Sub Techs

Asheville's Wireless Network

2011-06-30T15:19:00.003-04:00

Good piece in GovTech about the City of Asheville's $20K wireless alternative to shelling out $450K/year for fiber.

An important side note: part of the reason Asheville's fiber bill got to be a big problem is because the structure of local franchising fees was tossed by the NC State Legislature via the Video Service Competition Act of 2006: Asheville, N.C., saved millions of dollars and also supported a local business last fall when the city’s IT department opted to build a city-owned wireless network to connect public safety buildings.

Asheville was using a fiber network as a condition of a cable franchise to connect 22 administrative buildings, fire stations and police substations, but the North Carolina Video Service Competition Act of 2006 gave the cable TV providers the power to negotiate statewide contacts, taking local government out of the plan. The new annual price for the city’s fiber service was $450,000.
This put the city in a tough spot, said Jonathan Feldman, Asheville’s IT services director. Asheville’s station alerting, which was previously connected by fiber, had resulted in a threefold improvement in cardiac emergency survival rates and a 20 percent improvement in structure fire response rates.
The city didn’t want to pay the new hefty fee for service, Feldman said, but the new system was saving lives and the city couldn’t give it up. That’s when the city found a $20,000 solution to a million dollar problem.

Battles of the Bands

2011-06-05T06:27:00.002-04:00

I heard about this problem a couple months ago. Today's WaPo has a good summary. It seems that a wireless broadband network presently under development may cripple aviation GPS (and many consumer receivers as well):

Two of 21st-century America’s favorite gadgets — the smartphone and the GPS device — are on a collision course, according to a report delivered Friday to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The report says deployment of a massive new network of towers and satellites to expand wireless communication may effectively shut down Global Positioning System devices that are at the core of a multibillion-dollar plan to revolutionize aviation. They also may affect some GPS units used by drivers, bicyclists and boaters.

Whoops.

Overstatement

2011-05-17T09:26:00.003-04:00

There have been a lot of complaints such as this one in the Boston Globe from the Governor Peter Shumlin of Vermont lately:

Shumlin offered himself as an example. Data from FairPoint Communications shows the governor's hometown of Putney as wired with high-speed Internet service. Shumlin said that's true in the village, but not out in the hills where he lives.
"That is news to me and my teenage daughters," Shumlin said about data showing his hohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifuse has DSL, a type of high-speed Internet service. "We need the truth. We can't build out on bad data."

The complaint is well-founded. The federal mapping effort has had the benefit of gettin something down on paper. But in rural areas especially, the strategy taken by NTIA overstates availability. The reason for this is the basic geographic approach taken by the NTIA, an approach that aggregates availability to U.S. Census blocks. Among the problems with this approach is that blocks are not even in size. In urban areas blocks are, well, blocks defined by streets usually. Not so in rural areas where blocks can be quite large.

The bottom line with the basic strategy taken by NITA: aggregating availability data has pitfalls precisely where accuracy is most crucial. Namely, in sparser locations, U.S. Census blocks are large (indeed, those over a certain areal threshold were omitted from the initial map release one presumes for methodological reasons).

In dense areas, generalizing to a more or less arbitrary spatial units makes a certain amount of sense, especially if the units are compact, as blocks tend to be in densely settled areas. But in rural areas, this technique makes less sense because it tends to a) overstate avaialbility and b) deny the granular information needed for strategic decision-making. Aggregating data in this way was a gamibt and maybe a poor one, taken one suspects to avoid drawing a map of discrete actual service areas of individual providers, an approach that would no doubt lead to endless negotiation and litigation.

FCC Commissioner Cashes Out

2011-05-12T14:02:00.000-04:00

Okay, okay, it's not as though I expect a former F.C.C. Commissioner to sell all her possessions and walk the Earth like Cain on Kung Fu, but this piece from the WaPo's Cecilia Kang is pretty blatant:

Federal Communications commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker announced Wednesday that she will resign from the FCC on June 3 and join Comcast-NBC Universal as its senior vice president of governmental affairs.

