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30 | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.broadbandcommunities.com | AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2015 COMMUNITY BROADBAND community organizations to build digital inclusion programs in the eight Google Fiber cities. Charlotte had a secret weapon in place long before the city was even on Google's radar: Te James L. Knight School of Communication at Queens University of Charlotte was funded in 2010 with a $6 million endowment from the Knight Foundation to focus on digital media literacy. Under the direction of Dean Eric Freedman, the Knight School brought together a cast of players that built a digital literacy playbook. Te frst step was to create a digital media literacy index to establish a baseline for the city's existing digital literacy level. "We asked, 'Do people have the tools they need, the access, the ability to analyze and evaluate and share and create, to work with information in a networked environment?'" explains Freedman. "From our 2012 community survey, we created the digital media literacy index to see where we stand in terms of our performance as a city, and we were able to segment our data by ZIP code, age, ethnicity, education and income to locate populations with the greatest need. Once we knew where our baseline was, we created a number of initiatives that would have an impact, move the needle along the digital media literacy spectrum, and foster citywide engagement. We'll repeat the survey process again fve years out, in 2017, measuring the impact of our initiatives and looking for changes in the digital media literacy index across the greater Charlotte area." All the raw data and reports are accessible on DigitalCharlotte. org, a public-facing Knight School initiative that launched in March 2013 and contains neighborhood toolkits, training programs, learning resources and community updates. However, the Knight School's eforts lacked one critical, costly component: infrastructure. "We knew we could do the literacy training and advocacy, but what was missing for us was the infrastructure," explains Freedman. "We had preliminary conversations with Time Warner Cable and other local providers, but we were not able to identify a sustainable solution. We didn't have the resources to crack the city's infrastructure problem, even though we had already identifed those communities that were starving for infrastructure and might reap the most dramatic benefts. Te data had been shared out, and other municipal agencies, including the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, were surveying their populations, so we were on the same page and could see our fndings and our goals aligning. Te groundwork was done. So when Google came along, it sparked that conversation about infrastructure." THE CONVERSATION GOES PUBLIC As part of its endowment, the Knight School sponsors an annual Best Minds conference about advocating for and advancing digital literacy, which is designed to help the Knight School develop and refne its strategies. Participants include representatives of various city agencies, Charlotte libraries and schools, Time Warner Cable, the Pew Research Center, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the NC State Board of Education, the Foundation for the Carolinas, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation and others. With the Knight School's digital literacy work taking root, the Best Minds team considered transforming the conference into a public dialogue. Te timing was fortuitous; Google had just begun considering Charlotte as a possible fber city. In March 2014, as the Knight School began planning its fall 2014 conference, Freedman connected with Erica Swanson, Google Fiber's head of community impact programs, to share the details of the Knight School's mission and its developing digital literacy initiatives. In October 2014, with the Google checklist process underway and the city looking toward fber, Freedman invited Swanson to participate in the next iteration of Best Minds, which was pushed to March 2015 to provide an opportunity for the Google Fiber expansion plans to unfold. Swanson accepted. "We wanted to capture the conversation about fber without making Best Minds a Google event per se," Freedman explains. "We wanted the conference to be a pivotal moment, and we were already shaping Best Minds into a public-facing dialogue. Our initial approach with Google Fiber [Swanson] was, 'Tis is who we are, and this is what we're doing here in Charlotte around digital literacy and inclusion – engaged in measurable activities with a broad array of citywide partners from diverse sectors, working inside our neighborhoods, listening to the needs of our residents and our civic leaders and developing Digital Charlotte as a sustainable, connected learning laboratory to drive the work forward. It was important to us, as we were conceptualizing Best Minds 2015, to have Erica participate in what was becoming a larger public event, as Google Fiber shared our investment in digital inclusion." As these conversations continued throughout fall 2014 and into January 2015, Swanson saw at frst hand the depth and breadth of the efort already underway in Charlotte. Te details of the Best Minds conference were being honed as the fber checklist period came to an end on May 1, 2014. An announcement by Google was anticipated by the end of the year (and didn't actually come until the middle of January 2015). Freedman had already pushed back the date of the 2014 conference to allow Swanson an opportunity to reconnect with him about the status of fber in Charlotte. In the end, the 2015 Best Minds conference was set for March 20–21, 2015, to coincide with the city's third annual Digital Media Literacy Day (another Knight School initiative). Under the theme "Charlotte 2025: Te Connected City," the conference was able to leverage the announcement about the city's new infrastructure plans and focus on Google Fiber's long-term