Conclusion

The critical success factor to long-term sustainability of civic networks is the quality of their "intelligence" about their community. Do the community network planners, managers and operators know what the essential community needs and problems are, and are they focusing their efforts on providing electronic communication tools to help solve those problems? Intelligence is a success factor in another way; that is, for communities and regions to stay healthy, they must become "smart." Smart communities are those that will survive and thrive America's submersion in the global economy and the information age, without sacrificing the qualities and strengths that make each unique and livable. They will survive if all sectors of the community - government, education, non-profits, social services, and businesses - will work together to transform how the community carries out its business, and how people live, work, play, learn, move through, and govern their communities, using information technology and telecommunications. These communities will not wait passively to be acted upon by the forces of change and technology, but will become active participants in the change process, so that the results can be as beneficial as possible, increasing residents' choice, convenience and control, while minimizing the negative side effects that technology can always bring.

One powerful sustainability strategy that a community network knowledgeable about its community or region can adopt is to identify the barriers to the community or region becoming smart, and then to be instrumental in helping overcome them.

What are the common barriers to becoming a "smart" region?

• lack of understanding about the uses and issues associated with information technology, electronic communications and telecommunications.
• technical complexity of telecommunications, and lack of training, education and technical staff.
• high cost of acquisition and integration of new technology, and high potential failure rate - which with complexity essentially means high risk associated with adoption.
• the "vertical box" - the tendency for government, education, business to attempt to tackle these issues separately, without trying to leverage all the efforts toward a common goal.

How can these barriers be tackled? The community needs a catalyst organization that:

• has the ability to educate and inspire, to work with individuals in all sectors to help them acquire personal experience with the tools, and then help them see this in the larger organizational/community context.
• provides access to higher, deeper levels of technical expertise than any single business or organization can usually muster, to tackle the problems of complexity.
• can reduce risk of adoption for individuals and organizations.
• has a community-wide, community-based perspective, and can play a relatively neutral role. Because the organization is not seen as having a particular agenda preferential to one sector of the community at the expense of others it can maintain a broader, non-programmatic focus.

The civic network organization is ideally positioned to play the role of this catalyst organization. Davis Community Network has been developing this role, and proposes to demonstrate and document how it can be carried out through the pilot projects described in this document.