City should feel inspired to do more

The Spokane Regional Chamber of Commerce annual meeting last week was quite a show. You don’t often hear a suited, clean-cut undersecretary in the U.S. Department of Commerce say a T-shirted, dreadlocked university professor is a tough act to follow. And mean it.

Nor does an incoming chairman often quote Shakespeare to suggest Spokane’s time has come.

The mood was almost as upbeat as the music was loud.

Commerce Undersecretary Phillip Bond and University of California, Berkeley, Senior Research Scientist Jaron Lanier, from their very different perspectives, praised the place Spokane has reached in developing its technological capabilities. Both had just witnessed the launch of the Virtual Possibilities Network, a 200-mile web of fiber-optic cable with tremendous potential to boost education, research and business initiatives in the Tri-Cities, Pullman-Moscow, Coeur d’Alene and Spokane.

In Spokane, VPnet supplements already award-winning telecommunications capabilities.

“It’s a microcosm of where the country needs to go,” said Bond, who as the Commerce Department’s undersecretary for technology shares responsibility for the Bush administration’s proposed $132 billion research and development budget.

Bond dismissed concerns the United States is losing its technological prowess.

American universities are still the envy of the world, he said. The U.S. continues to lead the world in patents. Expenditures on research and development exceed those of the other six members of the Group of Eight industrialized nations combined.

“We are still seen as the innovation capital,” he said.

Bond, who is also Commerce Secretary Dan Evans’ chief of staff, has straddled the political and technological worlds for much of his professional life. He was involved in public affairs for Hewlett-Packard Co. and the Information Technology Industry Council, and in legislative affairs for then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. He was chief of staff for Rep. Jennifer Dunn, R-Wash.

His efforts on behalf of nanotechnology won him recognition last year from Scientific American magazine.

Bond said downtown Spokane’s wireless Internet footprint, the nation’s largest, scored a favorable mention from the president during a recent meeting with Commerce Department officials. Bush made a campaign stop in the city in June.

Bond also toured Sacred Heart Medical Center to see first-hand how Inland Northwest Health Services’ record-sharing technology is connecting medical care providers all over Washington. The system tracks 2.5 million patients, putting INHS among the nation’s leaders.

Federal officials are preparing technology standards that will allow emerging regional networks like that created by INHS to share patient information.

“Spokane and the Inland Northwest are a study in civic excellence,” Bond said.

Lanier saluted Spokane’s “civic digitalness,” and he wasn’t being rude. The community has the right technology and the right people to experiment with the capabilities of VPnet, he said, as well as the city’s other wired and wireless networks. “This is the first place I’ve seen that has all the pieces in place.”

Like Bond, he was enthusiastic about the potential medical applications. He envisioned, for example, a system that could monitor patients, and alert them when they need a checkup or renewed prescription.

But he advised VPnet supporters to not let any one or two strategies discourage a seemingly off-the-wall idea that might stick. “Don’t work with a master plan,” Lanier said.

Technology aside, perhaps the nicest observation Lanier made about Spokane had to do with its people. Despite his unusual appearance, everyone he encountered was “sweet.”

New Chamber Chairman Anthony Bonanzino turned to “Julius Caesar” to inspire his audience, and quoted Brutus:

“There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”

Bonanzino, who in the last five years turned the tide at a then-struggling Hollister-Stier Laboratories, says he will need the same kind of support from Spokane’s business community he got from his employees if Spokane, too, is to catch the flood.

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