It’s National Nonprofit Day! To mark the occasion, we’re excited to have a post from Jeff Hilimire, founder of 48in48, one of our nonprofit partners dedicated to helping other nonprofits make the most of their online presence. Jeff is also CEO of Atlanta-based Dragon Army.

“How do I find a way for my team members to use their skills in digital marketing to help nonprofits in Atlanta?” 

That was the question I kept asking myself as my first digital agency, Spunlogic, grew to almost 100 employees in the mid-2000s. In those days, we would volunteer every quarter at local nonprofits like soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and food drives — but we weren’t giving back with our greatest strengths, our digital skills, which allowed us to help our paying clients build brands and connect with their customers. 

I wrestled with this question for almost a decade, understanding that in today’s landscape the ability for a nonprofit to connect with donors, volunteers, and team members through digital channels would be paramount to their success. 

Then it hit me:“What if I put on a hackathon that brought together 150 volunteers to build as many nonprofit websites as possible in a single weekend?” 

The idea for 48in48 was born. In 2015, I asked my good friend, Adam Walker, to co-found this new organization with me and we hosted our first event later that year in Atlanta. The idea was to build 48 new websites in 48 hours, pairing great digital talent with nonprofits doing essential work in our communities. That event was so well received that we decided to host a spring event in New York, followed by our second Atlanta event later in the fall of 2016. When both of those events went exceptionally well, we knew we were on to something.

In 2017, we hosted events in Atlanta, New York, Boston, and Minneapolis. And then in 2018, we put on events in six cities: Atlanta, New York, Boston, Chapel Hill (NC), Bloomington (IL), and our first international event in London!

Today, we’ve organized 14 events, helped more than 650 nonprofits, and registered 2,000+ volunteers — and we’re just getting started! 

We haven’t done this alone. Google Fiber has been a sponsor since our first year, and we’ve worked with them in a number of capacities. From serving on our board to bringing their talents to help our nonprofit clients optimize their online presence, our relationship with Google Fiber has allowed us to increase our impact. We’ve used key partnerships like this with other brands too, like Delta Air Lines and State Farm, to help us continue to scale. Without their support, we wouldn’t have been able to dream so big.

"We had a record number of users come to our application this year, which we credit to the ease of access and information on our website. Our online presence finally matches who we are as an organization – forward thinking, efficient, sharp, and in constant pursuit of excellence. This shift moves us onto a new level for how we talk to the public, and our donors love it! We owe so much of that to the team at 48in48 for giving us an incredible website template,” said Jeannette Rankin, founder of the Women’s Scholarship Fund.

Our goal is to create a service opportunity where 10,000 marketing and technology volunteers can donate their skills for good on an annual basis. We’d love your help in this mission! Find out how you can get involved today at 48in48.org.

At an Atlanta 48in48 hackathon, volunteers work with nonprofit leaders to develop the right digital approach. 

Posted by Jeff Hilimire, founder, 48in48, and CEO of Dragon Army

Ready to get online right now? You can find out if service is available in your building and sign up on the Google Fiber website. We’re excited to bring Google Fiber and Webpass together in Austin and are looking forward to connecting you!

Posted by Brien Bell, Head of Webpass

Over the years, we’ve said a lot of hellos. (Or, more accurately, “Hey there’s.”)




Our first was in 2012, with a big hello to Kansas City. Then, in 2014, Austin and Provo. After that came Charlotte, Atlanta, Orange County, Salt Lake City, Raleigh-Durham, Nashville. Most recently, in 2017, it was hello to Huntsville, Louisville and San Antonio.




Today, we’re saying goodbye to one of our Fiber cities. And it ain't easy.




After a lot of analysis, we’ve made the tough decision to leave Louisville, Kentucky. As we told our customers today, we will be turning off the network on April 15 and their next two months of service are on us.




We’ll work with our customers and partners to minimize disruption, and we’re committed to doing right by the community, which welcomed us as we tested methods of delivering high-speed Internet in new and different ways.




This decision has no impact on our operations in any of our other Fiber cities, where we continue to sign up and install new customers every day.




When we launched Fiber service in Louisville in October 2017, we noted at the time that it was the fastest we’ve ever moved from construction announcement to signing up customers. That’s because we were trialing a lot of things in Louisville, including a different type of construction method — namely, placing fiber in much shallower trenches than we’ve done elsewhere.




Innovating means learning, and sometimes, unfortunately, you learn by failing. In Louisville, we’ve encountered challenges that have been disruptive to residents and caused service issues for our customers.




We’re not living up to the high standards we set for ourselves, or the standards we’ve demonstrated in other Fiber cities. We would need to essentially rebuild our entire network in Louisville to provide the great service that Google Fiber is known for, and that's just not the right business decision for us.




