Thanks to Ann Higgins for sending me a fun story in Government Technology on mobile computer labs in NY City. …
Much like the lovable ice cream trucks that drive around neighborhoods and sell delicious treats, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is driving a van equipped with laptops, Wi-Fi and printers to communities in need of computer access.
It’s great to see that trends started in Lac qui Parle (the Commuter Computer) are catching on in other places.
We’ve been following the fiber project in Southwest Minnesota for a while – definitely since they were awarded the ARRA funding. They have been on time deploying fiber and great about sending updates. Broadband Properties just ran an article that really outlines their project and progress. I won’t recap the whole article because as I said we’ve bee following their progress – but I wanted to share the highlights on why they think they have been successful. I think their notes will be helpful to others:
SMBS is a success in the eyes of its satisfied customers and the member cities. What makes this project so successful?
- There really was a need for services. Incumbent providers had not stepped up to offer next-generation services.
- Communities realized they could not do it alone. For a single community to succeed at building a fiber optic network would have been difficult; banding together aggregated the communities’ demand and allowed the financials to work.
- The project has several champions. Because multiple communities participate, there is a champion in each community. Jackson County has also been very supportive of the project both financially and politically.
- SMBS has a strong partner in WindomNet, and the two entities are linked in their success. Sharing both technology and expertise improves the bottom line of both entities.
- Good project management discipline was used. Projects such as SMBS are very complicated and have many moving parts. Having a project plan and follow-up ensures that nothing is missed and that any missteps are fixed and learned from.
I’m cheating this week. I’m actually at TED Global in Edinburgh. (If you don’t know TED, you should definitely check it out.) I hope to take bits and pieces from the very heady talks here for future posts – but mostly this week, I’m being inundated by ideas worth spreading.
So I was delighted to see that Connected Nation has posted a policy paper on Phase II of the Connect America Fund. A couple of weeks ago we were lucky enough to have Kevin Beyer from Federated/Farmer’s Telecom talk about the impact of Phase I on his ability to provide service in rural Minnesota. Many folks have been waiting to see the details of Phase II to see how it changes the game. It’s kind of like watching Texas Hold ‘Em – the next card could change the game.
Here are some quick snippets from the Connected Nation report…
The FCC estimates that the service territories of the larger, “price cap” local telephone companies collectively include approximately 80% of the 18.8 million Americans who do not have adequate broadband access today. …
Officially called “Connect America Fund Phase II,” this model will have a significant effect upon the economics of getting broadband to many unserved Americans. The FCC model will calculate an estimated subsidy amount that will be offered to these large companies to build out broadband across their unserved service area on a statewide basis. The price cap providers can accept or reject the offer for a state- or territory-wide build-out. If a provider rejects the offer in a state or territory, the opportunity will be offered to other eligible providers. All told, nearly $10 billion in subsidies over the next five years will be allocated pursuant to these models.
How these models are written and implemented will have a significant impact upon the broadband landscape in every U.S. state and territory.
The Minnesota Intelligent Rural Communities (MIRC) initiative is winding down. The demonstration communities are taking time to reflect on what has happened in their community as a result of added focus on broadband and broadband projects in the area. Each community will go through this process looking at what’s happened, lessons learned and plans for the future. One of the public benefits of federal funding for a project link this is the opportunity each community has to share what they have learned and the opportunity that other communities have to glean from their lessons. With that in mind, I’d like to share notes from the Upper Minnesota Valley Regional Development Center’s latest meeting (and hope to share other communities’ in the upcoming weeks). Thanks to Jacki Anderson for sharing her coordinator’s notes; they aren’t an exhaustive list of projects but a reflective list.
Project Presentations:
1. UMVRDC -Building websites for rural communities: Bellingham and Echo
– Two of the region’s smallest communities (pop: 205 & 278 respectively) are now on the worldwide web
– Best Practice: Both communities have all their local businesses listed on their website with contact information for each. This is definitely a best practice for small communities (not practical for larger communities). You would never know how many or what types of businesses are located in these small communities without these web pages
– Not surprisingly the businesses listings pages have received the most views since launching the websites
– Lesson Learned: Must have dedicated community members or staff to make the project successful, those with a little more “skin in the game” ended up being more involved in the process (free domain vs paid for domain/set-up)
– Staff felt that Word Press might be the more user and budget friendly site for smaller towns versus a GovOffice site which is slightly more complicated and expensive but comes more support.
