In 2002, shortly after Lev Gonick took over as chief information officer at Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Plain Dealer launched a series entitled "A Quiet Crisis." The series documented the steady decline of Cleveland’s - and all of Northeast Ohio's - economy, the erosion of manufacturing, and the dire prospects for the region's poorly educated workforce.

Gonick, who had come from Monterey, California, put his own twist on that assessment. Northeast Ohio had no future, he said, if it didn't develop ultra-broadband technology. And with a strong fiber-optic network in place within University Circle - home to Case and many other key cultural institutions - and over 200 miles of dormant fiber laid out across the city in the late 1990s, Cleveland had a good head start.

But activating ("lighting") that fiber required a major IT investment. And to really make an impact, OneCleveland's founders realized, ultra-broadband had to reach the whole city, especially underserved populations. That meant developing large-scale wireless access, and applications that made innovative use of the new bandwidth.

The potential seemed endless, but who would pay for it? How do you leverage private and public sector funding for something so big and, to a great extent, unprecedented?

How do you make the business case for each participant? And how do you ensure the project's long-term viability?

The following section outlines how OneCleveland has answered some of those questions.