Other Infrastructures: Shuffling High-Speed Rail $$

2011-05-10T07:24:00.003-04:00

The Obama administration hoped to commit $53 billion toward developing a high-speed rail network (a mere down payment on the $600 the U.S. High Speed Rail Association says are necessary to complete such a network).

The Washington Post reports today that some of those dollars are being reshuffled:

The Obama administration on Monday announced the reallocation of $2 billion in its signature transportation program to create a national high-speed rail network, including $795 million for upgrades that would permit speeds of 160 mph in parts of the Northeast Corridor.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood made the money available to other states this year when Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) opted not to accept funds that had been allocated to build high-speed rail between Tampa and Orlando.

Glad to hear that Florida's elected leaders maintain their ideological commitment to burning fossil fuels despite their particular vulnerability to rising seas....

Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House transportation committee, has been outspoken in his opposition to the administration’s plan to spend $50 billion more for high-speed rail over the next five years.
Mica, who favors a privately funded rail system, was critical Monday of funding for several projects that would benefit Amtrak’s operations in the Northeast Corridor.
“We need a comprehensive, responsible plan for the Northeast Corridor,” he said in a statement, “and Amtrak — our nation’s Soviet-style passenger rail service — is incapable of carrying out a project of this scope and significance.”

Soviet-style. Nice rhetorical flourish. But since the private sector abandoned rail service decades ago, where's the investment going to come from? See any would-be railroad tycoons on the horizon (since they did such a smashing job the first time around!)? No. Okay. So if it's going to happen, it won't start through private investment any time soon.

As an aside: since I worry about the century-old span across the Susquehanna every time I cross it going to and coming from Philly, I'm glad to hear that the reshuffling tosses a dime or two toward replacing it.

NC Senate Votes to Limit Broadband Expansion

2011-05-04T07:24:00.004-04:00

Okay, so that's an inflammatory title for this post. But that's precisely what the NC Senate has done in supporting the so-called “Level Playing Field/Local Government Competition”.

Among other restrictions on local government involvement in broadband, the bill limits the footprint of a public network service area to the official corporate limits of that entity as well as imposing operational limits.

This piece in the Davidson News demonstrates the stakes for a small town, attempting to collaborate with neighboring towns to build an inter-jurisdictional network:

The bill’s new rules would require cities and towns to get voter approval for any debt they issue to pay for communications networks. They also would have to hold public hearings on their plans. And since cities and towns are exempt from taxes, they would be required to make payments in lieu of taxes to themselves equal to what a private company would have to pay.

The community's experience with privately provided cable and, later, Internet service is typical of smaller communities across the nation. Davidson, nearby towns, and the surrounding unincorporated reaches of Mecklenburg and Iredell counties experienced the frustration of twenty years of de facto monopoly providers, takeovers, and service limited service, as a previous Davidson News piece explains.

But the NC Senate is not an institution that will allow simple pragmatics, a solid business plan, and the interest of communities stand in the way of an ideological commitment. Let's hope this bill is eventually stopped in its tracks.

2011-04-13T13:36:00.005-04:00

The Vermont Senate has voted to speed up the permitting process for towers that will enable high-speed Internet access and cell phone service.

Vermont's challenges are manifold: sparse population, lots of hills and trees. So wireless may be a near term solution, but wifi networks are hard (and expensive) to build in these condition.

The legislation was not without its critics, suspicious of giving too much to the big telcos. As the Brattleboro Reformer reports:

If not, he said, Vermonters will be able to get "all the rock and roll tunes you’ve ever heard of," and be able to ship money out of state to pay for them but they’ll be much less able to upload and send out their own creative work product, MacDonald said.
"Economic development is based on uploading," he said. "This bill is woefully short on uploading technology."
He also said if private companies are getting public dollars to set up new fiber-optic backbones around the state, they should be required to welcome other users, even competitors, onto their networks.

Gauging Broadband's Economic Impacts

2011-04-08T11:17:00.003-04:00

Let's hope that Kimberly Weisul is not responsible for writing her own headlines at bnet. Witness a piece from yesterday with the screaming headline: "Study: $7B Stimulus Funds Not Helping Economy".