2. LqP County Computer Commuter- Providing increased access and training to residents
– Best Practice: Developed partnerships with schools, businesses and workforce to offer special trainings
– Were able to visit more community groups and provide even more awareness about its resources (Kiwanis, Chambers, Social Clubs, Community Ed, Schools, Parades, Fairs, Radio Spots)
– Established an Advisory Board
– Lesson Learned: Follow a schedule already in place for cancellations, the Computer Commuter follows school cancellations for inclement weather.
– 162 users – 84% are 50yrs and older
– Avg user spends 1.5 hours on the bus
– Need to keep getting the word out that this is a “free” service
3. BS County -Public Access to County Information Online
– Four years of tax statements have been placed online and are available to the public. This has significantly reduced phone calls and inquiries in the assessor’s office.
– In the last 13-14 months there have been 64,000 non-county hits and 11,000 unique hits. The GIS site has generated over 3500 non subscription hits and has 1,750 paid subscription hits. For a county with a population of approximately 5,000 these are impressive numbers.
– Best practice: All GIS info (even paid subscription information) is available at a kiosk in the county building, the assessor’s office staffs are available to help customers and train them in finding and using the data.
– Subscriptions to the data have full access at the convenience of their own office, while the public has limited information available to them by just accessing the site. So technically all the information is available for free but you have to go there to get it. This has saved so much staff time in processing requests and billing minimal charges to individuals and businesses for printing and researching.
– It is anticipated that once the upgrades are complete the subscriptions (if they can maintain current subscription levels) will cover the cost of maintenance for the site.
– There are 7 annual subscriptions and 10 one-time shape files that have been purchased. 3 annual subscriptions have expired and all 3 businesses renewed indicating that they find value in the site!
– Lesson Learned: if they would have known then what they know now they would have included a request for more funds to develop an online payment system in conjunction with this project, it seems to be the missing piece right now.
4. Johnson Memorial Health Services- Home Stream Tele-Medicine Project
Great concept poor execution. This project did not work for the following reasons:
– Poor communication from technology company – no updates on where software testing was at so it always felt like it wasn’t working due to this there was only 1 family that remained committed until the end
– Were too far from the technology company (located in the metro) and lack of willingness/presence from technology company to come out to the community to talk about issues and resolve them
– Lesson Learned: when promised two-way communication but the demonstration includes only screen shots, this is a red flag
– Incurred overruns in cost and time with no results
– Pictures were blurry (Skype was better) – no two way communication
– Best Practice: Hospital could not/would not connect to bad technology & associate the hospital’s name/reputation with it. Proceeded with caution knowing this was beta testing
The hospital feels that there is still potential for this concept and would do it again but only with a company who is further along with their technology and committed to working with a community 3 hours outside of the metro.
5. Pioneer TV- Broadband in Rural Areas Documentary
– Best Practice: Brought national awareness to rural broadband issues by leveraging other funds and working with Need to Know programming.
– Hope to expand it by several more minutes so that other stations can run a 30 min segment
– Could lead into Brain Gain awareness/research/promotion
– Lesson Learned: try to plan projects around state shutdowns
– Could potential update this segment in the future
– Kept costs down by keeping interviews local
– Anticipated to air in September 2012
6. Ortonville Schools- Getting the business community online
– Developed open wi-fi network – used all the time by not only students but general public
– Lesson Learned: At first it was challenging to get businesses to sign up to do a website, now we wish would have had a plan to handle the demand for new website requests – have a plan for when demand picks up!
– Business pages and/or websites have been completed for over 100 businesses
– Xoom was best for working with businesses, schools felt IPAD was better for student usage
– Started by doing business websites in Ortonville, due to high demand expanding to county-wide assistance
– Best Practice: Have determined a website does fit everyone. Changing focus for some businesses from website creation to starting with claiming their business on Google (in some cases it’s a much better fit if a business has no intention of doing updates or providing new info)
– Average visits per day on business websites is approximately 60 – it’s a start.
