TANgents Summer 2004

On Monday, May 11, members of Seward County's IT Taskforce were guests of the Aurora Area Chamber and Development Corporation. Attending the tour, luncheon, and roundtable discussion were Gail Brand, Anne Byers (NITC), Jean Jones, Maggie Miller, Ron Minchow, Beth Petersen, Roger Reamer, Don Sylvester, and Tracy Vrba.

"It was obvious from our tour that the important focus of the city of Aurora is economic development," commented Jean Jones, the organizer of the Seward County IT Taskforce trip to Aurora "The community has defined that area of interest as critical for their survival and vitality, and has focused their efforts on building the synergy around recruiting businesses and individuals that have skills in these three areas of economics: agriculture, industry, and technology. The area is focusing on creating jobs, generating wealth and well-being for citizens, establishing alliances, and subsequently, improving the quality of life for their community and its surrounding area."

After the whirlwind tour of Aurora's many development accomplishments, two members of the Hamilton County Technology Committee, Gary Warren and Sam Moyer, met with members of Seward's technology committee.

Gary Warren began by giving a brief history of how Aurora has addressed technology-related development. Realizing that information technology was becoming increasingly important to the economy, Gary Warren and other community leaders made a list of stakeholders and formed a technology committee. The committee focused on painting a vision of why IT is important to Aurora's economic future. A technology fair was held in 1994 to create interest in technology within the community. Committee members attended local board meetings and personally invited key members of the community to attend. A survey of conference participants indicated that many residents wanted Internet in the schools. The following summer, classrooms were wired for phone and Internet and a technology coordinator for the school was hired.

The Hamilton County Technology Committee has continued to meet monthly for ten years. The committee organized two additional technology fairs in 1996 and 2001. The committee also developed two technology plans. The first technology plan was developed in 1994. A second edition of the plan was developed in 1999. The development of the Aurora Technology Center, a technology incubator, is one of the group's latest achievements.

"The tech center is a good project, but not an easy one," said Gary Warren. "It is a very important piece of the puzzle."

When asked on what should be the initial focus of communities with newly formed technology committees, Gary Warren and Sam Moyer stressed the importance of building connections to education. The high school has offered the Cisco Academy to train students to be network administrators. Aurora is also building connections to higher education. This year, Aurora will have interns from PKI and JD Edwards.

Gary Warren also emphasized the importance of reaching a critical mass of IT professionals in a community. Once a critical mass is achieved, it will become much easier to recruit IT professionals and IT companies.

Sam Moyer also suggested that the Seward group identify the drivers in the community and to tie their efforts to those drivers. In Aurora, economic development and wealth creation are the drivers. Aurora's IT development efforts have been focused on diversifying and strengthening the local economy. Although IT development benefits education, health care, and government services, economic development is, for most communities, the most important reason to focus on technology development. Sam Moyer suggested identifying 20 businesses which are heavy IT users and inviting them to participate in the taskforce. He also suggested asking those businesses to estimate the IT dollars which are sent out of the community. By pooling these dollars, it may be possible to hire someone in the community to provide that service.

Building strong community-wide support for technology development requires a lot of hard work. The most successful communities invest time and effort into building community support. In Aurora, committee members attended local board meetings to personally invite board members to attend technology fairs and to brief them on the technology plan. The Aurora News-Register has also been supportive of the committee's efforts.

TANgents, a quarterly publication of Technologies Across Nebraska, is edited and produced by Linda Tempel, University of Nebraska Cooperative Extension, ltempel@unlnotes.unl.edu, and Anne Byers, Nebraska Information Technology Commission, abyers@notes.state.ne.us. Please contact us if you would like to contribute an article or an idea for an article. Comments and suggestions are also welcome.