The Google Fiber Town Hall Meeting was held last night at the Asheville Civic Center Ballroom and the message was clear: Fill out your form. Each and every one of us needs to make sure we fill out a form nominating Asheville as a candidate for Google’s Fiber initiative. To do so, go to http://googleavl.com and click the button that says “Nominate Asheville”. But hurry, time’s running out.
What should you say on the form? The speakers addressed this last night.
Do say:
- Tell Google why you believe Asheville is a good fit for their program.
- Tell Google how you will use their Gigabit-per-second internet connection to do things you simply can’t do with a standard internet connection from AT&T or Charter.
- Tell Google how it will let you innovate.
Don’t say:
- Don’t tell them it’ll just let you do what you’re already doing only faster.
- Don’t tell them it’ll let you download your porn straight into your brain at the speed of light (they didn’t cover this last night, but I thought it needed to be said).
- Don’t tell them that it will “save” Asheville or be the root cause of a technological revolution that brings Asheville out of the dark ages. This simply isn’t true. Asheville is already in the midst of a technological revolution. Google’s Fiber will simply allow that to shift into overdrive and bring about real change to our community and the world.
Another overarching message of the night: Asheville doesn’t need to change our name to Google like some cities have done. Asheville deserves to be chosen based on our merits, on our real qualifications. What are those qualifications? The GoogleAVL site lists 18 good solid reasons.
Below: a few pics I snapped of the event.