The Grid

One more thing about Scott (Seeing Like a State).

He picks up on something I've often mused about: the American gridded landscape.

I've often mused that somehow dwelling within the objective correlative of modernist rage (i.e., living in a cartesian coordinate system of streets and other infrastructures) is bound to have some sort of cognitive if not metaphysical impact (if theories of behavior and environment are to be believed at all).

Scott is more interested in its origin as an example of high-modernist excess: The grid creates a "God's-eye view", stressing the Enlightenment bias toward formalized order. In the cartesian ideal, no local knowledge is necessary to navigate a grid.

Scott, Seeing Like a State (Notes, Reactions)

FULL CITATION:

James Scott (1998):Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press: 0300070160).

FWIW: Brad DeLong has a far better review than I could write here (even if his critique focuses on Hayek instead of Heidegger):

http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Econ_Articles/Reviews/Seeing_Like_a_State.html

This book has been around for a while, and everybody seems still to have something to say about it. I was a bit surprised how much I like about it. Perhaps it’s because as one deeply influenced by Arendt, which is to say as one deeply affected by Heidegger, I was quite interested and surprised to see someone build a theory around thinking an alternative to technē, which may mean to technological thinking of a certain sort altogether. So Scott attempts to create an alternative, too.

A bit of history: recall that those in the room in Marburg in the winter of 1924-25 when Heidegger delivered his seminal lectures on Plato’s Sophist was a Who’s Who list of 20th Century intellectuals (to name a few, Arendt, Gadamer, Lowith, and Strauss). The lectures are noteworthy in that these students tended to become rather committed Platonists or Aristotelians (and ne’er the twain shall meet…). The lectures are also noteworthy in that these lectures, ostensibly on Plato, contained a vital excursus on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, focusing particularly on Book VI. It is in this section of the book, which deals in great detail with human virtues, that Aristotle explains that the chief intellectual virtue (which is to say, the most virtuous of virtues) is phronēsis, translated into English by way of Latin as prudence but perhaps better understood as practical wisdom. For those familiar with the Serenity Prayer, phronēsis might be thought of as “the wisdom to know the difference”.

In a nutshell, phronēsis is the sort of wisdom that comes from experience, the capacity to make good judgments in a pinch (i.e., precisely the capacity one would seek in leaders). Phronēsis, then, is taken by many to be the essential trait of democratic citizens (one hopes that wisdom guides the decisions of voters, jury peers, and elected officials). And phronēsis should always be understood in contradistinction to its practical counterpart, technē, which is technological knowledge (or in rough terms a kind of knowing and acting that bridges the gap between theoretical understanding and production, i.e., instrumental rationality. In a nutshell, the chief problem confronting modernity, from Heidegger’s perspective, was overcoming the provenance of technē. Why? Because human freedom is impinged when discretionary judgment (i.e., phronēsis) is eclipsed by the instrumental rationality of technē.

Why this excursus in a review of Scott’s book, you might fairly inquire? Well, when you get to the meat of Scott’s alternative, it will make some sense. So I offer some pithy quotations interspersed with comment. I’ll return to the foregoing treatment of technē in a moment.

SEEING LIKE JAMES SCOTT:

The modern gambit, as Scott describes, is the impressive march of modern science and technology. Yet, those techniques, when applied to the domain of human affairs, create problems. Scott opens with the quintessential example, 19th Century German forestry. As the Germans attempted to maximize yield using the techniques that leveraged the power of emergent science, they created large, mono- and duo-crop swaths of conifer forests with tremendous yield for a few generations. But focusing on only a couple crops while “cleaning” the complications of underbrush to reduce fire damage and ease access for lumberjacks, led to rapid exhaustion of the forests (from lack of biodiversity). The myopic focus on productivity, steered by bureaucratic scientists far from the actual field, lasered in on an aspect of the forest and optimized it with impressive near-term results, only to discover that forests are complex systems, each element of which sustains itself on the basis on symbioses and intricate interrelationships. No science can reveal and comprehend these intricacies in their entirety. Yet scientific forestry management attempted to do just that.

Thus Scott reveals his main point: several features of modernity combine to create massive failures of hubris akin to German forestry (Scott focuses on the economic, social, and natural devastation that occurred in the wake of statist interventions such as Stalin’s collectivization). Modern tragedies are the result of 4 things: a) administrative ordering of society; b) high modernist ideology; c) authoritarian state apparati; d) a “prostrate civil society”.

