By: Robert J. Terry

Once again Baltimore is choosing earnest sincerity over publicity stunts in hopes of grabbing Google’s attention.

No city name changes. No hiring sky writers to fly over the Mountain View, Calif., campus of the search engine giant. No diving into a National Aquarium tank with a dolphin renamed “Google” (we didn’t do that, did we?).

The latest pitch for Google to build a multimillion-dollar ultra-fast network in Charm City comes courtesy of philanthropist George Soros, whose Open Society Institute has an office here in town. Baltimore Sun columnist Jay Hancock namedropped Soros in a recent column, and several media outlets around town have been reporting for days that the billionaire investor would be part of the effort.

Soros issued a news release today urging Google to pick Baltimore as the field site for its fiber-to-the-home network. More than 600 cities and municipalities submitted a request for information, or RFI, to Google by its March 26 deadline.

Soros deftly straddles the line between trumpeting Baltimore’s assets — world-class research institutions, a unique arts community — and highlighting the city’s challenges. Namely the “failing schools, untreated drug addiction, and an over-reliance on incarceration” that prompted Soros to locate an Open Society Institute office here in 1998 and invest $70 million in a variety of programs.

“OSI-Baltimore’s efforts to develop a trained workforce, keep children and youth engaged in schools and in after-school programs, expand access to addiction treatment, and increase access to public benefits and training would be greatly enhanced through the tools enabled by Google Fiber,” said OSI-Baltimore Director Diana Morris in a statement. “In addition, we applaud Google’s intentions to make this an ‘open access network,’ which will further promote the principals of net-neutrality and open society values.”

This warts-and-all approach probably makes some local stakeholders wince, but it’s bound to resonate with a company sporting the unofficial motto “Don’t Be Evil.” If Google wants to do some good, perhaps it will see the same things that Soros and his Open Society team saw back in 1998 — strong community institutions “but still many people who suffer from being disconnected from important resources,” as Soros put it.