The lessons we’ve learned in Louisville have already made us better in our other Google Fiber cities. We’ve refined our micro trenching methods and are seeing good outcomes elsewhere.


For that, and many other reasons, we are deeply grateful to Mayor Greg Fischer, the City of Louisville and its residents for their partnership and spirit of innovation over the past two years.

Hi everyone! My name is Kristi McNair and I’m new to Google Fiber’s communications team. I’m posting in honor of Veterans Day not only because I’m now a seasoned, two-week veteran of Fiber, but also because I’m an actual veteran of the U.S. Army.


Here’s a snapshot of the exact moment I knew I wanted to join the military:

We’re excited to have author Varian Johnson (The Parker Inheritance) guest blogging today. We’ll be hosting Mr. Johnson in our Austin Fiber Space on October 20th, and live streaming the event to Fiber Spaces around the country. You can find more information about those events at the links at the bottom of this post. Google Fiber believes in the power of books to connect us to new ideas and places, and we’re honored to help the next generation of readers find new ways to dive into books.



I’m author Varian Johnson. When I first began writing The Parker Inheritance, I thought I was writing a simple, fun puzzle mystery—a novel where a reader could follow along and solve the mystery along with the characters in the book. I am a huge fan of The Westing Game, the award-winning masterpiece by Ellen Raskin, and I especially loved how Raskin put all the clues into the book—right there near the beginning—so I could get in on the action and use my amateur sleuthing skills alongside Turtle, Theo, Chris, Doug and the other characters. However, as I re-read the novel, I realized that The Westing Game was so much more than a simple puzzle mystery. The book was filled with dynamic characters who grew and changed—characters trying to figure out who they were and who they wanted to be. The Westing Game was more than a simple puzzle mystery. Could my book carry that same weight?

That’s when I went back to another novel idea that had been sitting on my hard drive for a while. It was a multi-generational story about a black family and how they were shaped over time—from the 1950s to today. It explored the impacts of racism and how people saw African Americans through an unfair and biased lens. It also explored how people of color in this country were often forced to give up or hide their true selves in order to be successful, safe, and free.

At first glance, the two novel ideas didn’t fit together at all. But similar to a real puzzle, as I began to rotate, shift, and flip the different pieces of each storyline, a new, better image took shape. I was creating a mystery that was fun and exciting, while also creating a drama that asked us to explore this country’s legacy of institutional racism and its effect on young, black people. 

The writing took a lot longer than I’d originally planned, but once all the pieces fell into place, I had the story I was looking for. I’m so proud of The Parker Inheritance—how it encourages us to think and ask questions. But I’m also just as proud of how fun it is—how readers are allowed to lose themselves in mystery. I hope you check out the novel for yourself—whether for the drama or the mystery. And if I’m lucky—maybe you’ll end up liking it for both.

For information on joining us at one of the events in your town, check out the links below:

• Austin
• Atlanta
• Nashville
• Huntsville
• Kansas City
• Raleigh
• Salt Lake
• Louisville (This links to an email to RSVP. The event is at Love City this Saturday from 1-3 PM.) 

When we started Google Fiber eight years ago, we knew that building a new fiber network was going to be hard, slow and expensive. But what we didn’t fully appreciate were the obstacles we would face around a key part of the process: gaining timely access to space on utility and telephone poles to place new communications equipment.




One particular challenge revolves around making poles ready for new attachments. This “make ready” work has to be done to make room for new attachers’ equipment. The current system for make ready is done sequentially, and often involves multiple crews visiting the same pole several times over many months. This results in long delays, inflated costs and a frustrated community.




Fortunately, there is a better way. It is called One Touch Make Ready (OTMR), which is a system where a new attacher does much of the make ready work itself, all at one time. OTMR is a common sense policy that will dramatically improve the ability of new broadband providers to enter the market and offer competitive service, reducing delays and lowering costs by allowing the necessary work on utility poles to be done much more efficiently. This also means fewer crews coming through neighborhoods and disrupting traffic, making it safer for both workers and residents.




That’s why we’re so excited by the news that the FCC is poised to pass a rule that would institute a national One Touch Make Ready system, with the goal of significantly increasing the deployment of high-speed broadband across the United States. As the FCC stated, “OTMR speeds and reduces the cost of broadband deployment by allowing the party with the strongest incentive — the new attacher — to prepare the pole quickly to perform all of the work itself, rather than spreading the work across multiple parties.”




We fully support this effort by the FCC and applaud the efforts of Chairman Pai to remove obstacles that reduce choice and competition for broadband consumers. As the FCC says in its order, One Touch Make Ready “will serve the public interest through greater broadband deployment and competitive entry” — we couldn’t agree more.




By John Burchett, Director of Public Policy