Scot Rourke

Scot Rourke is an itinerant entrepreneur, dynamic business executive, and an experienced management consultant. Scot has turned around large industrial businesses and advised many early stage high-tech organizations. As president of OneCleveland, the world’s first ultra-broadband community network, he's launched creation and adoption of innovative technologies, products, and services that boosts prosperity in Northeast Ohio. OneCleveland bought up all the dark fiber (unused fiber-optic cable) under Euclid Avenue from the telcos when then overbuilt in the late '90s, and now OneCleveland is the nonprofit provider of community-based ultra-broadband networking services to educational, governmental, arts, cultural, and nonprofit organizations in Greater Cleveland.

Cool Cleveland: You’ve been working with the OneCleveland project now for a couple of years. Besides the nuts and bolts of the technology that is fascinating to those of us who are interested in that, give us a brief idea of what this means to the community... what it could mean to the community, what it should mean to a forward-thinking community.

Scot Rourke: Good question. It varies by person but my passion in this project is really using technology as a tool to help transform the region. My background, in addition to technology, is turnarounds of large businesses. What we’re excited about is the next layer. OneCleveland is about using the technology as an enabler in that we take away all the barriers. So, we try and take away any kind of barriers, sometimes it’s pain, sometimes it’s educational, sometimes it’s technology driven…we take out the barriers to adopting advanced communications and technologies to make sense.

So, my business background tells me to do a return on investment. We certainly want non-profit organizations - government and non-profits, to take advantage of return on investment opportunities. But we’re also interested in enhancing the quality of life. We’re interested in engaging entrepreneurs.

Now that we’ve got this killer infrastructure that’s unparalleled, we’ve got a regional community infrastructure with free internet from point to point, so researchers can move super computing data and we think this really enables collaboration unlike you’ve seen before.

It also enables and encourages people changing their business models. We see over the next ten years the verticals which might be education and might be health care, we see those blending. And, uniquely in this community where we’ve got this great collaborative infrastructure and we’ve got critical mass in health care, critical mass in education, unlike many other communities, arts and culture. I mean, we are so rich in this community - we see that these lines start blending and blurring, especially now that we can collaborate, and that turns into virtual relationships. We think we can be a platform for regionalization. So once we connect people we change the way, as a community, we invest our resources and we deploy these resources into our community priorities, not our organizational priorities. We align all of those and now you start transforming the community because we’re doing the whole value chain as a team instead of everybody taking a piece of a link of the chain.

So that’s the cool part. Our mantra is really “Connect, Enable, Transform.” So we start off by getting non-profits, education, government, healthcare… we get them online connected with our gigabit fiber and our free regional intranet, and then we go to enable.

Some of them know what to do with it and have their own ambitious plans. We just facilitate that. We work with vendors, we bring resources to bear, expertise to bear, continue to eliminate barriers, and do the things that any one organization might not be able to do, as a neutral third party and professional cat herder.

We bring all the hard things together that they don’t necessarily have time to do, or it’s not in their job description. We do the hard, ugly stuff, but altruistically, and then we start seeing the by-products, which are the transformation piece. Some of our ambitious projects are interoperable health care records so that we are addressing health care disparities. We’re improving quality of health, we’re reducing health care costs, we’re getting our regional health care providers to collaborate and optimize the way they’re deploying their resources. We’re getting outside investment to do this provocative, internationally acclaimed unilateral press for the region. As I mentioned, we’re getting seven (five national and two local articles) just this week, probably about the same amount last week. That’s with no marketing budget. Imagine if we had a marketing person, and/or additional resources for them to bear.

Talk about some of the content – because you’re building the pipes and the reason that you’re building the pipes is to put something through it. Are there things now going through those pipes, or you’re still in the process of building the pipes?

The pipes are live. The community leading organizations that are coming onboard are in varying degrees of transition. So the county libraries are up, Case, which has the largest free public wireless in the United States, is powered by OneCleveland, the City of Cleveland is powered by OneCleveland.

I’ll give you an example of an application with content: The Museum of Art, which is closing down for renovations, has actually gone through and digitized their contents, which is really a step, right? What they have done is they have worked with the Cuyahoga County Libraries Leader and Sherry Feldman. The librarians are working with the curators on how to tie in rich media, story-telling exercises, rich content, so that you can actually do virtual tours now and it’s not just a static picture of this fantastic art. It’s stories about the artist, the history of the genre, the time; any kind of trends, whatever it may be. Together they are developing educational content so that while they are closed they can still do this educational program, virtual tours for the kids. So that’s just one example, early in this project, of how we’re taking content, content that is important, and making it rich from a visual perspective that’s high-def type quality.

The OneCleveland network is educational and health-care related and involves a number of non-profit partners. Can you talk just for a moment about how this interfaces with the for-profit community because it’s been in the paper recently that SBC feels that this is in competition with their business, when really they haven’t been doing the kinds of things that you’ve been doing. How do you see those two playing with each other because this is a unique model where the community – the non-profit, philanthropic community, educational community has stepped up, bought these pipes, and wired the city, all on their own, without any market-driven reason to do so. And now all of a sudden the market-driven people are saying this is unfair competition. How do you see the two playing together?

Great question. The SBC issue is a challenging one. Our biggest challenge with SBC is having the opportunity to educate them about what we’re working on. We’re fully confident that if they understood what we really were, what our goals were, where we can work together, they would realize, like their peers do, that we are actually driving demand for them. That we are teeing up service opportunities for them. An important piece in the OneCleveland thing is that we actually don’t do any services ourselves.

So, now we’re using SBC equivalents in the community to deliver all our stuff. So I don’t have any people that actually do fiber. I don’t have any people that do essentially anything technical. We outsource all that work with our local private sector providers, which we think they’re doing a good job at it.

Unlike other communities, OneCleveland’s case isn’t that we’re being underserved here, what we’re doing is creating a more robust thing than they could afford otherwise, taking advantage of our regional community assets, and harnessing all our regional assets to more cost effectively deploy, and encourage and facilitate and almost seed invest entrepreneurial economic development and community service opportunities. So people like Adelphia and Time Warner and First Energy see us as valuable partners. Some of those guys have made significant donations to us. It’s really an opportunity to educate SBC on what we are, as they’re fighting these battles all throughout the country. There are 1,600 governments doing similar goals to us. The difference is they are government-led and they serve businesses and residents directly. So not only do we not do residents directly, not only do we not do, obviously, businesses directly, we also don’t do any services ourselves. We outsource everything. So we’re actually a re-marketer in many ways for people like SBC.

So we encourage them to come on board, learn how they can work together with us, and together we can drive adoption, because our goal is solely to increase the adoption of technology in the market. We don’t care who it is, and that’s why we engage everybody. We also don’t do any services and we won’t do any services. So services provided by those telecommunications vendors all are up to them to do on top of our network. We welcome them to do that.

When you get to the content piece and we all figure out what will travel through these pipes, I imagine that’s where you guys are going to be sort of leading the way. We can assume with any technology that the for-profits are not going to get into it until there is a demand for not the wiring, but for the content that comes through the wires. The sooner you get the wires built, the pipes built, and the content flowing through it, you’re going to drive up demand and someone’s going to have to fill that demand with compelling content.

We don’t plan on taking an active role. We want to enable that demand. We go and find the partners in the community, whether they’re private, public, we’re indifferent. It’s an open-source opportunity for people to provide services that has a consumer somewhere in there. So we’re just setting the stage in a very innovative model and again we’re a non-profit, serving non-profits and all of our services are delivered by the private sector that we engage on behalf of the community.

Interview and photos by Thomas Mulready

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