Daniel McDonald
Debuting its mission of bringing people together using technology, the Milledgeville Community Connections: Digital Bridges…Bringing People Together initiative began bringing people together Thursday, but without the technology.
About 25 people crowded into the Milledgeville-Baldwin County Chamber of Commerce conference room for the first of three town hall meetings convened to introduce the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation-funded Digital Bridges initiative and to help identify the challenges the community-owned program can use its technological resources to address.
The Digital Bridges hope to leverage the City of Milledgeville’s forthcoming Wi-Max Municipal Wireless Broadband Network toward a community-owned initiative that, among other community focuses, hopes to spur economic development in the Milledgeville area.
The meeting took a little less of a technological bent Thursday as representatives from the Middle Georgia Regional Commission, formerly the Middle Georgia Regional Development Center, led attendees through a brainstorming session to identify the issues of greatest concern.
“No big things happen without big ideas, and no new ideas happen without new ideas,” Regional Commission Government Services Specialist Chan Layson told the group.
Attendees at the first town hall meeting created a list of issues facing the community including economic development, education, health care and transportation. Attendees then broke into smaller groups to identify roadblocks or challenges to successfully address those issues.
Digital Bridges executive Heather Holder said the three sessions held Thursday will help inform the initiative’s nascent mission statement by gathering community members together and asking them about the issues to hear their thoughts about how the community can be improved.
The town hall meetings are being facilitated to compliment an online survey that is capturing the input of those unable to share their opinions in person.
“The survey was aimed more at getting the aggregate of community input whereas the [town hall] is more about hearing from individuals,” Holder said.
Holder, formerly the executive director of the Milledgeville MainStreet/Downtown Development Authority, told The Union-Recorder that she has been amazed by the amount of input people are providing.
“People are posing questions [about the initiative] over the phone and apologizing for not attending the meetings,” she said.
Tom Glover, president of local business and technology consulting firm Cogentes, told The Union-Recorder that he is very excited about the possibilities of the Digital Bridges.
“I think it’s a great idea,” he said. “If it is driven in the right way, it can really help give people a voice. I’m all ready to see the dynamics among the group of people it’s brought together here.”
To take the online survey and learn more about the Digital Bridges, visit the Web site at http://digroup.gcsu.edu/digitalbridges_survey.
