Michael Gurstein, Ph.D.

Centre for Community and Enterprise Networking

University College of Cape Breton

Bruce Dienes, Ph.D.

Centre for Community and Enterprise Networking

University College of Cape Breton

Public access Internet sites are not likely to stimulate significant economic activity as isolated units. However, when these nodes come together to form a network, they may become both a distribution network for the delivery of government, educational and corporate services (e.g., Job Banks, Health information, Internet banking, Distance Education, Telework), and a flexible network for matching and coordinating available resources to specific production contracts. Such a coordinated network would enable types of work and jobs now limited to urban areas to be decentralized to rural areas, and would enable a higher quality of delivery of services at lower cost than present distribution systems. Activities of these networks need not be limited to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) products and services. ICT could also be used as an "enabling technology" to facilitate decentralized, distributed production, management, and the marketing and distribution of a wide variety of goods and services.

The advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web has opened up opportunities for the utilization and application of the enormous capabilities of computing and communication to an audience that previously had been denied such access. And it raises the possibility/opportunity of the use of such access and information processing and communications power for the support of initiatives for local and community economic development.

The emerging functionalities which are supported by information and communications technologies (ICT) present quite significant potential opportunities and even advantages to local enterprises. At the least, these functionalities eliminate a number of the barriers of distance and of locale which these enterprises have experienced and give argument to those who suggest the inevitability of metropolitanization as a necessary accompaniment of globalization. These functionalities include:

• distance insensitivity,
• the capacity for local ownership and management of local information,
• the opportunities to provide work at a distance thus bringing lower local labour and overhead costs directly into competition with metropolitan locations,
• the capacity to take advantage of local nuance/accent/timbre in the processing of information and of products,
• the flexibility of small scale distributed production, and
• the opportunity to take advantage of economies of disaggregation and the synergies of distributed production networks.

Technology advocates can take various forms, including: community networks, community technology centres/information centres/public access sites, universities and colleges, school boards and libraries, non-profit organizations and local, regional and national governments. There are three primary ways that such organizations are using the new technologies at the local level to support local economic development:

Consistent with its long tradition of using public funds to support broad social goals, Canada has begun to provide a means to ensure access to ICT in areas and for populations which might otherwise not have this opportunity. The Federal Government, through the Department of Industry has launched the Community Access Program (CAP) which provides a one time only grant on a competitive basis to organizations in rural communities across Canada to support Internet access. Initially this program was used to ensure raw Internet access in small and isolated rural communities where there might be no commercial Internet Point of Presence.

The original 350 rural Community Access sites across Canada have now multiplied to over 2000, with an ultimate target of 5000 nationally and an additional 5000 in urban areas. The program thus appears to be moving from providing community access to ensuring public access by means of which government can equitably deliver information or services that might be provided via the Internet. The program continues to promote community access (and thus, indirectly, community networks) by providing the grants to community groups.

The initial impulse for the Community Access program in Canada was almost certainly simply to ensure broad public access to an important new communications technology. However, this technology appeared in many communities, and particularly those in Atlantic Canada, just at a time when other economic resources were in severe decline and where the national system of broad social supports appeared to be under some significant threat. The CAP program and through it, the availability of community Internet access, came very quickly to be seen as not simply ensuring access to a communication/information tool but also as providing a possible new instrument or resource for local economic development.

In the spring of 1996 and again in 1997, the Nova Scotia Community Access Committee (NSCAC) approved a proposal, developed and submitted by C\CEN, to provide much needed summer staffing for Community Access sites and other public Internet access sites. This project took the name Wire Nova Scotia (WiNS). WiNS operated in five regions across the province. Each region was assigned a regional coordinator, whose responsibility was to coordinate the activities of the WiNS workers in the CAP sites and to develop business, economic development and partnership opportunities within the individual regions as well as to explore the development of future CAP proposals for communities that did not yet have a CAP site. In addition to providing staffing, WiNS assisted Community Access sites and summer youth workers in Nova Scotia to reach their potential through coordinated training and communication resources, including on-line technical support. WiNS also handled administrative details such as payroll. The program was open to any Community Access site, not just CAP sites. WiNS also helped CAP sites network with each other to share resources.

Details of work assignments were determined by the needs of the individual sites. These could include:

• promoting the Community Access site to the community at large and marketing its services.
• providing training on Internet and related services to representatives of community organizations, business people and individual citizens.
• providing technical support to the Community Access site and
• outreach to neighboring communities to promote the Community Access concept and encourage others to develop proposals for the CAP program.

WiNS was much more than a summer youth employment initiative. Such initiatives have the potential to be a significant element in stimulating economic growth throughout rural Nova Scotia.

By enabling the Internet access sites to continue to operate and to develop sustainability, WiNS helped to create an environment conducive to opportunities for local economic development. In order to take maximum advantage of the full range of these opportunities in the future, the sites need to coordinate their activities with other sites in their region and across the province. Various regional institutions, particularly libraries and school boards, could be actively involved in supporting the creation and development of Community Enterprise Networks. Once these networks are in place and standards agreed to, the access sites could offer a coordinated distribution network for government information, distance education, business services, telework, etc. Such a coordinated network would enable many jobs now limited to urban areas to be decentralized to rural areas, and would enable a higher quality of delivery of services at lower cost than present distribution systems. Kick-starting these networks by providing staffing to the constituent sites would help enable the networks to start up and become sustainable. Institutional support possibly provided by local libraries such as handling payroll, purchasing, training, etc. may be essential particularly in the early years of the operation.

