Ready - Covid presents opportunity to breathe life back into rural communities - Form Text Source

Gary O’Meara works for a local government organization called Meath Enterprise which is a very large community hub embedded in their community. They also have Kells tech hub which is smaller with more of a focus on technology, and Gary is part of an association called the National Association of Community Enterprise Centers in Ireland.

Short term, the challenges presented by COVID have been reconfiguring spaces and bringing in new technology to support hubs and their clients; then the medium to longer term opportunities in terms of future work, blended working, remote working and how they can facilitate that.

With multinationals, the public sector and even colleges working remotely, COVID has accelerated the need for quality standards, technology and the adoption and digitization of these hubs and how they operate. COVID presents an opportunity for these hubs to be at the center of a national regional development program where we can work with these remote workers, breathing life and bringing money and bringing energy back into local communities.


Join the conversation

You will get
A copy of this months’ digest (magazine) and opportunities to make meaningful new connections across shared interests:

  • Access to other contributors via the community forum
  • Ticket to an invitation-only session at our 2021 international conference
  • First access to future community digests and event invitations

How is this financed?
This Community Journalism project and publication is part of the NGI Forward initiative. Launched by the European Commission in the autumn of 2016, NGI stands for Next Generation Internet. It has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 825652 from 2019-2021. You can learn more about the initiative and our involvement in it at https://ngi.edgeryders.eu

Where does this lead?
The contents of Edgeryders “Internet of Humans” NGI Forum and the Community Journalism project are analysed using the SSNA method. The results are then sent to EU lawmakers to be incorporated into policy recommendations. It will also inform a conference at the end of the project and selected articles and contributions will be published in book form as the “Next Generation Internet - Edgeryders Digest”. The authors of the selected articles who agree to them being published in that book will also be invited personally to the final conference.

Original article: 14033

Text source: 15326