At first blush, Scott’s etiology of these tragedies is not unlike that provided by the Viennese School, especially Hayek. That is to say, the modern state’s myopia is the problem for Hayek, too. The solution for Hayek, of course, is to do away with central governments and allow the unfettered market to operate unto its own logic. As we will see below, Scott’s solution is to call for an alternative mode of framing the modern gambit (not unlike Heidegger’s effort above). Of course, this appeal comes across as a rather empty formalism (“oh wow look what I read in Plato!...). But I’m getting ahead of myself.

SCOTT’S ASSESSMENT: HIGH MODERNISM TENDS TOWARD MYOPIA

Scott opposes the “imperialism of high-modernist, planned social order” (p. 6). In framing the problem in this way, Scott taps a rich legacy of thinkers who were suspicious of the “double-bind” of the Enlightenment: on one hand, modernity appears to be liberatory and progressive, yet it contains certain tendencies toward authoritarianism. Thinkers diverge on how exactly the modern condition (or postmodern one, whatever) constrains human freedom. For example, Strauss (again, Heidegger’s student) believed that a fundamental trap of modernity was the tension between liberty and equality (which de Tocqueville made note of). Liberal democratic institutions are, as Plato and Aristotle both noted, subject to the sway of demagogues and tyrants. Horkheimer and Adorno, exiled in Hollywood from Frankfurt, symptomatized the culture industry among other ideological organs of capitalism that limit human freedom. Arendt, following Heidegger, argued that the provenance of instrumental rationality limits the need for human judgment (and thereby human agency). What all these perspectives share is a depiction of a rear-guard action of a thinking public against the encroachment (Habermas calls it “colonization”) of those organs of instrumental rationality. Scott, in this sense, continues a rhetorical tradition that stresses the dire circumstances into which we moderns find ourselves thrown.

p. 26: states seek to render particularity legible, which requires disregarding local, historically-situated for universals.

The basic thrust of Scott’s particular adaptation of this skeptical trope is against the imperial inclinations of centralized authority. In its efforts to account for the vastness of their domains, states are forced constantly to simplify and generalize. This is quite similar in thrust and tenor to the critique raised by the Vienna School (i.e., Hayek and carried into the neoclassical tradition (i.e., Friedman) that the modern state is the primary cause of these ills. To be sure, Scott has a rogue’s gallery of villains, of which the state is one. He himself claims,

“Put bluntly, my bill of particulars against [the high-modernist centrally-planning social-engineering] state is by no means a case for politically unfettered market coordination as urged by Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman. “ (p.8

)

But sense his book casts particular blame on the state, the question of how Scott differentiates himself from the Vienna School. As DeLong puts it:

“Yet even as he makes his central points, Scott appears unable to make contact with his intellectual roots--thus he is unable to draw on pieces of the Austrian argument as it has been developed over the past seventy years. Just as seeing like a state means that you cannot see the local details of what is going on, so seeing like James Scott seems to me that you cannot see your intellectual predecessors.”

p. 30: Many things mark the increasing relevance of universality (CK’s observation: certainly reading from Kant forward, self-conscious reflection on universalism is a clarion of modernity). But several trends suggest a stepping toward the universal and abstract as opposed to the idiosyncratic and particular: a) increasing markets lead to increasing needs for standards, commonalities, consistencies….next stop is codes; b) popular sentiment, argues Scott, is a catalyst (as in the sense that growing centrality of rights to modern states leads to an increase in what Hegel called “abstract right” (again, my reference, not Scott’s)); c) the French Revolution made this general march of universalism ubiquitous.

p. 36: Modern states “aspire to measure, codify, and simplify”; systems of measurement and standards overcome the “Babel of measurement”

p. 39: cadastral map is the crowning achievement of modern states; provides “synoptic view of the state and supralocal market in land”

p. 44: “value of the cadastral map to the state lies in its abstraction and universality”

p. 45: “designed to make the local situation legible to an outsider”

p. 46: perhaps most importantly to seeing like a state: the cadastral map freezes social phenomena—more static, more schematic than reality”

Okay, so I think we get it. The modern state is a perpetrator of metaphysical as well as physical violence. It attempts (poorly) to shove the circular peg of local knowledge into the square hole of abstract reason. And this constrains freedom and results in large-scale tragedy and atrocity.