First let's unpack the premise:

By rolling out broadband internet service, especially to isolated rural areas, the argument goes, we can combat the economic malaise that has plagued many of those areas. Instead, it seems that the benefits of widespread Internet use tend to be concentrated in areas that are already doing relatively well. It’s the techie’s version of “The rich get richer.”

Okay, for what it's worth, if the rich are getting richer, then, strictly speaking we can't claim that the broadband stimulus is having no impact. But that's a minor point.

A tidbit of evidence cited in the piece, however, shows that only a minority of counties have experienced wage and employment growth in the wake of broadband expansion. But the data that substantiate this claim are from 1995-2000. So how on earth can that tentative and dated finding warrant the blithe conclusion that the broadband stimulus (which began almost a decade after the trend identified by a team of researchers) is so far without economic effects. Nonsense.

More importantly, if we pore over large-scale aggregated effects such as wage and employment numbers at the county level we fail to comprehend precisely the localized effects of connectivity. Only a starry-eyed economic development coordinator for a county might hold out hope that a fat pipe will lead directly to large-scale shifts in wage and employment patterns (especially in the long term). And, as the bnet piece suggests, a small and relatively fixed set of locations will benefit the most from connectivity. But that doesn't mean that increasing access and adoption in rural reaches of American isn't without consequence. For instance, perhaps broadband will staunch the steady flow of the best and brightest of rural Americans to the sub- and exurban enclaves to which they presently flock.

But just because a few conurbations stand to benefit the most doesn't in any way lead to the conclusion that broadband expansion is not helping the economy. That's a mischaracterization at best (and more likely ideologically-freighted spin with no toehold in reality).

Finally: Evidence of Planners Cluing In To Broadband!

2011-04-07T17:33:00.001-04:00

Planning Commission sees opportunity in short-term broadband goals for comprehensive plan — Technically Philly

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Round One to the FCC

2011-04-04T20:58:00.004-04:00

Good news for those in support of federal "Net Neutrality" rules. From the RoNew York Times:

A federal appeals court on Monday rejected as “premature” a lawsuit by Verizon and MetroPCS challenging the Federal Communications Commission’s pending rules aimed at keeping Internet service providers from blocking access to certain Web sites or applications.
While the decision, by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, is a first-round victory for the F.C.C. and its chairman, Julius Genachowski, the real battle over the agency’s attempt to regulate broadband providers has barely begun.

Broadband Availability By County Type

2011-03-30T16:46:00.006-04:00

Patchwork Nation, an effort at characterizing the diversity of American communities by creating a general typology of counties, has turned its lens toward broadband availability, in collaboration with Connected Nation,: Leaving close scrutiny of the typology itself for another day (and the characterization of counties as "Minority Central," "Immigration Nation," and "Evangelical Epicenters"), the map provides a good first cut at assessing socio-demogaphic correlates of broadband availability. As Patchwork Nation's Dante Chinni describes:

So if you were to sit down with a mathematician and try to figure out a formula for connectivity - admittedly a very difficult challenge - it might look something like population density, plus education, plus income, plus civic engagement equals better access to broadband.

Well, having sat down with broadband data at many levels, yup, that predictive model is just about spot on. That said, as presented, I'm not quite sure what to make of the "community engagement" part of the equation. Since that is at the heart of my own work, I have some ideas of what might be meant by it, though.

The future of electrical power in Japan...and Chernobyl...

2011-03-29T23:42:00.004-04:00

...oh wait, according to Bloomberg, a big chunk of the budget will be devoted to cleaning up the Fukushima Dai-Ichi reactors. The best guess right now is that it'll take way longer than Three Mile Islahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifnd (probably on the order of 3 decades) and at least $12 billion: And then there's this little sidebar:

Ukraine is unable to fund alone the cost of a new sarcophagus to cover the burned out reactor at Chernobyl, due to be in place by 2014. The 110 meter-high arched containment structure has a 1.55 billion euro ($2.2 billion) total price tag and the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has so far raised about 65 percent of that.

Yikes. So much for investing in the next generation of electrical power....

