We've had some very invigorating discussions here lately, and I'm just beside myself with joy that it's happening here in the open 'net. Thank you all for all your contributions!

While I'm not really privy to a lot of solid base information one way or the other, Dodge recently raised a side-line point where I am, or was, deeply involved: The Future of Work.

in comments to Special Committee Meeting Dodge wrote ...
It seemed a bit of a paradox that there was such a local lobby for a wonderful school that would be supported with education taxes from cottagers who would never use the facility ...
The people who are buying properties here tend to have had their families. Retirees or folks within a decade of retiring don't need the school system ...
The next generation go to school where their parents live not near the family cottage. There are residents with families too and probably a growing cohort as work increases at The Point. Properties at Sauble are in good supply. Jaymor has approved plans for a subdivision that can go ahead. You are right the Board has too many classrooms and good money was wasted. We paid for a mistake of listening to promoters who were not good planners.

Or were we being smart ... in spite of ourselves?

We err in our judgement if we think every family who lives in a place like this must choose between low-paying tourism support roles, farm-hands and retail, the quarries, the trades or The Point. Sure there are some jobs there, but as a vital economic foundation, the statistics on the modern workplace no longer support that smoke-stack world-view.

Looking around this place, direct observation does not support it either. Only recently Stats-Can and the corresponding agencies in nearly every other developed nation have reported that more people now work outside the factory plants and office towers. Just slightly over half of the taxpayers are now tangled up with free-agent nanocorp entrepreneurs. There is no arguing it, it is not figure fiddling or speculation, it is an inescapable fact of modern life.

The Times They Have A-Changed

The factories are robotic ... or moved to China. The office workers are work-at-home moms on call-centre lines and roaming outsourcers. Cell-phones outnumber landlines the way insects outnumber mammals -- in the UK, 17,000 cellphones are discarded every day! -- the modern world is mobile and the workplace is nothing more than the place where you are. It is not just an AT&T slogan.

What does this mean for a place like South Bruce Peninsula? No, sorry, it doesn't mean you could keep your job as an engineer at the Point and work from your deck in Colpoy's Bay, although more than one engineer has assured me there are no technical obstacles to doing so. This doesn't mean you can keep your job at the TD and manage customer accounts from home, although that is also not completely out of any future scenarios.

What it means is we have been wooing precisely the wrong young-family demographic. We have been trying to attract outside people from the wrong sources, and more tragically, we have been channelling our own young graduates into the wrong vocations. We should not be trying to fit them into factory slots, we should be trying to bootstrap them into their own free-agent nanocorp industries. We should be urgently and earnestly fostering a creative rural economic revolution on par with the cotton-gin.

May and I came to Sauble partially to prove a point, to prove, against the council of my Ontario Telepresence Project peers, that this 'Internet' thing could be the salvation of rural economies everywhere. We relocated the consulting business to just beyond the edge of the then-known Internet Universe, connecting back then through long-distance modem calls to Kitchener. During the Sympatico Project, Bell Canada execs called us "Bell's Sauble Office" and for a while during the Regional Sports Project, there actually was a news website called saublebeach.cbc.ca ...

Mind you, I made a fatal miscalculation in my own choice of a remote occupation -- I foolishly thought I could sail through on the weight of my experience and reputation, believing the IT world was a meritocracy ... I was totally unprepared when the overnight downsizings post-Y2K erased all my collegial connections, a toxic situation for a consultant too remote to attend the Right Parties and do the schmoozefests. Water under the bridge: it turned out ok since I later lost all interest in the directions the ICT industry was taking, and being cut free from that world allowed me to fall victim to my own predictions ;) and let me slip into a new remote occupation ideally suited to this environment!

The company where I now work is entirely virtual. Most of us are scattered over Southern Ontario, one is in New York, and the boss is in California. We are the global provider of real-time sports news, betting odds and statistics for the sports news and fantasy league industries. We first met face to face just last December, and none of us have ever seen either our two fleets of Internet servers ... or even our telephone switchboard! We don't know where our fax machine is, not really. It is all virtual, ethereal, tied together by that thin line of Internet where we sign in to our office each morning from where ever we are, be that in the home, on the road, or on the beach with a smart-phone, hooked up in a constant stream of your usual office communications. It isn't exotic anymore, and we are nothing unusual.

