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Using Civic Networking for Community Economic Development: ACEnet's Approach

by Amy Borgstrom
ACEnet Executive Director

CPSR News Volume 15, Number 3: Summer 1997

The vision that drives us arises from the belief that civic networks can support and amplify the transformation of our low-income community from a preoccupation with problems to an opportunity-seeking orientation. We imagine a community where the relationships are so thick and diverse that small groups of people are continually getting together, both face-to-face and through the civic network, to create new activities that make our lives and communities healthier and more prosperous.

For the last five years, ACEnet has experimented with the use of civic networks to enable community-based microenterprise and small business assistance programs to increase their effectiveness. We view civic networking and the use of Internet-based applications as essential to amplifying our community-based economic development efforts.

Our current approach consists of three complementary strategies: we use civic networking to link microfirms with high value markets, to create networks of firms and service providers within communities, and to enable community-based microenterprise and small business assistance programs around the country to work collaboratively and learn from one another's experience. This approach is based on the assumption that the most lucrative markets require a level of sophistication that can best be achieved if community groups and firms in low-income communities, locally and throughout the country, find new ways to work together.

ACEnet was founded 11 years ago by a group of community members interested in transforming the depressed regional economy in 10 counties of rural, Appalachian Ohio. Our efforts are designed to result in a community that is flexible, adaptable, opportunity seeking, and thus able to thrive in the new world economy. ACEnet currently works with over 150 farm families, start-up entrepreneurs, and very small manufacturing firms focusing on high-value markets for specialty food and wood products. Most of these firms are family businesses or have fewer than five employees. Our experience has revealed a critical need for access and training in new technologies for these firms if they are to compete successfully in high-value markets.

The key elements that need to be developed for civic networking to act as an engine for economic growth are a compelling vision and genuine excitement about the opportunity; an organization to facilitate the process and build leadership in the community; and sufficient capacity in the community to build local assets, especially in terms of dollars for training and technical assistance. A community culture that includes a track record or tradition of successful collaboration across sectors and jurisdictions is not required for success, but certainly simplifies the process.

In our case we have been building the social infrastructure of collaborative projects for 10 years, so our many partners both locally and around the country are ready to begin to carry out some of these projects in a computer mediated environment. We have face-to-face relationships with over 150 firms with varying degrees of interest in and experience with new technologies. Our vision, capacity to communicate that vision, and commitment to ensuring that southeastern Ohio is able to take advantage of the opportunities represented by civic networking are well established. Our key challenge is to build community assets to develop the technological infrastructure and skill to use it.

The tool we have chosen to apply to this challenge we call the joint design process. When a problem or need is identified, key community organizations are brought together with small businesses to design a new program or service targeted directly to meet that need. The result is the rapid modernization of small firms engaged in a continual process of improvement. The stakeholders not only design and implement new programs and services, but also evaluate, reflect upon, and revise their efforts to accommodate their own learning and rapid change. In this paradigm, the term continual improvement does not apply merely to production processes or customer satisfaction, but can also describe the learning processes of entire firms, industries, organizations, governments, and communities. Civic networking can be used to proliferate and disseminate this learning rapidly among all those involved.

Media attention to the so-called " information superhighway" has created a sense of heightened expectation in our communities that often can't be met because of infrastructure limitations. For example, as the Internet increasingly moves to a graphical, point-and-click interface, it is difficult for community-based systems to keep up with the technology and offer the services that community members see on TV and in magazines. In addition, the 29 counties of Appalachian Ohio are served by six different telephone companies. The only major commercial provider of Internet access that doesn't require a long distance call is also one of the most expensive. In one county, there's a long distance charge to call from the high school to the county seat.

ACEnet works in collaboration with other nonprofit organizations all over the country in a number of different contexts. The sense of heightened expectation occurs in the nonprofit world, too-everyone wants to get online. How do we develop appropriate, affordable platforms for communication, collaboration, and mutual learning in such fragmented? And how do we transfer crucial group process skills like facilitation to the online environment?

So far in our community, public access to technology has been driven by schools, libraries, public broadcasting, and other nonprofits rather than commercial providers. We need to develop ways to design and carry out increasingly sophisticated public/private partnerships to ensure equitable access and innovative applications.

Free-Nets and other community-based or civic networks have played a key role in ensuring affordable public access to local and regional information. In addition, they give local citizens the powerful experience of creating and providing information of interest to them to a global audience. But these systems face increasing pressure in terms of maintaining long-term sustainability. We need more experimentation in terms of developing hybrid forms in which business usage can help defray the operational expenses of providing low-cost, public access.

Given today's environmental realities, nonprofits are or should be analyzing where we stand in relation to markets. In order to survive, we all have to act more like socially responsible businesses and less like charities that need to obtain funding from other charities so we can give away products and services. That old paradigm, aside from no longer being particularly feasible, also leads to an unhealthy relationship between nonprofits and funders and between nonprofits and our constituents. A more positive approach is to build upon the social and human assets in our community by becoming social capitalists.

For civic networking initiatives, which include any community effort that uses technology as a tool, to be most effective, our organizations that host and facilitate them must learn to value our own work, realize that we have valuable things to offer, price these items, and offer them to targeted markets. In this way we can subsidize our efforts to provide information services to those who can't afford such services. Particularly in an information society we have to start giving ourselves credit and realize that we are producing valuable information resources, communication tools, and replicable applications that we can own and market and for which we can be compensated.

This doesn't mean we have to abandon our values. It means we can sell our value-added products to those who can afford them in order to insure access for those who cannot. As a society, we want to insure that our communities can be positioned to access the opportunities available in a global, information based society. And equally, those of us in the nonprofit community want to be able to make the most of our opportunities.

For example, we at ACEnet are designing our Internet presence as a large web with 'free things' in it, but letting customers easily move to purchasing things they value highly at prices they are willing and able to pay. For instance, on the Southeastern Ohio Regional FreeNet (SEORF), small food firms can participate in an open discussion forum on market trends for free, but have to subscribe to products such as a digest of specialty food trend information, or order a specific key-word search of our database of retail and mail order purchasers for a fee.

This switch to a more entrepreneurial stance means investment up front in assessing needs, creating products, and learning how to carry out a marketing cycle. New applications need to be developed in a market-driven way that resembles the product development cycle in the private sector. We all need to learn about how we can market in the networked environment where there are incredible opportunities for one-to-one, customized, targeted, and narrowcast marketing.

Resources
urls: http://www.seorf.ohiou.edu
http://civicnet.org/webmarket

For more information contact:
June Holley, President
jholley@tmn.com

Amy Borgstrom, Executive Director
amyb@seorf.ohiou.edu

The Appalachian Center for Economic Networks (ACEnet),
94 N. Columbus Rd.
Athens, OH 45701
614-592-3854 phone
614-593-5451 fax

Amy Borgstrom is Executive Director of the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks, located in Athens, Ohio. She currently shares responsibility for the development of ACEnet's flexible business networks project, especially those aspects focusing on the impact of new information technologies on small manufacturing firms.

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