DeLong criticizes Scott for not being sufficiently attentive to his Viennese roots. His point is that Hayek and others have argued from the liberal economic position that state intervention inevitably causes more ills than it resolves. Hayek argued famously against planning (reacting specifically to planned economies in particular), claiming that central planners lack the perspective to see individuals, local networks, and specific contexts sufficiently to take decision-making power away from local actors. As DeLong quotes Hayek:

“...the fact that knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.... “ from “The Use of Knowledge in Society”

Although as DeLong rightly criticizes Hayek for being inattentive to the Viennese School, he pays little attention to the intellectual pedigree of mētis, which is Scott’s effort at redeeming the present.

SCOTT’S WAY OUT: REHABILITATING LOCAL WISDOM

Against this evil, Scott proposes mētis: “denotes the knowledge that can only come from personal experience” (pp. 6-7)

p. 7: “I am making a case for the resilience of both social and natural diversity and strong case for the limits, in principle, of what of what we are likely to know about complex, functioning order”

p. 346: the problem with high-modernist schemes: “little confidence they repose in skills, intelligence and experience of ordinary people”

p. 351: “…all socially engineered systems are formed and are in fact subsystems of a larger system on which they are dependent not to say parasitic” (CK: might we call this the lifeworld?)

p. 352: big problems occur: “fairly simple interventions into enormously complex natural and social systems”

p. 357: “Common law, as an institution, owes its longevity to the fact that it is not a codification of legal rules, but rather a set of procedures for continually adapting some broad principles to novel circumstances” (CK: sounds a lot like phronēsis”)

p. 311: “formal order, to be explicit, is always and to some considerable degree, parasitic on informal processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize” p. 313: Scott explains mētis: “indigenous technical knowledge” “folk wisdom” “practical skill”

p. 316: mētis is knowing when and how to apply rules of thumb in concrete, specific situations. Example from Oakeshott: a ship pilot knows general rules of sailing (and has often actually authored many of those rules by dint of experience), but always applies those rules in particular circumstances. Twain’s Life of the Mississippi embodies this principle.

This is not technē, which has to do with rules of thumb and how they’re created, but necessarily in their application.

p. 323: Scott explains a story of Squanto in his encounter with first English settlers. When asked when it was safe to plant corn, the advice from a local expert was to plant when the silver maple leaves began to emerge. In other words, the time it was safe from frost was not determined by the date in an almanac (an abstraction from the way days are lived). Rather the advice given allows for all sorts of complexity. In different microclimates, safe date might vary. But generally the maple tree will tell you when it thinks winter is over.

Actor Networks and Broadband Standards: An Annotated Bibliography

Okay, so here are a few pieces that will end up in the final draft of the literature review:

Tilson, D., Lyytinen, K. (2005). "Making Broadband Wireless Services: An Actor-Network Study of the US Wireless Industry Standard Adoption," Case Western Reserve University, USA . Sprouts: Working Papers on Information Systems, 5(21). http://sprouts.aisnet.org/5-21

NOTE: This is a classic ANT paper: "We adopt actor-network theory to examine how technical and human actors interact to reach agreement on the creation and adoption of wireless services and standards. We present a model in which actors formulate standardization strategies based on their perceptions of existing and future actor-network configurations in light of their interests..." The authors use the evolution of the 3G standard as the case to launch their theoretical claims. They find that the 3G standard was an occasion in which operators (users, I gather) were highly influential".

And here's another:

Yooa, Youngjin , Lyytinena, Kalle and Yang, Heedong (2005). "The role of standards in innovation and diffusion of broadband mobile services: The case of South Korea," The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 14 (3) Pages 323-353

Similar to the above:

"We explore the evolution of the mobile infrastructure in South Korea through the lens of actor network theory. In particular, we analyze the roles of standards in promoting, enabling and constraining innovation in broadband mobile services over a 10-year period....Our study suggests that successful innovation and diffusion of broadband mobile services are collective achievements and firms need to deploy strategies that enable them to mobilize broad socio-technical networks that include technological, institutional, political and financial resources. At the heart of such strategies, standards play critical roles as they mediate different interests and motivations among participating actors."

This one might be helpful, it's an early effort at understanding rural actor-networks:

Murdoch, Jonathan (2000). "Networks — a new paradigm of rural development?," Journal of Rural Studies, 16(4), October 2000, Pages 407-419.