Crowdsourcing Radiation

2011-03-29T06:27:00.006-04:00

Tina Rosenberg has an interesting piece in the NYTimes refers to several sites that are crowdsourcing radiation levels in the wake of the tsunami/nuclear catastrophe in Japan.

Here's the view at JapanStatus.org, which posts reported radiation levels:

And here's the view from RDTN.org, which differentiates the colored markers by the entity providing the reading, not by the actual reported radiation level, which is a little confusing and less than informative graphically:

Toward a National Bandwidth Map

2011-03-26T09:30:00.007-04:00

So the wires were ablaze yesterday with news of Broadband.com's new national bandwidth map.

Cool, a Google Maps mashup that promises to deliver a bandwidth map of the whole US. Slick.

Drill in a little closer and that map of bubbles comes into clears and more useful focus. The default map, for example, shows only the point locations of DSL central offices, a helpful start. One can select the estimated broadband availability footprint of those locations (green below). And one can look at the footprints of Ethernet over Copper (EoC), as shown in orange in the Metro DC region below. And, as Stacey Higginbotham gushes at GigaOm, this sort of effort has the potential to provide enormous insight into where, at what speed, and at what cost broadband is available.

As an example, the map shows that 7 out of the 10 cities with the most expensive rates per migabit of bandwidth are in North Carolina. As the NC legislature contemplates the "level playing field" bill that would effectively exclude municipal and other public networks, learning that industry is putatively failing tilts the rhetorical scales toward the munis.

But what is the method behind these claims? You'll look in vain for an explanation of how the map works, whence the data come, etc? According to Higginbotham:

The map borrows from the National Broadband Map – launched last month by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration — in the form of an API call that takes some of the data shown on the federally funded map, but it also adds true crowdsourcing and machine learning to deliver a greater variety of information.

Cool! Crowdsourcing! Hive mind! Awesome. But, uh, how? Saying we're tapping the hivemind is one thing. Explaining the method by which that is rendered as an estimate of broadband availability, cost, and speed is another. I'll hold off calling Broadband.com's map the greatest thing since sliced bread until I see more about their data and their methods. Until then it is an enlightening collage.

A sidenote: as I've said many times before, bandwidth is an important issue. But it's not the only concern in the world of broadband policy. For starters, often claims and maps about bandwidth have a huge error term. Any number of discrepancies exist between the benchmark one gets at a terminal and what is actually "available". Nonetheless, bandwidth is among the things that must be considered in a coherent national broadband strategy.

BBand Planning 101

2011-03-25T14:35:00.015-04:00

So how do you leverage all that federal broadband data?

Let's say you're in a small to mid-size county not conveniently strapped on to the side of a large metropolitan area. The big fat broadband pipe is not heading your way anytime soon. That means that the core population centers of your county might have access to, say, 7 mbps downstream. And large swaths of the county might have access to wireless. And some have no access at all.

Let's say, you live, for example, in place like Buncombe County, North Carolina. So there's a substantial population (~210 thousand), the preponderance of which lives in or around the county seat.

What do you do?

Well, for starters, consider broadband availability relative to densities of population. Are there any obvious low-hanging fruit that providers have missed?

Not so lucky, usually. In many cases, the low-hanging fruit is long gone. That means that the areas left behind are recalcitrantly lagging.

Now it's time to take a close look at the broadband mapping data from NTIA. A first question: the NTIA collects information on community anchor institutions (CAIs) since these are integral to both sustainable adoption and public computing center aspects of the BTOP program.

So how well connected are those anchor institutions?

Well, in the case of Buncombe County, most are in the Asheville ambit. So most CAIs have access to the broadband. But not all:

The place to start is triaging those institutions (while not accepting the NTIA determination of what is and isn't an anchor institution; update the NTIA list and make sure it is comprehensive). Which are connected? Which of the disconnected should be connected? Which of those could be easily connected? Making these determinations is the first step toward an actionable plan.

A couple glaring deficiencies exist in the NTIA data, of course. Most important, the data are aggregated to US Census blockgroups. That means that, especially in rural areas where this information is most relevant, the footprint of broadband is overstated. Making a location-based strategy is difficult when the location of the broadband footprint is uncertain.