7. Dawson Boyd School- New media center, student tech team and student to community training Academy
– Computer Savvy Specialists (CSS) learned how to refurbish computers – 5 of 12 are now planning to pursue college education related to computers where prior to this experience had not
– Best Practice: New Computer Savvy Specialists will continue to refurbish and work with the EDA to distribute computers from community businesses and old computer labs in the school
– Lesson Learned: CSS students will continue to work with businesses in the surrounding communities on websites and social media. During the project they found students were best able to help businesses with “updates” and new content after the websites were created rather than having the students create the initial websites
– Recycling of schools computes with students refurbishing and County EDA distributing to families – the need is great they always seem to have twice as many families interested as computers available
– Teachers teaching others with online classes through community education – this still needs some tweaking, they learned that although online classes are great they want to integrate one or two in-person meetings, new classes will also be looked into
– All aspects of this project have gone over so well that they plan to continue all of it for the next school year
As I mentioned earlier – I’m at a conference this week. I am pleased (and thankful) to share a post today from guest blogger Matt Grose. Matt is the Superintendent at Deer River School District. He is also on the Blandin Broadband Strategy Board and the Minnesota Broadband Task Force.
Image courtesy of The Moth Chase (www.themothchase.com)
Every so often, a technology arrives that attracts educators like moths to a light, becoming the next must-have item in the classroom, whether deserved or not. We’ve seen things like the personal computer, interactive whiteboard, classroom response system, and LCD projector all take their place in what we often think about as an ideal classroom. I’d argue that today’s bright light is the iPad.I believe the iPad craze has hit education in an unfortunate way. Every time I open up a paper (I still do that sometimes), or check my favorite news aggregator (I do that daily), I am reading about another iPad deployment. Now, in the spirit of full disclosure and contrary to what you might be thinking, my district is going to be piloting iPads in a 1 to 1 initiative this fall in four grades, so some of my criticisms could be considered hypocritical.
What concerns me most is what seems like a lack of planning on the part of many districts as they roll out this new and exciting technology. In talking to my peers and even to vendors, I hear stories of districts doing little in the way of systems analysis to see if they are even ready, in many cases deploying devices that they are in no way capable of supporting from a technical or personal perspective. Specifically, I am concerned about readiness in four areas:
1) Bandwidth. I’m personally aware of a district that is planning to roll out an iPad initiative with only a T1 line coming into their district. One of the strengths of the iPad is its ability to easily connect students to content either they or someone else has created, which most often lives online in some format or another. A student staring at an iPad trying to connect to a slow internet connection is a bored, frustrated, and disengaged student, the opposite of what the device should be intended to do.
2) Internal infrastructure. Districts deploying large numbers of iPads need to be extremely concerned with wireless density – that is, the availability and strength of wireless in the learning environment. Experts suggest the best way to ensure that devices can reliably connect with the speed needed to do meaningful work is to have a wireless access point in each classroom. Unfortunately, a wireless access point isn’t nearly as cool looking as an iPad, and as a result, districts often skimp on the very thing that makes the iPad the most useful and enables access to the internet.
3) Staff development. The iPad is a great tool, but like any tool, is only as good as the person using it. Staff need to feel comfortable with the device if they are going to be expected to use it to enable creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking. Staff can’t be handed iPads as they leave for the summer and then be expected to be ready to transform teaching and learning in the fall, but unfortunately, that is the story that is being played out over and over again. Districts need to thoughtfully plan staff development activities that not only address the technical how-to’s but also the process of designing units and lessons that teach and reinforce 21st century skills.
4) Policies and expectations. I believe strongly in the saying “If they knew better, they would do better.” Staff, students, and parents need direction as they navigate their way through this new way to do education. In their book Switch, the Heath brothers say that we need to “script the critical moves.” In this case, that means making sure people are clear about what they should and shouldn’t do as well as what appropriate use looks like. New technologies demand new policies and practices.
