those words are echoing back and forth through my head and have been ever since i started the initial rezpondr idea little under a year ago. we got so far and with some more development themes and time we could finish a version of it. i did design a theme for it that could spin off called doorstepr - pulling together those businesses locally that were producing social media and using the internet and toolset to get their realtime message out there about products, services and venues.
right now i'm involved with a project over at conkers (http://conkertu.tumblr.com) doing lots of social media, pr and networking to get the event/location ready for a tweetup on the 28th of november. the site currently has hardly any cellular and very slow dialup connections. we have a few options for trying to get a feed from bonded connections wired over from ashby the three miles to conkers and distribute that at the site - this option is about a grand (£1000) - we also have the possibility for fibre and we have found a wonderful guy that could get us fibre into conkers - the problem is fibre install is not cheap per year, but would come down the more people using it.
we could spread the signal out from their to a lot of local places - the caravan park, the yha eco-friendly base, rosliston forestry centre and moira furnace to name a few. all fairly close together and i'm sure with lots of scope for local villagers and business to benefit from the fat pipe too with a community development project connecting hyperlocal business.
we are talking 100 meg with the capacity to burst to 1gb here - not a crappy connection. we are not talking small feed here - this would totally transform the output from this area. i believe that you enable a locality digitally with a way to receive and broadcast and you increase the ability for that regions economy to dramatically increase.
imagine local bakers, farmers and even the caravan park getting in on the action. i'm also excited about the idea of hd streaming video from the amphitheatre @ conkers. obviously this would be not be possible for the first event on the 28th. we literally have five weeks to get some kind of internet connection in and this might mean that we do not have enough bandwidth for doing live video. conkers really is in the middle of the country(side!)
this morning we went to a number of places nearby to see what kind of internet connections they had and they are all pretty terrible. not just that, these places are fairly local to each other but do not have any connection with each other - they do not talk. i met a lady setting up a children's focused photography centre who i'll be dropping a card into - i need to get some cards and details over to all of these people i think - do some eco paper adverts telling people what we are trying to do - be interesting to get gauge interest in fibre and super fast internet - i bet lots of people want it.
so many local businesses could be enabled with social media if they have a decent broadband connection. so many great farms and bakeries around these parts could see an influx of custom from being wired and having orders and custom coming in from the local area. having the whole process streamlined and eco orientated spreads a healthy message. i'm really excited by this project it all feeds back in the ammoboxproject, rezpondr and doorstepr. all media, all local - all enabling.
