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July 16, 2002
Lindon Moves Ahead with UTOPIA
I live in a small city called Lindon with about 6000 residents. Tonight the City Council had a vote on whether or not to move forward to the second phase (feasibility study) portion of the UTOPIA (broadband) project. Going into the meeting, word was that the council was going to disapprove it 3-1.
I'm a fan of the project and said so tonight. Kelly Phillipps, CTO of Center 7, one of the city's high tech businesses and hopeful network services provider for UTOPIA, also spoke in favor of the city's participation. In the end, they approved the approximately $40,000 necessary to participate in the feasibility study 3-1.
Maybe we turned them, maybe they would have voted that way no matter what, but its nice to participate and feel heard. Technology voices are needed in public policy debates.
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An Open Offer to Utah State IT Employees
I believe that the 900 or so IT employees of the State of Utah would benefit from speaking and listening to each other more. I think we need groups of specialists inside various departments to communicate with others in their specialty and without. Consequently, I'd like to see more people writing blogs and communicating their ideas through an open forum like the one blogs engender. To that end, I'm willing to pay the licensing fee to Userland for the first 100 employees who start a blog. Here are the conditions:
- Download the software and begin using on the 30-day free trial. I'd like to see you get a start before I pay the fee. Let me know when you're up and running.
- I'm biased toward IT employees, but other are welcome too, particularly if they're interested in eGovernment.
- You're responsible for what you post. If you're going to talk about things that shouldn't be public on Userland and need to be kept behind the state firewall, let me know and we'll set up a place inside the state network for that. We could even set up an authenticated area, if needed.