posts is to make this experience a personal one with you, so I commit to blog openly. For me myKP is my digital karma project. I’ve worked in the telco industry a long time and experienced its rewards, have made some amazing friends, and have been fortunate to travel the world doing what I love most. For some time I’ve have harbored a desire to give something back (must be my superman complex), hence myKP was born with the aim of connecting people, helping to bridge the digital divide and having fun and bringing opportunity, starting in our own back yard and then hopefully the rest of world. It is our belief that only through association with like minded organisations such as Connecting Bristol and individuals such as you that this is possible.
That said, who’s ready to start a revolution with us? I can feel your eagerness and excitement vibrating across the bits and bytes, and I am looking forward to teaming up with you. However, let’s get something straight right of the bat, Broadband, Wi-Fi, and Internet Access (whatever your flavor or you want to call it) is really boring. myKP for some time has contemplated about, how to make a topic filled with arcane legal and technical underpinnings simple and understandable enough to benefit rural and regional communities, and develop a model that would be sustainable as well as act as a platform to grow from.
At the moment here in Oz, much like the rest of the world, there is a tremendous push for connecting underserved, rural and regional communities from the highest levels of government through to us common folk. As large a nation (mass) and as dispersed as we are makes for delivering quality Internet access to everyone a difficult task and rightly so, traditional telecommunications providers have found it difficult to justify the costs of deployment against the small return for shareholders.
To date, the popular concessus for boosting connectivity in these communities, again much like the rest of the world, has been government incentives and subsidies for service providers to build infrastructure. However, government incentives may not be the answer but more rather education and a coming together of a shared vision of organisation such and Connecting Bristol and myKP , the connection of our users and the involvement of those with most to gain from enabled communities. No…… not the end users….. but the companies and organisations wanting to reach them. Absolutely Governments must get involved and lead by example, however perhaps not in the way that first comes to mind.
Touring Australian rural and regional towns, the first thing that strikes you is the resilience and capability of the people, along with their desire to help themselves. This we are certain is the same world over. Hence, our first point of call was how do we get these people to help themselves when it comes to accessing the Internet. One tried and proven way is to show how quality Internet access can improve and enable other areas of community concern, like health care and distance learning. By showing people how it works, perhaps through demonstrations of remote education, or distance doctoring.
But we’ve done this. Countless studies, submissions and expert opinions have shown us the inherent benefits of Internet access. There is clear awareness and evidence at all levels of public, private and government sectors of the benefits it can provide. But, since when did we want to eat our vegetables just because mum said they were good for us?
Eventually, the more we talked to people, the clearer things became and the answer pretty simple. I remember talking to a grandmother in the central western town of Gilgandra, New South Wales (population roughly 3000), about how we wanted to bring affordable, quality Internet access to the town and all she was interested in was receiving e-mails with pictures of her new grandson, not a word about any medical diagnosis over web cam. A local olive oil producer wanted help to put his products on e-bay and develop an e-commerce site so he could sell his produce in the “big smoke”. These examples were repeated over and over again in every town we visited.
During our research period we made some amazing friends, and the myKP Community project for us very quickly became about what it should have from the beginning, not technology, not about the delivery platform but about its application, about the content not the possibilities and most importantly about, people.
Have I lost you yet? This is where we interact, what do you think, are people the most important thing about the Internet?
