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At
first glance, the groundbreaking ceremony for the
Institute for Advanced Learning and Research in
Danville's Cyber
Park
was just
another turning of earth by dignitaries with gold
shovels on a blistering July afternoon. The
Governor, the Danville Mayor, the Pittsylvania
County Board Chairman shed their coats and beamed
for photographs while thanking their lucky stars
they had jobs in the services industry indoors for
the rest of the afternoon.
A
second look, however, turns the captions on those
dig-and-grin photos into scenes of transformation.
One of the speakers described the new building and
programs it will house as "Stargate on the
Dan." Suddenly the gathering in the industrial
park was applauding the partnership of Virginia
Tech, Averett
University, the Danville
Community
College, Pittsylvania
County, Danville
city, the
Future of the Piedmont Foundation, the Tobacco
Indemnification Commission and the Commonwealth
of Virginia
designed
to prepare and launch Southside Virginia
into the
cyber-century. [Note: Hyperbole is a critical and
accepted part of economic development and change
management everywhere.]
Launching
anything, anywhere is difficult, but particularly in
a region like Southside, where slides in the
fortunes of textiles, furniture and tobacco have
devastated the local economy and tax base and
pulled hard at the confidence essential for the
future. Burdened by obsolete habits,
attitudes and skills ingrained from the region’s
mill-town culture, workers and students and families
are further taxed by the necessity of changing
faster than their human natures allow. Still, as the
pain of maintaining the status quo has mounted for a
decade – falling population, high unemployment,
low income growth – leaders and citizens alike
have come to the revelation that they, themselves,
must create the future they had been waiting for
someone else to bring them. That is transformation.
To
understand the depth of change contemplated in the
Dan River
region,
stare for a while into an empty factory shell and
imagine the lives of the hundreds, even thousands
that no longer revolve around what once was there.
Better still, drive up Route 647 until it tees into
Route 603 in Halifax
County. You'll be
sitting in the middle of
Republican
Grove, Virginia, a hamlet
smack in the middle of country that includes
hundreds of small-scale tobacco growers. Marigolds
and salvia grow in the boxes in the front of the
First Baptist Church of Republican Grove, but the
fields all around are landscaped in tobacco. These
are not just the neat parallel rows of grain and
vegetable crops. These are congruent semicircles and
long wavy rows that mimic the layout of a formal
rose garden.
Virginians
who elevate tobacco cultivation into an art form,
patronize a Lucky Leaf 4-H Club and name their rural
byways Golden Leaf
Drive
or Tobacco
Road aren't pining to become software developers or
network system engineers. For them, a
“new economy” means higher prices for
cured leaf. Somebody will have a hard time
convincing them that any other definition works
better for them. Decoding symbols on a "Stargate"
doesn't mean you don't have to walk through to get
to change.
Consider
the obstacles to building the Institute, its
programs and its infrastructure connections. Funding
the $18 million facility is one. Attracting faculty
to teach college- and university-level mathematics
and technology is another. Establishing a high-speed
Internet access point is a third. Developing new
educational programs, including the Galileo magnet
high school and K-12 faculty development in
Franklin, Henry, Halifax
and
Martinsville, is a
fourth. Anchoring research programs in the region is
a fifth. Cutting across every aspect of education,
workforce preparation, economic development, higher
education, business entrepreneurship and job
creation, achieving the vision of Stargate on the
Dan required an end to the pushing and shoving of
local hierarchies and the construction of a new,
Southside-wide network of partnerships and
relationships. Since collaboration between
localities for economic development be classified as
an unnatural act among consenting adults, the
groundbreaking was an achievement of no small
proportions.
If
the new economy equivalent of the old "What
came first, the chicken or the egg?" question
is "the intellect or the infrastructure?,"
Southside has the answer: Both come first. The
region is committing equal equity to eDan,
high-bandwidth, next-generation Internet
infrastructure and protocols that marry optical
fiber and wireless technologies, and "iDan,"
the human infrastructure of smarts, skills and
innovative thinking. Having long ago adopted
technologies to irrigate tobacco and lubricate
looms, eSouthside will be irrigating young minds and
lubricating information technology deal flows.
What
an eDan plus "iDan" can bring Southside in
the decades ahead isn't certain, of course, but
billion bits-per-second Multimedia Services Access
Points (MSAPs) allow collaboration and sharing of
large, complex data sets among researchers there and
anywhere else. That capacity, suggests Nancy
Franklin, Southside Regional Director of Information
Technology at Virginia Tech, allows the region to
become a producer, not just a consumer of electronic
products and services.
In
the biotech area, that could facilitate the creation
of tissue culture labs and a bioinformatics,
plant-genome information center functioning as a
part of the BioGrid to develop high value
horticultural crops for Southside farmers
diversifying out of tobacco. Or it could mean a
partnership with the U.S. Army and NASA to extend
state-of-the-art vehicle dynamics and off-road
mobility modeling at the Virginia International
Raceway linked in real time with the Army's Aberdeen, Md.,
test
center. Information technology companies will find
the capacity to explore Next Generation Internet
applications and onshore software development
projects.
Evidently,
there are more partnerships ahead for Southside Virginia, including
strategic initiatives with established technology
regions such as North
Carolina's Research
Triangle and
Northern
Virginia's
Techtopia. The difference going forward is that
Southside will participate as a vital node on the
network.
So,
at least some of the symbols on the "Stargate"
look favorable. Pittsylvania
County
already
has a river named Dan. It also has a river named
Banister. For tech-savvy Northern
Virginians
who know
the CEO and community leader of those names, is
there really any doubt that a DynCorp isn't far
behind? Or that Republican
Grove won’t eventually landscape with something
digital?
-- August 5,
2002
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