Ask HN: Are there any rural tech communities?

I don’t know any off the top of my head but I am also very interested if there are any existing hubs. I assume it would be somewhere with good internet.

I live in a rural community. It is a mile to my nearest neighbor. Many farmers live here, but also many people who just have long commutes to a town/city. I would not say that they are very different people - we all have more in common than we are different. But they do have different backgrounds and skills. Most of them are pretty sharp and are interested in technology, but they just don't know much about it. Some of them have tried to learn some basic coding. Many of them are intrigued by what tech can bring to agriculture. I think that if you wanted to take the lead and build a tech community locally, focused on helping people come up to speed and figuring how it would have direct benefit to the local community, most areas would be receptive to such a thing.

Alaska Developers Alliance – https://www.akdevalliance.com/

I'd like to know, too.

My guess: You need at least a town with a state college. (Do you consider Fort Collins, Colorado to be "rural"? It's about 110,000 people. Decent tech scene there.)

In Michigan there are software companies in small rural towns but no where I know about is there a concentration.

I used to live in a small rural town West of Lansing when I worked as an agronomist in a past career. I left to do a SaaS startup and stayed local because this small town became a test site for cable Internet. Note this was a time when neither Lansing nor Grand Rapids had a broadband Internet option, everything was dial up or ISDN if you were lucky.

My new office was across from city hall. I advocated to the city father's that they spend a fraction of the money promoting it's empty industrial park (every small town in Michigan has one) to lure software companies to town promoting it's then rare broadband Internet. They treated me as if I was advocating building a spaceport for aliens. In fact if they saw me coming they'd cross the street.

I found out years later that quite by accident a startup had moved to the town specifically for the availability of broadband. Now they only have around 25 employees twenty years later but in a town of less than 3,000 I think that is still pretty good. But with a small amount of effort they could have had a dozen such companies ;<(.

Asheville NC seems to be turning into a "work remote" tech hub. I moved here during the pandemic and have met many tech workers just walking around my neighborhood. Technically it's a city (looks like ~90k population), but coming from NYC it certainly feels like nature to me. There are streams and mountains and back yards.

Have you heard about CORI or the Rural Innovation Network communities?

The Center on Rural Innovation (CORI) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization partnering with rural leaders across the country to build digital economies that support scalable entrepreneurship and lead to more tech jobs in rural America.

https://ruralinnovation.us/community-impact/rural-innovation...

https://ruralinnovation.us/

Not affiliated, just found it prompted by your question, looks very interesting!

Why not look to small towns around state universities? Also, in the USA, look for micropolitan towns. Places that aren't tiny, but aren't major metro areas along with those kinds of challenges. Smaller towns can be easier places to afford homes, shorter distances to truly rural places. The people can be - not always though - challenging. May be more conservative politically and culturally. May be resistant to progressive ideas and efforts. Wife and I live in a smaller university town and love it here. It is a small community of similarly minded people who like the town and like technology and/or share similar progressive ideas. Fortunately we can hop in a car and be in a big city in an hour or so and enjoy big city entertainment and shopping. That said, our town punches well above its weight with plenty of shopping and entertainment opportunities.

I feel like by the time you have a community that is worth noting that they're not very "rural" anymore. At the very least it is then suburban.

Number of tech worker's that's hard to know.

You might be interested in Thief River Falls, Minnesota. Digikey is based there and one of the largest electronic retailers in the world, but the town itself is relatively small (few thousand people)

Afaik they're the only company to work for so it's a bit limited. But I have a friend who lives there and is one of their many developers and she loves it. I understood from her that they're staying permanently remote even after the pandemic, but they might give you preferential treatment if you're willing to move anyways. And I know she still has the possibility of going into the office whenever she wants and has great relationships with her coworkers.

Some of their problems are very interesting too, as much of the software is to run their highly optimized warehouse. Their whole schtick is that they can get your product out of the warehouse in just an hour or two, so if you can pay for fast shipping it will get to you however fast you want. And this ends up being a very interesting optimization problem with human and machine components as well.