Sometimes it is possible to ignore ineffective practices in other places, especially if they don’t affect the children in my district. Districts rushing into large scale technology projects without careful planning can have some serious and wide spread consequences though, because every deployment that fails is fodder for those who are quick to point out places where technology has failed to improve outcomes for students. To the degree that community support for my district’s efforts is weakened by poor outcomes in other places, the children in my district will lose out, and that I can’t ignore.
Last week, Connect Anoka County hosted a number of providers for a series of presentations on Last Mile options. Connect Anoka County is working on a community fiber network. Here’s a quick reminder of the program, from the Connect Anoka website…
Connect Anoka County is the county-led effort to increase the amount of fiber optic cable in the county. The Connect Anoka County project has resulted in a partnership between Zayo Bandwidth, LLC and Anoka County. Through the partnership, Zayo Bandwidth applied for and received a National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA) grant paying 70 percent of the fiber construction cost and initial equipment. The grant project will construct an approximately 286 mile fiber network throughout Anoka County linking 145 governmental institutions.
And here is a description of the meeting…
This meeting is intended for council/board members, city managers/administrators, EDA members, economic development professionals, cable commissions, etc. Please pass the word along to all those who may be interested in learning more about last mile connectivity. This meeting will be an excellent opportunity to gain insight into the industry and ask questions of several broadband providers.
The intention is to look at options for expanding the community network to local residents and businesses. Presentations from the meeting are available on the Connect Anoka County website; they may be useful to other communities looking at community network options.
I love this story because it really demonstrates that money spent on technology is an investment that pays off. It’s not a donation; it’s not sunken costs. According to the Rochester Post Bulletin…
Mayo Clinic will share $60 million from the U.S. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation to fund efforts to improve health care — and save costs.
Mayo also announced expected savings — of $172.8 million — for taxpayers as a result of the $60 million investment.
And here are some of the projects that will be funded…
The grant covers three projects:
• A “patient-centric” electronic environment — costing $16 million and estimated to save U.S. taxpayers $81.3 million over three years. Four states (Minnesota, Massachusetts, New York and Oklahoma) will participate in a Mayo collaboration with the U.S. Critical Illness and Injury Trials Group and Philips Research North America.
Mayo will train ICU caregivers to effectively use new health information technologies to manage ICU patient care, reducing errors due to information overload. Mayo’s model uses a Cloud-based system with a centralized data repository, electronic surveillance and quality measurement of care-response.
• A collaborative effort including Mayo Clinic Health System for management of multiple physical and mental illnesses, costing $18 million and estimated to save taxpayers $27.7 million. Care will be monitored and patients will transition to self-management.
• Shared decision-making for patients and care providers, costing $26 million and estimated to save taxpayers $63.8 million. Sixteen states will be touched by a Dartmouth College Board of Trustees grant with lead Mayo Clinic investigator Dr. Doug Wood.
Patient and Family Activators will be hired to work with patients and their families so they share decision making with doctors, and that’s expected to reduce utilization and costs.
Obviously it’s easier to recoup costs when the funding is a grant – but think of this in terms of investment from the federal government. They invest $60 million so that taxpayers save $172 million. Presumably this effort will help shift healthcare services online – clearly that’s the focus of at least two-thirds of the projects mentioned above – but also presumably savings will only be realized when patients have the technology (equipment and connectivity) they need to access healthcare resources online.
So while we calculate the cost of bringing broadband to unserved areas – I think we also need to calculate the cost of not bringing broadband to unserved areas. As more services are provided online it will become costlier to serve people who aren’t online – especially since many of those hard to reach places are by definition the most remote.
PCs for People are partners in the Minnesota Intelligent Rural Communities initiative. They have received a lot of well deserved attention for their program, which refurbishes donated computers and recycles them back into the community, giving them to families and people who would not otherwise get a computer. The Minneapolis Star Tribune just did a nice profile on the organization, recognizing their tremendous growth…
From 30 donated computers in 1998, to 5,000 a decade later, the inventory grew and grew. The 15,000th computer was given away this year.