Abstract: The network concept has become widely utilised in socioeconomic studies of economic life. Following the debates around exogenous and endogenous development, networks may also have particular utility in understanding diverse forms of rural development. This paper assesses whether networks provide a new paradigm of rural development. It seeks to capture a series of differing perspectives on economic networks — including political economy, actor-network theory and theories of innovation and learning — and attempts to show how these perspectives might be applied to different types of rural areas. The paper demarcates two main “bundles” of networks: “vertical” networks — that is, networks that link rural spaces into the agro-food sector — and “horizontal” networks — that is, distributed network forms that link rural spaces into more general and non-agricultural processes of economic change. It is argued that rural development strategies must take heed of network forms in both domains and that rural policy should be recast in network terms.

Stimulus

So here's some grumbling from Joseph Upton:

The government just seems to be paralyzed and they are paralyzing the service providers, who need to drive on with business one way or another...Nothing has been decided of any consequence, just that more talk needs to happen and the public needs to comment on how to divvy up the money.

Quite true, quite true, indeed. Upton says give it up to the bigs:

So, kudos to the big players for keeping America moving. The RLECs need to take note and follow suit, and let the free money chips fall where they fall, so that the networks can begin to move again

So the present problem is indecision. Government is in the way. Move over and let the incumbents take care of the problem. Hmmm. Is that line of thinking particularly new?

And let's consider, shall we, what the FCC, RUS, and NTIA have to make decisions about. Well, for starters, there's, uh, EVERYTHING!!! And these decisions have incredibly important implications. So, hey, if y'all want to make sure we're all on the same page and get it right, take a couple weeks.

As an example, a common question is how, precisely, will we define "underserved"? To date, we've been working with FCC data that provided precious little direction from the government. The FCC gathered availability data of broadband using the standard of 200 kilobytes per second. That means that if you have a connection at that speed (okay, or greater), then you have broadband. And if one person in a zip code can connect to broadband then, by the FCC definition, that particular chunk of area however big was said to have broadband access.

Now the FCC has made the point repeatedly that to set concrete bandwidth benchmarks to a moving target is constantly reify and then hypostatize numbers that are essentially arbitrary (in so many words...).

So, sure, what's in a number? But how about a goal that at least inspires a little imagination?

But perhaps, if we made a policy of collecting better availability data (which in fact the ARRA does), perhaps we could develop more nuanced metrics of underserved that varies by local condition and circumstance. In the near term, for example, we will not blanket the US with fiber. That means that denser areas will for the foreseeable future will have higher bandwidths than rural areas. So underserved in Brooklyn may not mean exactly the same thing as it does in Nome.

Of course, defining these terms is highly political. There is a lot at stake in whether we redefine "broadband" so that we have a tangible policy goal for all this cash. And this instance is merely one incredibly thorny issue that is being, by Upton's reckoning, talked about ad nauseum.

I say let's move. But let's move prudently.

Girding for the Last War

One Last Comment on the 3/10 Hearing:

We're using the army that fought the last war. In many respects, the last time the federal government was used to stimulate demand for a networked infrastructure was 70 years ago, during the Great Depression, with the creation of the Rural Electrification Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority. In other words, the federal agencies that are taking the lead on broadband deployment policy are themselves artifacts of political and policy dynamics with long pedigrees.

At a public hearing regarding the broadband infrastructure allocations occasioned by the enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) on 10 March 2009, officials played their cards quite close to their chests. The three agencies involved in distributing over $7 billion toward increasing broadband access and adoption, themselves haunted by the ghosts of funding cycles past were reticent to overindulge specifics. Rather, they called eagerly upon "traditional and non-traditional stakeholders" in an effort "to ignore no sector of our national life".

I argue that this focus on soliciting public input is a helpful thing. After all, who are the agencies involved? First there is the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) within the US Department of Commerce. NTIA didn't come into being until 1991, when Commerce's Office of Telecommunications absorbed the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy. Probably streamlining made sense, but this does give one a sense of the newness of the program. Now NTIA is taking on a big task, dispensing the largest chunk of the broadband dollars to establish the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), an agency that has yet to be created to dispense grant dollars and loans based on criteria that are yet to be determined in pursuing goals that are, in many respects, still under development (but we're hoping for jobs, right?).