But this is a good first step for framing the game plan.

Where are the muni networks?

2011-03-23T22:18:00.002-04:00

Interesting map at Community Broadband Networks, labeling the nation's 130 or so municipal networks.Pretty surprising distribution, with the largest occurrence of networks in Iowa, Georgia and Tennessee (REA and TVA, anyone?).

Broadband hogwash in the NC legislature

2011-03-22T23:25:00.002-04:00

Good piece on the challenges of rural broadband in the News and Observer.

I didn't realize that NC beat the Roosevelt administration to the punch, passing a state rural electrification bill a month before the REA came into being. That proud legacy notwithstanding, the state legislature is now weighing a bill that would place all kinds of obstacles in the path of public broadband networks (and presumably public-private ventures by default).

Technology, Plans, Toys

2011-03-07T16:34:00.001-05:00

Kaid Benfield is right.

Yes, Gizmo Green seems to be the composite vision of green advertising. Quite true, no new technological product will redeem a sustainable future. And, indeed, rampant consumerism may in fact be a large component of our present unsustainable course.

So, sure, it's pretty easy to deconstruct Gizmo Green as a failed guarantor of sustainability. But to conflate technology with technological products would be a mistake, as is suggested at the end of Benfield's piece.

Perhaps it's fair to say that planners understand the future of technology just as well as technologists understand the future of cities, places, and spaces.

Yet, isn't that the whole reason why planners should insinuate themselves more forcefully into imagining, designing, and building policies toward the technologized future? I.e., if Gizmo City is one potential "imaginary," then shouldn't we all make sure that the we move toward a different one?

Gigabit in Hong Kong

2011-03-06T10:33:00.002-05:00

The New York Times piece points out the obvious in describing gigabit broadband for $26/month in Hong Kong:

In the United States, we don’t have anything close to that. But we could. And we should.

Indeed. And we'll only get there with fiber. And the places that have fiber will be on equal footing with world leaders. And those that don't, won't. It's simple as that.

S Korea Goal: 1gbps to the house

2011-02-25T11:47:00.001-05:00

South Korea sets 1 Gbps residential broadband access goal - FierceTelecom

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Digital Divide, Minnesota...

2011-02-25T11:44:00.001-05:00

» Nearly 30% of Minnesotans lack broadband

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NTIA Data (So Far...)

2011-02-21T20:30:00.003-05:00

So I've spent the weekend sinking my teeth into the National Broadband Map. More to the point, I've been figuring out what the data contain, what's not there, and what can be said about the findings. Bottom line: there's a lot to sift through. One big lacuna: there is one (big) .txt file that list that contains all of the identified Community Anchor Institutions (CAIs) in the country. And the lat/long fields are pretty much useless. So step one for mapping the CAIs is geocoding them . But I've got a couple pics of Philly worth a second look, such as the above bandwidth map (which displays the maximum download speed aggregated to the census block level). Note: providers report that just about all of Philly has 50-100 mbps available.

High-speed Woes in China

2011-02-18T09:26:00.001-05:00

NYTimes: China Rail Chief’s Firing Hints at Trouble

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Policy Innovation

2011-02-11T01:26:00.001-05:00

So the Obama FCC is certainly working diligently to find room for expanding spectrum at the margins:

The core of the plan would ask, though not require, local TV stations to give up a chunk of the broadcast spectrum assigned to them by the Federal Communications Commission. The chunks would then be auctioned off to wireless companies with the donating broadcaster getting a piece of the of proceeds. In effect, it’s an effort to get the most out of our broadband spectrum, which is a limited quantity.

The big questions remain unanswered. How many local broadcasters will play along? Will the $30 billion that auctions of available spectrum are projected to generate over the next decade actually materialize? Regardless, the administration is rolling out an impressive national strategy for broadband development based on leveraging existing policies and institutions (viz., the rejiggered Universal Service Fund) and exploring tweaks such as this latest announcement.

With next week's release of the National Broadband Map, it's heady days in the broadband world.

