Wireless Akron, Connected Northeast Ohio

The latest news from the regional collaboration OneCommunity puts Northeast Ohio on the national map

Here's the news:

A new national center here will help communities ensure that their citizens can take advantage of social, civic and economic opportunities by accessing the digital town square of the 21^st century.

The project is funded by a first-year, $4.5 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to OneCommunity, an acclaimed expert in helping communities create sustainable universal access.  Knight has pledged up to $25 million over the next five years to accelerate digital access projects in the 26 U.S. communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers.

The nonprofit Knight Center of Digital Excellence will collect and share international best practices online with communities everywhere. It will provide on-the-ground aid to the Knight communities to develop technology strategies and enable citizens to connect with each other and the world. Knight’s initiative includes a $10 million Digital Opportunity fund offering challenge grants to Knight communities.

Akron is the national center’s headquarters and the first community to benefit from a grant: $625,000 for a wireless universal access corridor that will leverage OneCommunity’s regional fiber-optic network. The corridor will cover eight to twelve square miles, including downtown, and cost about $2.2 million to design and deploy.

Here's what Lev Gonick, the visionary who started OneCommunity, had to say about it on his blog:

Connected Communities are an exceptional research and learning opportunity. Having the national Center of Excellence in Akron will afford Northeast Ohio an important opportunity to lead the nation in one of the most exciting, large scale design projects of the 21st century. As the Knight Foundation made clear, for the Foundation, the investment represents nothing less than a commitment to help write the story of transformation of the 21st century.

Northeast Ohio's leadership in building community information networks can also be seen in OneCommunity's school initiative, which should connect about 700,000 students to an unprecedented education network by next school year.