Examples of possible activities include:

Support for local business: Community access sites could become business incubation centres. Small businesses in rural areas could rent usage time at these sites, enabling them to access business software, laser printing, and the Internet without the sometimes prohibitive expense of purchasing dedicated equipment. As each new business expanded and became stable, it would eventually invest in its own equipment, but it would have been able to try a venture with less initial capital and risk. Some centres may expand to offer fax or photocopying or other needed business services that are readily available in metropolitan regions, but often not in more isolated parts of the province.

Creation of new markets for IT-based business services: The Strait East Nova Community Enterprise Network (SENCEN) has recently negotiated with the Royal Bank to provide training and access at SENCEN sites to the Royal Bank’s online banking service. This allows the bank to expand its market from the small percentage of Nova Scotians who have personal Internet access to the much larger client base that can use community access sites. Moreover, the revenue from the arrangement would help to provide employment at the sites (trainers) and contribute to the long-term sustainability of the site. A similar pilot project is underway in New Brunswick with mbanx.

Delivery of government information and services: Just as the Post Office has out-sourced some of its services to local businesses, community access sites could become points of presence for government information and services, again providing employment and revenue at the sites. A key advantage of using CAPs to deliver services is that they can offer facilitated access to Internet-based government resources, assisting citizens who do not yet have Internet skills to find the information they need. The personnel at the sites could also be trained to provide such items as licenses, permits, etc.

Training and Educational Opportunities: Community Access sites could collaborate with universities, colleges, libraries and school boards to provide a delivery network for distance education. This would provide greater accessibility to educational opportunities without disrupting people’s work schedules or living arrangements. There is potential to create a network for "just-in-time" training of workers as new opportunities arise, obviating the necessity of bringing in workers from out of the province.

Telework: One area where the new opportunities presented by ICT have been especially commented upon for supporting local economies has been remote working or telework. Decentralized computing capacity linked to a communications capacity as for example through the Internet but also through dedicated and data lines, allows for the conduct of work from a remote location.

The network could create opportunities for government departments or businesses to employ rural workers and rent a terminal at a CAP site during business hours for them to carry out their duties. This could allow for decentralization of government departments without having physically to move departments out of the capital. A pilot telework project is underway at the L’Ardoise CAP site (see below).

One of the lessons learned from WiNS is that there is a clear need to redefine, or to expand the definition of, the purpose of the CAP sites. In most parts of the world, such telecentres are seen as public points of access and/or as community information networks (CINs), which enable local information to be more widely accessible, and government information to be widely distributed at low cost. Looking at the web sites and business plans of such centres, they do not seem to be aware of the potential economic opportunities they could provide.

While there is nothing wrong with Internet access sites as a public service supported by the local tax base (the second option), it is perhaps missing the point. If a CAP site could see itself as a generator of revenue and jobs, rather than as dependent on ongoing public support, the site may well be used in more varied and creative ways. The problem is that a single site, or even a few local sites, cannot generate enough of a market to attract distribution contracts, nor generate enough products or services to become viable on their own. However, combining two insights about CAP from the WiNS program: the economic potential of Rural Informatics, and the coordinating potential of remote management techniques, we can envision Community Enterprise Networks rather than Community Information Networks. If fifty or a hundred sites joined together to form a flexible production and distribution network, they would be an economic force to be reckoned with, particularly if there is institutional support (e.g., from a library system) during its critical incubation period.

A significant new opportunity is presented by ICT through the formation of such online networks for distributed economic development and production. The capacity of the technology to allow for continuous communication, work sharing, remote administration and management, seamless presentation and marketing of multiple centres as a single source to the world is only beginning to be explored. Following on the highly successful flexible networking approaches to production as found in Emlia Romagna in Italy, these networks can only be enhanced by means of ICT.

Coordination of production based on optimization of selective advantages within the network, and the use of the larger scale capacities of the network to undertake more elaborate activities, are two approaches that deserve further exploration and piloting. This could be a major source of opportunity for local economies, which previously had been restricted in the range of their activities by limitations in scale, access to skills, and the advantages arising from specialization. Thus, a flexible network can draw advantages both from the specifics of particular geographic locales and from the economies and efficiencies of scale as a component of a larger network of producers.

Thus it would be possible to establish or to extend a virtual (electronic) network that could for practical purposes function as a virtual enterprise. Such an enterprise could take advantage of the very real changes in the operational functionalities that the technology affords as for example in allowing for the firm to function so as to optimize the advantages of ICT’s distance insensitivity, the opportunity for local ownership of local information, and the lower cost structure of distributed locations. The possibility exists of creating new types of networked enterprises which take advantage of the synergies created as for example virtual enterprises/smart regions, the product differentiation available through local nuance and timbre, and the flexibility of distributed smaller scale and thus more adaptable/flexible systems and the achievement of what are emerging as the economies of disaggregation rather than scale.