Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
About
INNOVATOR 2005: Case Western Reserve University
7/28/2005
www.radvision.com). There is even some early experimentation underway with Sony (www.sony.com) and LifeSize (www.lifesize.com) in the area of near-highdef-quality video conferencing. New private sector investors and technology parks have been formed that explicitly leverage those public and non-profit institutions subscribed to OneCleveland. Building and construction developers are working with OneCleveland to design communities of the future. Innovators like Hexagram Inc. (www.hexagram.com) are now delivering meter-reading technologies (water, gas, electric) over Wi-Fi, another dimension of the digital city initiatives associated with OneCleveland.Surprises
In very forward-looking projects, it’s sometimes difficult to separate the surprises from fulfilled dreams, but for Gonick, the most stunning and rewarding aspect of OneCleveland has been the growing number of collaborations that cut across traditional sectors and boundaries within the community. Meaningful collaborations—between the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cuyahoga Public Libraries; between the Cuyahoga Public Libraries and Cleveland Hopkins Airport; among the regional health care providers; and among Case, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland Institute of Music, and the Cleveland Municipal School System in the direct delivery of interactive, near-high-definition science education, healthcare education, and music education—are all underway. OneCleveland has also helped advance institutional goals like those of ideastream (Cleveland’s PBS and NPR affiliate), delivering its programming not only in the broadcast mode, but now directly over IP networks to OneCleveland subscribers like schools and hospitals, and even through early experimentations with mobile/wireless networks. “These are provocative applications, many funded through external grants that have both helped to validate the OneCleveland ultra-broadband strategy and also helped to validate the role of technology evangelists in helping to transform, or at least provoke, their respective institutions,” says Gonick.Next Steps
Through Case’s leadership, and with key help from key vendors like Cisco Systems, OneCleveland has been able to transform a city of smokestacks and heavy industry into a digital city of the 21st century where technology is leveraged in ways to meet the business, civic, and educational needs of the residents.
OneCleveland is now expanding beyond the boundary of its name, moving into neighboring Summit County in Northeast Ohio.The network has already attracted big business, and Gonick reports that businesses from as far away as Korea are exploring the network as a venue for testing new high-bandwidth applications. The capacity of the network is also very attractive to researchers and prospective graduate students, and is being used to market the university as a destination of choice for serious researchers.
Finally, over the next 12 to 18 months, OneCleveland will be offering additional value-added services to its subscribers, most notably support for the world’s first community computing platform. The Community Computing Platform, launched over the summer of 2005 with support from Sun Microsystems, will allow Case and the OneCleveland community to offer Web servers, blogs,Wikis, and other computational-based services running over OneCleveland to advance the community’s priorities.
