Trust Doesn't Scale

In the spring of 2020, KINBER helped extend wifi into the parking lot of a summer camp in Trout Run.

Camp Susque sits about fifteen minutes north of Williamsport. Working with River Valley Internet, we expanded the camp's wireless network so the public could use it from the parking lot, eight in the morning until eight at night, seven days a week. Families in that part of Lycoming County had limited internet options at a moment when school had moved to remote learning and work had moved to video calls. So people drove to a parking lot and got online.

There was no contract, no revenue, and no press release. It was the obvious thing to do, and we could do it.

I've thought about that parking lot often since, including earlier this month on a panel at the Penn State Impact Forum about Trust in the Future, where our session asked how we build a future in which talent and opportunity find each other faster.

My part of that conversation was access and infrastructure; whether geography or circumstance decides a person's ability to participate in the economy ahead of us. It's the question I've spent a decade on. And the honest answer is that access is necessary, insufficient, and the easier half of the problem.

The easier half

Connectivity is an engineering problem, and engineering problems yield. KINBER has built fiber across forty-seven Pennsylvania counties. There is more public capital available for broadband right now than at any point in my career. The technical path from unserved to served is well understood.

What doesn't yield to engineering is everything that has to happen after the connection works.

A wireless mesh network we supported in Pittsburgh — built with two universities and a community partner — put service into low-income neighborhoods. The radios were the straightforward part. Getting four organizations with different missions, different funders, and no authority over one another to act together was not.

When a university needs a short-term spike in bandwidth for a research run or an event on campus, we let them burst, at no cost. It isn't in a contract. It happens because somebody on their side called somebody on ours and the answer was yes.

KINBER worked with the Somerset County Library System to help them secure funding for a technology space. We don't get paid for that. We set up DASH sites with community anchor institutions for the same reason.

That's the work KINBER and KeystoneREN do for the communities we serve; we show up so they can trust the future they're building. None of it is infrastructure. All of it determines whether the infrastructure matters.

How trust actually gets built

You can scale infrastructure. You can scale a program, more or less, if you're disciplined about what the program is. Trust is different — it's built one relationship at a time, by a partner who called and got a yes, and then called again a year later and got another one. That's earned, not engineered.

Which has a consequence worth naming: expansion is not replication. An organization moving into a new region brings its model, its materials, and its metrics. What it cannot bring is accumulated benefit of the doubt. That gets built again from the beginning, and the building takes longer than most grant cycles allow.

It also means a pilot that worked may have worked for reasons the report doesn't capture. The technology performed, the funding held — and the local director had known your program lead for six years and took a chance she wouldn't have taken with a stranger. The report records the first two.

What compounds

If trust can't be manufactured at scale, the question becomes what behaves somewhat like it.

The closest thing I've found is narrower and less inspiring: be the organization that does what it said it would do, including when it costs something, and let that accumulate in public.

Say no clearly rather than maybe indefinitely. When a timeline slips, say so before anyone asks. Make the boring commitments — reporting, invoicing, showing up to the meeting — unremarkable, because reliability in small things is what people extrapolate from.

That doesn't scale either. But it compounds, which is the next best thing. It reaches rooms you've never been in. When a prospective partner calls someone who worked with you, the answer they get is the asset.

Building the pipeline the same way

The same logic applies to talent, which is where the panel spent most of its time.

At ELA Group, the employee-owned engineering firm where I serve as a director, there's a model I keep coming back to: engage high school students through internships, stay connected with them through college, and hire them when they graduate. Not a recruiting campaign in their senior year — a relationship that starts at sixteen.

That is a slow, unglamorous way to build a workforce. It's also how local talent stays local. A student who has spent four summers inside a company has a reason to come home that no salary offer can manufacture on its own.

We tend to think about the pipeline as a funnel to be optimized. It behaves more like a set of relationships that either exist or don't by the time they matter.

And the technology question

Someone always asks about AI, and the anxiety underneath the question is whether it removes opportunity.

We've done this before. Agrarian to industrial. Industrial to information. Information to whatever we're calling this. Each transition displaced real people doing real work, and each one was also absorbed, because human beings adapt and institutions eventually follow.

The useful framing is that AI is a tool we work with to do more, not a replacement for the doing. What we should be teaching — to students and to people my age — is how to work alongside it rather than react to it.

But that only reaches people who are connected, supported, and known by someone who can open a door. Which brings it back to a parking lot in Trout Run.