National Infrastructure Bank....hmmmmm

2011-02-09T13:43:00.002-05:00

Interesting idea coming from Geithner, given that funding is always prone to the vicissitudes of partisan brinkmanship:

The Obama administration's budget proposal due out next week will call for creation of a national infrastructure bank that selects major projects for federal backing, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Wednesday.
Geithner said it would support projects that produce significant returns on our investment, allow Americans more choices in their modes of transportation, and better connect existing transportation networks.

FCC Poised to Restructure Universal Service Fund

2011-02-07T10:43:00.004-05:00

This is big:

The federal government spends more than $4 billion a year, collected from phone bills, to subsidize phone service in rural and poor areas. Now, it's considering ways to give those places more for the money: high-speed Internet connections instead of old-fashioned phone lines.
The Federal Communications Commission is set to vote Tuesday to begin work on a blueprint for transforming a subsidy program called the Universal Service Fund to pay for broadband.

This is a big deal and an important shift in emphasis. Right now, of course, we still need to invest in rural telephony. But it seems likely that the continued structure of the USF may in fact provide disincentives to expanding broadband service. Providers receive federal subsidy to (re)invest in conventional wireline service. But the FCC has proclaimed that broadband will be the telecommunications platform of the future; restructuring the USF is a step toward realizing that vision.

Legislative Wrangling

2011-02-04T14:15:00.002-05:00

So ATT is working with its friends in the state legislature to scuttle a BTOP funded middle mile project in SC:

“They have been invited to the table and offered a piece of the pie,” [Oconee County administrator] Moulder said. “They’ve chosen to see us as competitors, when we had hoped they would see us as partners.”

A familiar pattern.

Connected Nation: No Bid for KY RFP

2009-09-02T09:10:00.003-04:00

So Connected Nation opted not to submit a proposal in response to the Kentucky Commonwealth Office of Technology’s broadband mapping RFP.

Seems the Commonwealth is asking bidders to turn around a statewide map, uh, yesterday. Well, in two months, which is effectively the same thing. From the Connected Nation blog:

Kentucky’s RFP for broadband mapping calls for a submission of a substantially complete dataset by Nov. 1, 2009, a full three months earlier than the timeline laid out in the federal guidelines....Connected Nation’s wealth of experience in creating broadband maps shows that this timeline is simply unrealistic.

I'll take a look at the responses to the non-response soon.

Lots of Takers

2009-08-29T05:04:00.002-04:00

So the basic stats are in. The first round of applications for broadband stimulus funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 have been received by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Rural Utilities Service. A press release from NTIA provides the rundown:

they received almost 2,200 applications requesting nearly $28 billion in funding for proposed broadband projects reaching all 50 U.S. states and territories and the District of Columbia

That $28 billion is roughly seven times the amount (~$4 billion) available during the first round.

Trust But Verify

2009-08-07T04:07:00.006-04:00

I read a piece in Business Wire with great interest on the entry of the Broadband Information Services Consortium (BISC) into the broadband mapping fray. After all the heat that Connected Nation has gotten in recent months for being the paid handmaiden of industry, I'm curious to see what a large-scale alternative might look like and how to build a better mousetrap.

I hasten to add that mapping is crucial. But as I've written it is only the first (or perhaps second) step in improving broadband access. While several states have contracted with Connected Nation for mapping services alone, I'd wager the greatest results in broadband deployment are those that take advantage of the broader community mobilization such as that which has occurred in Kentucky and several other states. That is because a map is necessary to point out gaps in service. But those gaps exist because large provider don't see near-term opportunities to recoup their investment. So mobilizing local knowledge and forging local coalitions is essential if anything is going to change in those areas.

And that's where the real power of Connected Nation's approach lies.

So what does BISC offer? It's really hard to tell. Here are a few clues from the Biz Wire piece:

"...provides states with customized solutions to broadband mapping to address the full supply-and-demand broadband continuum..."
"... ensures the most accurate, fully verified and up-to-date information available for broadband mapping..."
"...“Our collective experience and platform enable us to compile the multiple layers of real-time data of location and serviceability, either as a full-service approach or as a complement to state efforts....”
"Broadband maps created with geographic information system (GIS) technology provide an advantage to states..."

