| Why VirtuHalls© |
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The rationale behind VirtuHalls© is the development of an "Information Society". State of the art technologies can be used to support economic regeneration and community development and to ensure that everyone benefits from the information revolution that is happening around us. In this the role of cities is of paramount importance. Cities and towns are, by their very nature, best suited to represent at the local democratic level the "chemistry" of all the social, economic and cultural changes of the Information Society. Action is required to ensure that new technologies create new employment and training opportunities and improve the quality of life for people and organisations living in, working in and visiting the cities. In that all European cities have similar problems. And these problems are solved by European cities, their business partners, community organisations, etc. Without European co-operation these solutions will be too isolated. Cities might re-invent the wheel. Indeed the business partners often operate on supra-national scales or even world scale. They co-operate with others in their business relationships. But then again, business partners are only one of the factors that make Information Society policies in cities come true. In Infocities we found that public-private-partnerships are the best recipe for successful application of IST (Information Society Technologies) solutions. And Infocities' output were the first attempts for socio-economic business plans. This idea behind socio-economic business plans is crucial. IST projects are often about demonstrating best practices. Lessons to be learned are up to the beholder, or sometimes there is the obligatory explanatory report on the side. Not so within Infocities. This forms a framework of professionals applying common strategies and lessons. These strategies and lessons were the main output of the project. The split-up of the old Infocities family into smaller consortia gives us the chance to go deeper. To be both a patchwork of local public-private-partnerships, and also ongoing real, touchable, deployment of Infocities business plans. Both "spread" and "depth". VirtuHalls© is not about investment in trans-european broadband communications hardware. In Infocities-1 we investigated this. The result was that trans-european broadband is not commercially feasible. It is better to think "virtual" (hence: VirtuHalls© !) and think "service delivery models". For example, a Boeing full of CD-ROMs has a higher bps-rate than cable. |
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