Forum Activity for @emiliano-espinosa

Sharing our Context

ABCD and Rural Communities

This week I'm moving to a town in Maryland called Easton. It has about 16,000 people. Easton is about 40min from Annapolis and it's on Route 50, the highway that takes people from Baltimore and DC to Ocean City. Since I haven't moved in yet I don't know the specific strengths and challenges yet. So far I've been living in a 50acre farm in Princess Anne (3,500 people) with one of the lowest income per capita in the US that's about 1hr from Easton.  

I just started a new job, managing a network of 5 co-working spaces, there is one in each small rural town, the two smallest have about 4,000 people (Chestertown and Denton). It is an experiment because each town is unique as well as the community in it.

I've noticed that every community is focused on their own and hardly pays attention to what is happening next to them. It feels very similar to the case study on the East Shore in Canada. The challenge is to build a more regional community between the small towns.

Case Study - Reimagining Rural Communities Using ABCD

ABCD and Rural Communities

The case study on reimagining rural communities left me inspired. The problem of having less population census after census can be a big challenge for many small rural communities in the US and the world. Most of the times, a decrease in population is a result of a lack of  jobs and opportunities in the community. On top of that, if the community is not united, strong and supporting one another other, the feeling of decay can feel stronger. It reminds me of how Dale Williams tackles this same issue in a small town in New Zealand were most youngsters leave because there is no opportunity https://youtu.be/ib-raWy_TXI

I was impressed by the simplicity in which the project in the East Shore of Canada was conducted. Grant money allowed a GIS intern to be hired, that intern started the asset mapping process, the events/meetings brought community together and helped to build trust and stronger bonds between community members. The website shows the final product of this efforts. My question is, how has the team managed to keep the website and the project moving forward? Or is the content of the website the same as when the project got developed?

Good take aways were:

"The project uncovered a cultural character of the communities that suggested they have a resistance to technology, with a preference for personal contact. However, newer residents and younger people tended to rely more on technology."

- Creating a digital hub to bring people together.

- "There needs be a plan on what to do with the assets and data. There were attempts to work with existing websites and regional mapping initiatives, but ultimately a new website had to be created. The absence of a plan meant more work as data was incomplete, and had to be sanitized and reworked for the website. Know what the outcome will look like and where it will be housed, to avoid having to re-do or add significantly to the data."