CAMDEN, Maine - Who wouldn't want to work in this picturesque fishing village, nestled between craggy Mount Battie and sparkling Penobscot Bay?
That's the question the 500 attendees of the first-ever Camden Conference on Telecommunications are being asked this weekend, at a three-day seminar organized by a bunch of technology leaders who had the wacky idea to live in Maine. If a networked economy means that people can work where they live, rather than live where they work, who wouldn't want to put down roots here in Winslow Homer country?
The conference, which grew out of the 10-year-old Camden Conference on Foreign Affairs, was organized in part by adopted Downeasters John Sculley (former CEO of Apple Computer), Bob Metcalfe (founder of 3Com and inventor of Ethernet), and Tom DeMarco (president of Atlantic Systems Guild and a noted software engineering theorist).
Dominating the first day's proceedings was the idea that the Internet not only makes possible participation in virtual communities, but that telecommuting enables people to live in tightly knit real-world communities (like Camden), and not have to withdraw from the economy or sacrifice top-notch job opportunities.
"I came to Camden because it was a 19th-century community," said DeMarco. "It's a place where everybody's dog is your dog, and everybody's kid is your kid. If living in a 19th-century town is possible again, and we can work via our connectedness, then that is just tremendous."
Shoshana Zuboff and Jim Maxmin, a couple who live just south of Camden in Damariscotta, further embroidered that theme. Zuboff is a professor at Harvard Business School in Cambridge, while Maxmin is chairman of Global Brand Development, doing much of his work in London. "The location of your job becomes irrelevant," said Maxmin, former CEO of the floral-printed clothier Laura Ashley. "You can be in Maine and control operations on many different continents," he said.
Maine's governor, Angus King, and Bell Atlantic CEO Ray Smith showed up to boast about the state's burgeoning technology infrastructure. Maine was the first state to implement a 100 percent digitally switched phone network, one of the first to wire every school and library (with 56K access or higher), and is in the process of building a statewide ATM fiber-optic network.
And such zippy connectivity is having an impact on Maine's economy - traditionally dependent on timber, lobster, and L.L. Bean. "Growth in the Maine economy is coming from semiconductors, biotech, and call centers," said Governor King, who will be running for reelection next year, the only independent governor in the US. He pointed to a new US$650 million National Semiconductor wafer fabrication plant in South Portland and a rapidly growing telemarketing center in Camden run by credit-card issuer MBNA Corporation, which employs 2400 people.
"Maine is a wonderful place whose major disadvantage has been location," Governor King said. "Maine was literally at the end of the line. The telecommunications revolution has changed that. We're not talking about prospective possible changes, we're talking about real changes and real jobs."
Famed prognosticator and author of Telecosm, George Gilder backed up King's assertions. "This place is going to be a major world technology center," he predicted. Bell Atlantic's Smith furthered the Kiwanis Club-style boosterism, opining, "Just like no one knows you're a dog on the Internet, no one knows you're on a small Casco Bay island, or that you're a schoolboy in Camden. It puts small-town America on a par with New York and Philadelphia and other big cities."
One way Camden hopes not to keep up with big cities is in its way of life. The town, incorporated in 1791, has just 5,000 residents, and is a place where doors still go unlocked.
The Camden conference is being held in the Camden Opera House, an 1894 building that also houses the town's tiny police station and government offices. The town is such an exemplar of pre-20th-century life that it lacks a traffic light. Governor King, an avid motorcyclist, joked that a traffic light onstage that signaled speakers when their time was up was "the only stoplight in all of Knox County."
The audience at the conference differed from the typical high-tech trade show crowd in that it was dotted with local bed-and-breakfast owners, teachers, high school students (including one 18-year-old from Brunswick who serves as the governor's personal tech-support specialist), and librarians.
While conference organizers harbor no illusions of competing with the intensity of technology innovations that take place in states like California, Washington, and Texas - at least in the short term - they do hope that by inviting the digerati to descend on Camden once a year, they'll be able to make New England's biggest state a more hospitable place for techies. "We'd love to encourage the industry in Maine, and that's why the governor is here," said Chuck Fryer, of the Camden Conference organization.
The conference continues through the end of the weekend. Other speakers include Clinton's top Internet policy advisor Ira Magaziner, MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, Harvard professor and "multiple intelligence" theorist Howard Gardner, and Bran Ferren, the executive vice president for creative technology at Walt Disney Imagineering.
