I’ve said before we’re in a world of broadband funding limbo right now. Minnesota is on the cusp of receiving more than $650 million for broadband expansion but we don’t know the details yet because the NTIA has not yet approved Minnesota’s proposed plan to spend the money, many communities are scrambling to prepare for a without any clear direction. Rural Innovation Strategies, Inc. (RISI) has created a free BEAD application toolkit to help smaller and rural ISPs be competitive with their applications.

It’s hard to me to speak too much on the information because I’m an academic not a  practitioner, but for the academics or for folks who want to understand the process, but won’t be getting out their calculators to fill in forms, this seems to be a good introduction. The toolkit is based on an outline and series of questions that I think make it easy to follow.

You could create a lot of checklists based on this toolkit and that seems helpful to folks on all sides of the table.