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Organization and Communication


Having a fully-connected Huntington could change the way we organize our lives and the way we communicate with each other, from our families and friends to our employers to our own government. With Google Fiber, Huntington could lead the charge as the internet continues to revolutionize the way we share information with each other.



Here are some ideas we were able to come up with for how Google Fiber in Huntington could improve the way we share and organize our lives, our jobs, our families and friends, our ideas -- how we organize our world's information. Maybe they'll inspire you to submit some of your own ideas!

  • Cameras and dedicated two-way communication channels between emergency responders and hospitals could allow us to triage patients and begin treating/preparing to treat them before they even arrive at the hospital.

  • We could have a new kind of ER "in-take" or "pre-arrival" doctor operating a Google Buzz-like command center for receiving field data from emergency responders and patients before they arrive at the hospital.

  • When a patient presents a new case to a doctor, a Google Wave-like interface could be created for that case, where all data relevant to the case, including procedure and test results, operations and their dictations, and inter-doctor discussion on the case to be replayed to all doctors who participate in the patient's care for that case.

  • We could come up with new ways to share our happy news with our family and friends -- for example, what if you could set up private pages for your family to watch and talk live with you as you get your new 3-d ultrasound?

  • If we were able to move more of our medical information and history into the cloud, we would be able to enjoy a lot of benefits, like having greater visibility of and control over the privacy of your information, improved and more complete long-term care, an easier way to deal with your insurance provider, etc.

  • Fiber would give us better opportunities to educate new doctors via more interactive teaching methods. We could even go so far as to have area doctors and the work they do be much more visible to our younger students through live remote "job shadowing" sessions.

  • Families connected with Google Fiber would have better access to healthy living/eating/etc. advice and community support networks (including those for drug and alcohol abuse and other illnesses)

  • Imagine this: Teachers give assignments and take, organize, and grade students' work online. This eliminates so much organizational overhead that teachers will be able to focus *much* more on *teaching*!  It also promotes the availability and quality of feedback on a child's progress.

  • Tools that facilitate high-yield discussion like Google Moderator would provide a more visible, more effective way for students to ask questions in class. The discussions wouldn't have to be limited to single classrooms, either, allowing for a more consistent quality of education from school to school.

  • These online collaberation tools serve many great roles in our community individually, but together they bring about at least two more incredible opportunities:

    • 1) to prepare our students and our citizens for the workforce of the 21st Century; and

    • 2) to bring the vital and noble effort to educate our children as close to the home as we can, fostering increased parental involvement in the education process.

  • I believe that if we prepare our kids for the "real world" by teaching them how to organize and locate information in the information age, they can develop cognitive organizational skills far superior on average to those of previous generations. This could improve our children's academic performance later in life and their standings for competitive 21st Century jobs.

  • Fiber broadband would make feasible or practical a whole host of new global communication channels for the classroom, facilitating a new era of exchanging ideas between even the youngest students from all over the world. (This, as Google develops a voice translation service to break down our language barriers the way the internet is breaking down our physical barriers.... the possibilities are simply mind-numbing!)

  • With fiber in the home, our teachers could still deliver a world-class education to students even when circumstances outside our control may have impeded it in the past, as in the case of extended inclimate weather (something to which we're no strangers here in West Virginia), or homebound students, who may be physically spread throughout the city and difficult to reach with our limited physical resources.

  • Fiber in Huntington could allow Marshall University to have an increased presence in our K-12 education system. I think everybody wins when this happens.

  • If we moved all of our public records-keeping onto the cloud, we could benefit from drastically-reduced organizational costs while affording us all the many benefits of the information processing tools of said cloud. This would also serve to simplify and in many other ways continue to improve the interface of processes and services between the city and its constituents. That's right.... improved services at reduced costs!

  • City service workers (all workers?) (all services!) could leverage the fiber to stay connected to whatever information they need to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively. Who hasn't seen the strides made by Government services like the DMV already with our limited bandwidth! Overhead could be further reduced with the enhancement of intra-department and department-to-public communications and information sharing.

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