NTIA Testimony: Broadband Stimulus Funding Should Support Social and Economic Justice.

Below is my testimony before NTIA from March 16, 2009. While most of the other folks who presented focused on the impacts for corporations, I wanted to bring the conversation back around to what was primarily important -- the potential positive impacts on local communities. Here's what I said:

Thank you very much. It is good to be here.

For those who know me, I will be taking a slightly different perspective on things. I spent the past decade in addition to my work at the New America Foundation also doing community technology deployment. I have been climbing on roofs, building coalitions and suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous local politics, and I have been successfully implementing solutions in communications that people said were impossible to deploy.

So let me begin by restating what I hope is obvious, which is that private profits are the byproduct of the critically important digital inclusion work -- work that needs to be done desperately in this country -- but they are not the end goal of the stimulus funding.

Our fundamental goal should be to search for the most efficacious eligible entities, both public and private, and maximize the social and economic benefits of this national intervention. It is critically important for NTIA to evaluate each application on its own merits, and not disallow any specific entities or organizations from applying a priori.

The fact is that broad band stimulus is so desperately needed is indicative of the woeful state of current service provisioning within many communities. It's very existence that of the BTOP program points to the need for new thinking and innovation and new strategies that dramatically differ from prior attempts.

The types of eligible private entities we must support must go far beyond usual suspects. Within the private sector NGO's of all types must be eligible and must include nonprofits, hybrid partnerships with municipal entities, etc., etc., etc.

Current measures, business models and implementation plans have far too often marginalized considerable resources and expertise within local communities. The deprioritization of local control and accountability has too often led to far less effective IT training for local residents, lowered educational outcomes, decreased salience to local constituents of the systems that are deployed, and the marginalization of these communities that these resources are supposed to be serving.

So NTIA has an opportunity to begin to address these digital injustices. We have both an obligation to ensure that the very best organizations receive public funding, and the concomitant duty to ensure that the most socially and economically just outcomes are deployed. Diversity ensures that universal and broadband access and the widest span of digital resources becomes a reality.

To sum up, digital inclusion is not just about the services offered, it's about the local control and accountability of these organizations. It's about finding the right institutions and organizations to deliver these services in the first place.

I very much look forward to the following discussion and public comment. Thank you.