The Rural Utilities Service (RUS), within the US Department of Agriculture, will dispense over $2 to provide grants and loans with similarly unspecified criteria is itself a legacy of the Depression. RUS got its start as the Rural Electrification Administration.

So we are being led out of the present malaise by an antique and in many ways obsolete federal structure. RUS is in a strong position to administer funds, of course: it has been funding rural projects for decades. There are many reasons why it makes sense to funnel money through a proven conduit.

But then again what we see at play in the broadband portion of the recovery package is the effect of last year's army. By dent of attempting to address the broadband challenge as one with a rural and an urban component, RUS is enacting what my good buddy Cory Knobel calls "ontic occlusion". The existing bureaucratic structures, since they are overdetermined by the past, are overdetermining what will happen next. It is ever thus, of course, but we may be watching it in action.

That said, one legacy of REA that is being reawakened is its focus on grassroots planning and implementation. More on that later...

Broadband Hearing a Dissapointment?

So Business Week was less than thrilled with yesterday's hearing, I hear:

At the first public discussion of the Obama Administration's much heralded broadband plan, government officials offered virtually no hard answers to the hundreds of people who gathered in person and the 2,500 more who participated via live Web video. For almost every substantive question about how the billions will be allocated, officials said they're looking for guidance from the public. Bernadette McGuire-Rivera, NTIA associate administrator, said the government is seeking input on "nearly every facet of the program."

I'd agree that the officials assembled provided very little specific guidance (or even guidelines), but I was hardly surprised. The event went like this:

Gov't Official: We've got money. Here's our timeline for disbursing it. Tell us how we should do that.

Earnest-looking Would-be Applicant: Do you have a preference for multi-juridictional applications?

GO: You tell us. We're looking for input on that. And however many applicants you put together, consider asking for $$ from more than one agency; that's what we're looking for: collaborative grant awarding.

Another EWA: How about platforms? Is there a preference for wifi? Fiber? Fibre? DSL?

GO: Yes, tell us about your preferences.

Another nuther EWA: What about this urban-rural thing? What do suburban providers like me do?

NTIA GO: Let's let the USDA handle that one.

USDA GO: Yes, we handle rural stuff. But urban agriculture is all the rage these days, so game on! Tell us where to draw the line.

And so on.

I'm not surprised in the least that Business Week saw it as a disappointment. But the first step is figuring out how to change the federal approach to this problem. The funding and oversight mechanisms that exist are probably not suited to the task, so the first step is that those agencies learn how to work across their stovepipes. And they communicated an interest in doing just that. I found it encouraging...

My summary

I often am asked by urban planners why I'm looking at a rural phenomenon (rural infrastructuration). I'm not, really, of course. I'm interested in how communities (irrespective of space and/or place) plan for broadband expansion. For the most part, the funding mechanisms for these sorts of public planning projects have addressed the rural aspects of the broadband challenge, because RUS has gotten most of the $$.

Without question, what I'm hearing from the interlocutors in today's meeting is a genuine interest in redefining how the broadband challenge is taken on by the federal government. A big funding mechanism is pointed at rural America, but the need is by all means not exclusively a rural one.

More Broadband Stimulus Live Blogging

Great questions from participants, focusing on redefining and allocating spectrum, allowing for in-kind contributions from local and state governments, platform neutrality.

Most of the questions are geared toward criteria. The answers are typically skirting specifics, stressing comments regarding suggestions for criteria. I.e., no one has nailed anything down yet, it appears, at all.

How will we determine effectiveness? Everyone is soliciting input regarding developing metrics. For example, a stated goal is "innovativeness". But how do we measure that, as Seiffert quipped, "Are you three times more innovative than me?"

Question focusing squarely on urban-rural. Fellow from right here in MontCo asked what a suburban wireless provider should do. A disproportionate amount of the broadband $$ are going to rural areas. Deutchman uses this as a plug for FCC's mapping project. In future, funding allocations will be geared toward definitions of underserved vs. unserved (aha, more contested terrain).

More on the Broadband Stimulus

All the interlocutors in the discussion portion are stressing the ways in which the governmental structures that will be at work in implementing the broadband portions of the stimulus.

That is to say, Seiffert keeps stressing that the nature of the collaboration among FCC, the USDA's Rural Utility Service (RUS), and the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) are up for grabs. That is to say, part of the infrastructuring that is occurring centers on the presently inadequate federal structures. Right now, RUS, FCC and NTIA have been funding mechanisms whose missions were suited for the times in which they originated. Broadband is rendering certain hypostasized and often obsolete structures of these previous epochs in stark relief.