There are a lot of tech folks in western Mass and western Connecticut, both very rural. I've met a few. Grey beards working remotely for a decade or two. And I've even met a few young people with kids who work remotely for NYC companies out of rural NJ.

Lancaster PA has or had a few tech companies.

So I'd say probably yes. Pick a county of 500 thousand people or so and start looking through their Craigslist for job postings. You'll find them eventually.

Pre-pandemic, Bend, Oregon where I live was already a hot spot for remote work:

https://www.bendbulletin.com/business/bend-is-u-s-capital-of...

It's a city of 100K people though, so I don't think it's what I would call 'rural' if you live in town.

I don't know if it qualifies for your standard but Greenville, SC and its surrounding areas (Traveler's Rest, Simpsonville, Easley, Greer) have a blossoming tech community over the last 10 years. I'm one of the admins for our main tech Slack group and there's about 1,400 of us in there at last count.

Beautiful downtown area around a waterfall, tons of biking, near mountains and 3 lakes.

House prices are through the roof right now due to the influx of people though. Stories of bidding wars that used to be unheard of in this area.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZA252lotHM

Getting a bit pricey now but lots of tech workers in the small towns 1-2 hours from Austin . Like Bastrop , liberty hill , Lockhart , etc

I live on rural property about an hour from SF. My neighbors aren't techies, but they really aren't that different. Lots of older/retired people, plenty of maker-type people. Out here there's space to have shops, tractors, and physically large projects. I can't discuss programming with my neighbors but welding, electronics, gardening, and construction are fun topics.

I still see many of my Bay Area friends; weekend parties at my place are way more fun than parties in their tiny city houses/apartments. And we still keep in touch remotely.

Not every rural area is the same; I also lived for a year in eastern Kentucky and the people are indeed a bit different there. But I still made friends, and I'm not a major extrovert or anything.

Silicon Fen in UK? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Fen

Snide answer - look at voting records from the places you are interested in, and find those that match you as closely as possible so you don't have to be confronted by anyone different from you.

Some of the Seattle 'suburbs' get fairly rural, lots of trees, at least some lots are a couple acres, a few working farms, lots of hobby farms, but still have a lot of tech workers.

If remote work is important to you, check out internet options. There's a chance of Comcast and CenturyLink, but both get shifty about actually servicing homes in places (Comcast won't run a drop to my house even though their cable is on the pole at the corner of the lot; CenturyLink has run out of DSLAM ports in some neighborhoods, and some homes are too far from the DSLAM to get usable speeds); some public utility districts do fiber, but if your prospective house isn't already passed by their fiber, you would need to pay actual costs to extend the network plus actual costs to run a drop to your DMARC (which gets spendy if you've got underground wiring and a long driveway; I've got a $50k installation quote which 40% is undergrounding along my driveway and 60% is stringing the fiber on poles for 2ish miles); but some counties don't do that. I've seen relatively good reports for Starlink, but waiting time is unknowable and bandwidth and latency fluctuate during the day.

There is "Programmers village" ("Поселок программистов") in Kirov Oblast in deep Russia.

It is not exactly a rural community: it's just 20 or so families of remote tech workers (mostly freelancers) living a few kilometers from a small old town with dirt cheap land and local labor (like "buy a two-story house with one month's SF salary" kind of cheap). It was founded before the pandemic by a guy who used to work as an SWE at Yandex and grew tired of living in Moscow.

I wonder if something like this exists elsewhere.

Isn't this an oxymoron? i.e. the second enough techies converge in the same location is the same second it transforms from a rural community into a suburb

UK? Pick any county within an hour or so of London. Oxfordshire and Berkshire is full of systems/tech people.

If you're into medtech or healthcare, Rochester, MN. Rochester itself is around 80-100K, but in the middle of rural SE MN with several smaller communities around it.

I live in Breckenridge, CO. I'd love to make this more of a rural tech community. The harsh winters here make for great skiing and programming weather.