Greensboro loves Google. City staff launches Operation Google.

The following update on the City's plans for pursuing Google's ultra high-speed internet access was sent to City Council members today from Assistant City Manager Denise Turner (courtesy of Councilor Nancy Vaughan). It sounds terrific to me.
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Council – we held the first meeting this morning of what is called ‘Operation Google’ to discuss how to move forward on this application. Included in the meeting was Darryl Jones, IT Director and Councilmember Thompson. Councilmember Matheny also stopped by to provide a couple of ideas but did not join the meeting.

We concluded the application has three aspects to it:

1. What is Greensboro’s unique selling position? What’s attractive about Greensboro? 
2. What are the infrastructure resources the city has to complete a competitive application? 
3. Community input and engagement in creating a competitive application.

Next Steps
The work to complete the technical and data portions of the application started last week and will continue. Most of it we have in-house, some we will gather from external sources but I expect to complete those sections pretty quickly and easily. Darryl Jones is inventorying the city’s infrastructure and will work with other public and large institutions in the city to determine our technological capacity and how it is utilized.

A public meeting will be called for next Wednesday, February 24 at 6pm in the Council chambers to solicit input from the public regarding:

• What does it mean to have Google in Greensboro/how would we benefit from Google’s presence
•  What is attractive about us/what makes Greensboro unique?
• Why does Greensboro need Google and why Google needs us.

The feedback will help build the aspect of the unique selling position of Greensboro. There is a need to have a strong community focused marketing effort as part of the application as well. Google encourages youtube videos, use of Google maps and other ways to make the statement of why Google should pick our city. Hopefully, the public meetings will add to this aspect as well.

From this meeting, we will narrow the focus of the application. In the meantime, I am doing some research to gain an understanding of other projects that may be underway across the city which may have relevance to the application as well.