Nearly 80 percent of families and individuals served by PCs for People have never had a home computer, Elofson said. Recipients are typically people with disabilities, or on fixed incomes or elderly. Many rely on a library for computer use, but may have to wait hours for access.
The article also recognizes the ongoing need…
Their work is nowhere near done. In 2012, the digital divide in Minnesota remains big and stubborn.
About one in four rural households has no working computer, according to a 2010 report commissioned by the Blandin Foundation. The report found no significant growth in computer ownership among this demographic since 2007, suggesting a troubling plateau in adopting new technology.The divide is deep in urban areas, too. A 2012 Community Technology Survey conducted by the city of Minneapolis reported that 82 percent of city households have computers with Internet access. But only 57 percent of residents of the Phillips neighborhood do, as do 65 percent of residents on the Near North Side. One-fourth of African-Americans said they don’t have Internet access at home, the report found.
This is problematic for many reasons. Job applications are now commonly done online. Schools use online tools regularly to communicate with families. Even health care providers are connecting with patients online.
“The demand [for computers] always amazes me,” said Casey Sorensen, PCs for People’s executive director. “They say, ‘My friend, my social worker, my job coach, told me to come in.’ They can make a donation or not, but they walk out with a computer.”
One conversation I’ve found myself having with colleagues lately is the difference between wired and wireless connection – which often is really the difference between using a computer or smartphone (or other handheld device) to access the Internet. For many folks (if not most or all) the decision to use a smartphone as the primary tool for getting online is economic. A smartphone is much cheaper than a computer. But there are some substantial qualitative differences between what you can do on a smartphone versus a computer. I love my smartphone for directions, for quick reference questions, for staying in touch with friends. But I don’t want to apply for a job on it. I don’t want to write this blog post on it. When it comes to “doing work”, I want my laptop. In many ways I think the folks at PCs for People are giving people a tool to do work. When we spoke with them in 2010, 85 percent of the people who got computers maintained a broadband connection for it.
Chris Mitchell, with Institute for Local Self Reliance, has started a podcast series talking with folks who are involved with community networks. This week he spoke with Linda Kramer with the Marketing Committee of the Sibley-Renville Fiber Project in rural Minnesota’s Sibley County. The interview is a good introduction to the Sibley-Renville project as well as a nice look at what has been working well in terms of marketing the community network.
Sibley-Renville Counties are looking for a solution to get good broadband to the whole community – including area farms. The marketing team has worked at promoting the community network – and also worked at trying to get folks to sign up for services in advance through mailings, advanced sign up for connection, door-to-door communication, phone calling. (I should note that they really signed up for an intention to get service, not a binding contract.)
It’s interesting to hear how successful they have been and the reasons that folks have been interested in the FTTP network in area cities, towns and townships.
My very lucky news is that next week I’ll be in Edinburgh for the TED Global conference. (If you don’t know TED, you should check it out!) So in the midst of trying to get ready and get caught up, I’ve been trying to think of big questions I have to frame the ideas I hear next week. One ever-present topic for me is the impact of technology on how we think. For example, now that I have GPS on my phone I will never gain a sense of direction? Or now that I can do research on the fly, will I make better decisions?
Thanks to Bernadine Joselyn for getting me connected with a survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University that looks at a similar question – only strictly with millennials. The first paragraph of the report draws you in…
Analysts generally believe many young people growing up in today’s networked world and counting on the internet as their external brain will be nimble analysts and decision-makers who will do well. But these experts also expect that constantly connected teens and young adults will thirst for instant gratification and often make quick, shallow choices. Where will that leave us in 2020? These survey respondents urge major education reform to emphasize new skills and literacies.
Hmm. I have to wonder when teens weren’t interested in instant gratification – but other than that I agree totally – especially with the idea that we need to emphasize new skills and literacies and I’d broaden that beyond teens and young adults. I think we all need to learn how to adapt technology but also we need to help technology adapt to us!
