Farewell to Connect This!
After five and a half years, dozens of guests, two emergency episodes, and 124 shows, we’re saying goodbye to Connect This!. We want to thank you all, from the bottom of our collective heart, for joining us on this journey. Across the live stream and audio versions of this show, we’ve been delighted and surprised each year to get nearly 10,000 listens as we’ve talked about building and managing networks, competition in the marketplace, creating clear and effective marketing campaigns, state and federal infrastructure grant programs, dark money campaigns, local broadband champions, affordability, digital skills, and more. Thank you to all of the guests who have lent their time and expertise to the show. We couldn’t have done it without you. We’re taking the energy you all have given us and the lessons we’ve learned over to Unbuffered, our new show at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which talks about all the ways that communications and data technology shapes our lives and our communties – from Internet access, to devices, to privacy and surveillance, and more. Unbuffered combines the format and ethos of both Connect This! and the Community Broadband Bits podcast, where we recorded almot 700 episodes over a ten-year run. Community broadband will remain at the core of what we do here, but the world is a bigger, more complicated place than it was a decade ago, and new challenges call for new approaches to meet them. Special thanks for Travis Carter, co-founder of the show, and Doug Dawson and Kim McKinley, for sharing their experience and knowledge as we continue to move the needle towards fast, affordable Internet access for every household that wants it.
