Re. the regional unconference, the Northern Voice conference in Vancouver has been a roaring success since it launched in 2005. While the first year was a one-day scheduled conference, they’ve since gone to two days, with the first having an unconference format.

You could drop the organizers a line (I’m guessing they’ll be more available after Feb. 23 than before!) and see if they can pass along any advice.

1) UNIVERSITIES UNIVERSITIES UNIVERSITIES. You need *MULTIPLE* world-class universities in a small area to become a high-tech center. The Silicon Valley is the Silicon Valley because it has not one, but *two* world-class universities in the same area (Stanford and UC-Berkeley), as well as many good middle-tier universities such as San Jose State University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, University of Santa Clara, etc. How many world-class universities does Indiana have?

2) SCHOOLS SCHOOLS SCHOOLS. You need well-funded schools with a lot of “special” programs such as language immersion programs and Advanced Placement courses and excellent facilities, because otherwise you won’t get smart people from around the world to move to your area. They’ll go where there’s good schools instead. How good are Indiana’s schools?

3) A CULTURE OF TOLERANCE. No high-tech area can thrive based solely on home-grown talent. You have to be able to attract people from around the world. I work with people from India, Israel, Russia, China, Poland, Germany, and Korea. We couldn’t operate if we had to operate solely with home-grown talent, this is a big planet with a lot of smart people and those smart people would go elsewhere and they’d out-compete us. Indiana is best known as the only state in the United States that was ever run by the KKK, and if there is a case to be made that Indiana is more tolerant today, that case needs to be made.

4) LOTS OF THINGS TO DO. Smart people bore easily. You can’t get smart people to move to your area if they get bored. Within 250 miles of my home I can go surfing, hiking, mountain climbing, I can go to dozens of museums, eat in thousands of restaurants featuring the cuisines of hundreds of countries, walk through quaint old Chinatown neighborhoods and historic old forts, go mountain biking on hundreds of miles of fire roads through forests or ride my street bike on a vast network of segregated bike lanes (i.e. bikes share the road but have their own lanes), I can go to hundreds of shopping centers ranging from the second-largest mall in the world to quaint walkable old-time downtowns with cafe’s and small shops…

5) MONEY, MONEY, MONEY. Unfortunately jobs go where the money is. The reason the Silicon Valley stays the Silicon Valley is because this is where the venture capitalists and their money live. They like to be able to drive a few miles to the companies they’re funding and look at what’s actually happening (and I’m not joking, I’ve seen multi-zillionaires come in and visit a small startup with a whole 40 employees because they are there to make sure that their money is getting used wisely and that the core team knows what they’re doing). Indiana needs either its own supply of multi-zillionaires willing to take chances on new high-tech companies, or the State as a whole has to create its own venture capital funds to use to create these businesses (which does work, BTW — Canada has successfully used this approach to attract jobs to Montreal, for example, which had gone into an economic funk after all the French separatist silliness of the early 1970′s). And it would take even more money in Indiana, because you’d have to pay people to move there — there’s already plenty of smart people in the Silicon Valley.

6) SMART PEOPLE, SMART PEOPLE, SMART PEOPLE. Right now, the cream of Indiana’s young people move elsewhere to pursue their talents. You have a chicken-and-egg problem here — you’re going to have to somehow pay them to move *back*. And then have something for them to come back *to*.

Anyhow, replace “Indiana” in the above with any other state (like, say, my home state of Lousiana), and you see why there’s not high tech a’poppin’ there. Until those things change, it ain’t happenin’.

- Badtux the High-tech Penguin