The report is interesting to read – it’s really thoughts from leaders in the technology and sociology fields on the topic. They create a shortlist of skills that will be even more desirable in the future…
Survey participants did offer strong, consistent predictions about the most desired life skills for young people in 2020. Among those they listed are: public problem-solving through cooperative work (sometimes referred to as crowd-sourcing solutions); the ability to search effectively for information online and to be able to discern the quality and veracity of the information one finds and then communicate these findings well (referred to as digital literacy); synthesizing (being able to bring together details from many sources); being strategically future-minded; the ability to concentrate; and the ability to distinguish between the “noise” and the message in the ever-growing sea of information.
It’s interesting to think of these in terms of current education. Are we fostering these skills in the classrooms? I have kids in school and I see some of this happening – although I also studied these skills in library school so I think they get a good dose of digital literacy and synthesizing at home. I still see an emphasis on the end answer more than the process – which I think can be misleading in terms of gauging ability to synthesize and/or distinguish between noise and message.
It occurs to me that these are also skills that are important in digital inclusion efforts. I know the focus right now is simply getting people to use tools – but I think we will reach even more people when there’s a focus on using technology as a means – not an end. (I’m sure some classes and programs do that now.) I remember talking to the folks at PCs for People about their clients, who by definition are new computer users. Their clients learned how to use the computer on their own – maybe with help from friends or family. And I think many people learn that way. It’s a good first step. But are the making the most of the technology? Maybe the next step of adoption programs needs to focus on:
That might lead to higher level users and encourage users to become “lifelong learners” who are constantly adopting new digital skills as opposed to users who are proficient with the tools we have today.
According to a report from Point Topic there are more than 600 million broadband subscribers today – that’s worldwide. I must admit I don’t know a ton about Point Topic. They haven’t defined broadband in the teaser summary, but it includes satellite.
It was interesting to see the breakdown of subscribers by method:
Also they appear to be looking at the topic from a market research perspective – so it’s fun to get a glimpse of the business side of broadband…
This represents a 2.7% growth in the first quarter of 2012 and 11.5% in the 12 months since Q1 2011. This is primarily due to the invigorating addition of markets and countries where penetration is yet to achieve the level of the ‘mature’ countries and allows for faster initial growth.
Even markets like India and China aren’t bottomless however and there are signs that countries worldwide are entering a new phase where customer acquisition will be driven primarily by churning current subscribers from their existing supplier. …
The dominant story in access technologies continues to be FTTx, representing the various hybrid combinations of fibre and local loop solutions. The cost effectiveness, from the operators point of view, and the significant increase in bandwidth over DSL in particular is hitting the sweet spot at the moment. FTTH is growing well from a small base but deployments are limited in most markets. …
If we look at the market share change over the last 12 months we can see more clearly how Fibre is taking share from cable and DSL in particular. Consumers are churning away from DSL to the higher bandwidth products where available, but in some ways they are eating their own lunch. …
Satellite and mobile, as a primary home connection, are making inroads into the unserved market and as such theoretically have a better theatre to operate in with plenty of headroom and less competition than the fixed line areas.
I’m sad that I won’t be available – but there’s going to be an online radio show on US Ignite later today (1:00 PM – I assume Pacific Time) hosted by Craig Settles. Call in questions are welcome. Here’s a description from the site:
US Ignite launched last week with a big White House gathering, and has been riding a huge wave of publicity and questions. Lots of questions. Today we hope to get quite a few of yours answered.
US Ignite founding partners Sue Spradley and Joe Kochan join us in a special 90-minute show to talk about the program, separate hype from reality and discuss how your community can benefit from the program. This is a hot topic and we expect many of our listeners to call to exchange thoughts with Sue and Joe.
Here’s my initial take on the US Ignite announcement, and also some thoughts on President Obama’s Executive Order to streamline broadband network buildouts.
I’ve seen the pictures – but I can’t really believe what I see up and around Duluth. The flooding is terrible. You think about the roads and the roofs and fields – but not the telecommunications. But apparently the floods took down a lot of the means for communication this week. Internet access went out for Frontier customers. Cell and 911 access was out all over.
I want to thank Paul Bergman for taking the time to answer my questions while in the midst of cleaning up the water damage…
Yes the safety of all the citizens of Lake County was again jeopardized because of an old communications network that was never updated after many failures such as what has just happened. Only a network with redundant features like Lake County is constructing would have eliminated the loss of 911, Internet and cell phone use again for our citizens.