We are just another example of the modern workplace. The future is here today: I know writers holed up here in the bush writing articles, novels, technical writers, children's authors, there is no better place for quiet contemplation and living a relatively decent life on an author's sort of wage ;) I know composers, illustrators, animators, post-production labs ...

The common thread they share is how the 'goods' they move and the materials they 'refine' are ethereal, abstract ideas easily transported given sufficient bandwidth, which for some is Internet, for others the telephone and fax, for others still Canada Post does them quite fine.

They are not real-estate based, they have no need of office towers or factories, no need of high-density housing or parking lots. They are not bound by distance needing only connections -- theirs is a world of endpoints with no spaces in between. There is a whole class of emerging and evolving occupations which are perfectly suited to remote rural living. And it gets better ...

Fostering Creative Rural Entrepreneurship

It is a matter of whole-world ecology. The problem with most of the current employment options in our neighbourhood is scale and population density. Right? It is a closed-ecology where there are only so many dollars in so many pockets, and both are scarce in supply. The dollar you make off neighbour A is spent buying goods from neighbour B ... and the system invariably leaks because the majority of goods we consume are 'foreign' goods ... the majority of the money you spend here very quickly slips back out to Toronto.

That's the drain. Now, what about the source: Tourism helps balance some of that outward flow by scooping dollars from 'foreign' pockets, but our stats also show how our summer tourism mostly originates within a 100km radius ... so it is still local-area microcosm money, and still largely wandering off to Toronto.

The problem is this economic base has very little raw material to draw upon: we have livestock, stone and scenery. All three add so little value-add before shipping that all three industries scrape by praying there's no hardship to sink them. Costs are simply too high, and profits are simply too slim, and if they employ at all, it is minimum wage. That's an ok model for a no-growth retirement nest-egg amusement vocation, but it's no way to put your kids through college.

Everybody Wins

Ok, so lets postulate for just a moment that we have every last one of the Graduating Class of 2007-2010 now artfully employed doing everything from cell animation and folio for BBC-K to tech editing textbooks in Tamil ...

what have we done to the ecological footprint?

Nothing at all; these are the same people we had here today, they are just more productive, earning higher wages, feeling better about themselves, feeling better about the future of their community, feeling better about the future, period.

What have we done to the economic ecology?

We have tipped the trade balance more in our favour, generating real wealth by selling our creative goods, drawing from an inexhaustible well of natural thought resources. We can only consume just so many flat-screen TVs, but we can counter that parry with a host of untiring creative talents.

What have we done to the quiet retirement community dream?

We have ensured they will always have good roads, clean water, health services and children playing ball in the park.

Everybody wins.

Somethin' from Nuthin'

Now ... consider those whom economist Richard Florida calls The Creative Class, those who work with intangibles, those who add vital value to nothing more than the discourse of thoughts, miners of ideas and time. Talk about 'Dreamweavers'!!!

There was some talk a while back about focusing the Peninsular Shores High School toward 'The Arts' but I think their use of that old-school term was their undoing, and why the idea is met with reflexive chants of Where will they ever find jobs??

What the school should have saidsay is a pledge to guide all grades towards community-sustaining vocations in The Creative Industries, and then have Council ensure a time-line of infrastructure development to intersect with the emerging graduates so they can and will want to stay here, live here, grow here. All sorts of communities have done precisely this, big places like Singapore, little places like remote rural Montana.

Can it be done for a place like this? Check out Jim and Timmlyn's SohoDojo where there's enough case-studies to keep you dream-weaving for months.

What can we do today? For starters, there should be a Creative Industries task-force keeping up on our options, keeping us posted on our progress, keeping us moving forward. we have economic development and tourism development officers, we should have an office of creative development coordinating these options and progressions, a one-stop where everyone from the youth upstarts to the downsized boomers can get some orientation and be regrooved into this new frame of vocational thinking. Schools too need to forget grooming the kids for citiwork and apply their counselling talents to fostering creative work. Most of all, though, it is also up to you and I to kick open these doors of opportunity and walk through them ourselves.