Wild About Google... Community Support

The level of energy in every community in America skyrocketed the day Google announced the Fiber for Communities program. Throughout Anchorage, many small groups of entrepreneurs and online enthusiasts met to plan their response to Google’s RFI.

The local IT community is strong and close knit; we quickly realized that we could --and should-- work together and support the official Municipality response and make it as strong as possible.

By the time work on the Anchorage response was complete, more than 100 members of the community had contributed directly to our final product.

Similarly, more than 1850 residents joined our Facebook Group.

Because our team recognized the importance of the data driven decision-making process to the success of our projects, we developed a simple survey targeting the local IT community with the goal of identifying:

• The availability in Anchorage of skill sets needed to support various aspects of the applications we are proposing within our response.
• The relative quality of available skill sets.
• The amount of time our supporters are willing to commit to the success of our projects.

 Key survey results include:

• 284 members of the (loosely coupled) local IT community responded to our project survey
• 283 respondents supported the Anchorage project (1 respondent was verified to be a resident of a competing town)
• 23,506 volunteer IT hours were identified as a minimum initial level of support.
• A strong base of local IT community support was identified in a short time span:

• 262 residents signed a separate petition in support of Google Fiber for Anchorage
• Finally, Google Blue is clearly the favorite Google logo color.