It'll be interesting, in other words, to watch and see what, if anything, changes about the governance of broadband. Right now, I'd say follow the money. The NTIA got the biggest piece of the pie. They're steering most of the stimulus dollars (that makes it a hopeful signal that Seiffert is stressing the need for collaborative grants).

But is USDA really where broadband should be driven in the 21st Century?

What I Think of the Broadband Stimulus So Far

Here's what I think makes a lot of sense:

a) NTIA and RUS are obvious funding mechanisms for the investments being made. While the majority of the funds being released are heading to rural American infrastructure development RUS (more on that in a moment), there seems to be some reason for this. RUS has been developing actual, physical networks (power, phones, now broadband) for quite some time. They have institutional capacity.

b) Seiffert makes interesting point: As the ARRA stipulates, the NTIA's mandate is to address questions of "underserved and unserved", while RUS's is to deal with "urban and rural, focusing on the rural". How these distinctions are negotiated (if not politicked) will, in my estimation, be the crux of the success (or otherwise) of this broadband program.

Live Blogging the Public Mtg on BBand Initiatives

You can watch, too!

Meeting will be (or was) webcast.

The presentation began with a welcome from Anna Gomez, acting Administrator of NTIA.

Next Tom Vilsack, Sec of Ag: private sector, all levels of government should work together to find new models for implemention. "It's fair to say that we are not as far along as we need to be."

Key stakes: competitiveness. Creating platform to make the US competitive. "Very important technology that every American needs to have access to".

Next Michael Copps, acting head of the FCC: "at long last a proactive broadband buildup for our country"

Obama feels extending broadband to four corners of this country is key to country's future. For past seven years, FCC has received reassurances regarding pace of telecommunications development. But as recently as last week, US has received news that it continues to fall behind.

"Years of broadband drift and growing digital divides are coming to an end"
"Broadband is the central infrastructure challenge of our time" Then an excursus on previous epochs "eras of private enterprise supported by progressive public policy".
"We lost precious time."

FCC has important role to play. "On April 8, FCC will kick off an open, participatory, public process" to deliver a national broadband strategy within the next year. "Will seek out a range of traditional and non-traditional stakeholders to be heard."

And then, Rick Wade, Senior Advisor to NTIA:

Goals a) Extend broadband across US: spread "pipes" closer to need, allow private sector to serve public via these.
b) Jobs
c) Connect community anchor institutions (libraries, schools, health care centers, etc)
d) Stimulate demand

Develop proposals for funding across sectors, regions, and communities. "Are working to ensure that broadband capacities and needs of local communities are known"

Broadband Internet technology will create jobs both in the near and long term.

Next, programmatic stuff.

a) Dr. Bernadette McGuire-Rivera, Associate Administrator, NTIA Up to $350 million on broadband mapping and planning
Up to $200 million on demand ("sustainable broadband planning")
Just about anyone who meets the criteria can apply (i.e., all levels of gov't, private sector, non-profits, etc).

b) David Villano, Assistant Administrator for Telecommunication Programs
RUS has got over $2 billion in budget authority, meaning it can be deployed as grants or loans. Will thus attempt to use large portion to leverage additional funds.
Purpose of RUS throughout its history has been to spur economic activity and development.
Focuses on rural populations.
RUS is well-equipped and experienced for this sort of budget allocation. USDA Rural Development

c) Scott M. Deutchman, Acting Senior Legal Advisor to Acting Chairman Copps, FCC

d) Mark Seifert, Senior Advisor to NTIA lead roundtable. Made an appeal for rapid efforts to define what should determine what "best" proposals are, should focus on, etc. Moreover, he asked for recommendations regarding making the collaboration among FCC, NTIA and RUS work.

QUESTIONS:

a) Are multi-jurisdictions or groups of organizations going to receive priority? Answer, no preference, but multiple applicants are encouraged. Then, Villano suggested that grants across agencies are specifically encouraged.

b) Will number of towers and/or wired buildings information be included in the mapping? Answer from Deutchman: not ready to explain specifics, but goal will be granularity. Seiffert then suggested that suggestions for how best to leverage mapping technologies would be encouraged (hmmm. grant idea).