It’s remaniscent of the outages they experienced in January 2010 when a broken steam pipe left the area without internet, phone or wireless service – and it makes the case, more dramatically than I suspect they’d like that improvements are needed in the area. From what I’ve heard no one has been hurt – but I can only imagine the unnecessary worry and added running around involved when a catastrophe hits and citizens have no way to phone for help and the community has no way to check in with citizens or with other departments.
Friends in the area have described the damage to me – and it sounds as if road repair and maybe construction will be required. Perhaps that’s a silver lining and an opportunity to install conduit while they’re working – a “Fix Once” spin on the “Dig Once” strategy.
There has been a lot of debate on need for improved infrastructure in Lake County – one issue concerns the percentage of served versus unserved homes. Perhaps the definition of served needs to come with a reliability factor in the area. Two major outages in two and a half years seems less like a fluke and more like a weak link.
[Added June 21: more info on the storms from Duluth News Tribune]
When you look at national, state and local statistics on who is online and who isn’t, the elderly always seem to make the list on the far edge of the digital divide – especially low-income seniors. In May, the Benton Foundation and Connected Living hosted a conference of evaluators, practitioners and policymakers to talk about getting seniors online. They have recently published a report on their findings.
The report stresses the importance of including seniors in the digital economy – as they point out, but 2015 there will be more people over 60 than under 15. A couple of strategies were suggested:
Thanks for Ann Higgins for the heads up on International Telecommunications Union’s Broadband Commission for Digital Development work on Universal Broadband Targets. As you may recall, the ITU created a world broadband plan in 2010 – with a 2015 timeline. They are meeting next week and in preparation the Broadband Commission for Digital Development has published an open letter. Here are their four key universal broadband targets:
Target 1: Making broadband policy universal. By 2015, all countries should have a national broadband plan or strategy or include broadband in their Universal Access / Service Definitions.
Target 2: Making broadband affordable. By 2015, entry-level broadband services should be made affordable in developing countries through adequate regulation and market forces (amounting to less than 5% of average monthly income).
Target 3: Connecting homes to broadband. By 2015, 40% of households in developing countries should have Internet access.
Target 4: Getting people online. By 2015, Internet user penetration should reach 60% worldwide, 50% in developing countries and 15% in LDCs.
I find the 5% average monthly income an interesting statistic. It seems high to me – but I like that there’s a mark in the sand to measure affordability.
The letter itself eloquently highlights two other key points – the need for adoption and for a balance of wired and wireless solutions.
On Adoption
Investments in broadband have a vital role to play, both in moving the global economy back onto a higher growth trajectory, and in generating sustainable social and economic growth. Like water, roads,
rail and electricity before it, broadband is of fundamental importance to the social and economic development of all nations. However, Investments must not be focused only on infrastructure development, – they must also provide for advanced online services, locally relevant content and services, and support for media and information literacy development to address inequity and deliver broadband inclusion for all.
On Mixed Means of Access
While fixed networks continue to provide the necessary backbone and core data capacity, they are complemented by mobile networks and devices that put broadband applications and services directly into the hands of users. High-speed broadband enables online collaboration (including social networking and crowdsourcing), user-generated content, and locally relevant new services to drive innovation, helping to transform people’s lives in both developed and developing countries alike.
Both of these topics have come up in the Minnesota Broadband Task Force and other community broadband discussions that I have attended. I think the ITU always does a good job of offering a high level perspective on street level concerns of broadband. And in that spirit I wanted to include one paragraph that exemplifies that dual perspective. To insure the greatest value of the worldwide network, it is important for all of us to care about their four pillars…
For global broadband roll-out to contribute most to development, human activity must transform information into knowledge that can support individual empowerment and sustainable social and economic development, including institutional and political transformation and the development of knowledge societies that rest on four pillars: freedom of expression; quality education for all; universal access to information and knowledge; and respect for cultural and linguistic diversity. Broadband development cannot be limited to technical infrastructure; the availability of relevant broadband enabled content, applications and services in multiple languages should also be ensured.