These notions all sound great. But one question remains: where do the data that form the base map actually come from? The Biz Wire piece doesn't say.

Connected Nation has been roundly criticized for accepting as gospel the information that they receive from broadband providers. That's a fair line of attack. Why should we trust providers, particularly when the data they release comes with strings attached?

As I've written previously, while they've not called it "crowdsourcing" in the past (what not hip enough, dudes?), Connected Nation has encouraged public validation of its base map. The information that providers contribute is not cast in stone, but is viewed as a starting point. Connected Nation has provided a mechanism for consumers to question the accuracy of the map, soliciting inputs from the public as means of improving on what providers are willing to share. For example, in Kentucky alone, over 4000 inquiries have been made based on the data providers have made, improving the quality and accuracy of the map as a whole.

The BISC plan seems to make heavy use of crowdsourcing (which amounts to polling or surveying the public) and extrapolating from the poll to estimate conditions over all. This is apparently the sum total of the approach taken by Broadband Census, which begins with a blank slate and maps on the basis of voluntary polling (not sure how many data points the Census has for the whole nation, but I've been told it's fewer than the 4000 Connected Nation has for Kentucky alone (as a corrective, I should, add, to a base map drawn from provider data)). As any statistician will explain, the fewer data points you have, the larger the error terms (i.e., the more the inaccuracy). So if you start from a blank slate it takes a lot of data points to generate anything meaningful.

Connected Nation's maps are not perfect. Nor are they intended to be. Nor could they be. Broadband deployment changes rapidly. And providers (for all sorts of reasons, and not just the big ones) don't provide entirely accurate spatial depictions of their deployments.

The big question is: Where does the map start? From a blank slate (in which case crowdsourcing is likely to contain lots of inaccuracy)? Or from a flawed, incomplete, temporally-bounded map of provider data (in which case crowdsourcing can and, in Connected Nation's case, already does make a big difference)?

Although they claim to be operating transparently, we don't yet know where BISC's base map comes from. I'll withhold judgment until I do.

So Everyone's Clueless?

2009-07-23T13:46:00.004-04:00

So how do you build a national plan for broadband?

It seems no one is offering many specifics.

This piece from John Eggerton from Multichannel news is pretty alarming:

The Federal Communications Commission's broadband czar is not impressed with the agency's submissions from the public and industry on the grand broadband plan, suggesting there is too much pie in the sky and not enough pie chart on the page.

How anemic are the offerings?

He ended his talk by literally begging for better input. "We really need your best ideas. And we need them quickly and clearly."

So Google's effort crowdsourcing the National Broadband Plan hardly inspires confidence, nor does it bespeak any national consensus. Now the FCC's Broadband Czar is begging for better public input, too.

Suppose this plea puts us all on the spot...

Crowdsourcing and the Broadband Map

2009-07-21T08:41:00.006-04:00

Drew Clark of BroadbandCensus.com has a great idea:

One of the things that BroadbandCensus.com has been doing since our launch, in January 2008, is to provide a crowdsourced, public and transparent collection of data about local broadband Speeds, Prices, Availability, Reliability and Competition. We call this the Broadband ‘SPARC.’

The basic idea is to get as much information from as many sources as possible to create sort of a collage, a national broadband map extrapolated from an enormous set of data points, ideally from lots and lots of individuals. There's a lot to be said for such a bottom-up approach, setting aside the initial challenge of getting folks to participate. The main challenge is that the starting point is a blank slate.

The question, really, is when and how such a crowdsourced resource should inform planning and decision making.

Clark has been outspoken in his criticism of Connected Nation's approach to broadband mapping, offering crowdsourcing as an alternative.

Yet, it seems there's less light between Connected Nation's approach and BroadbandCensus.com's. Indeed, Connected Nation has placed public verification of their mapping results at the forefront. Though they've not referred to the effort as crowdsourcing, I suppose they could.

Connected Nation brokers arrangements with multiple providers offering to protect what those providers believe is proprietary data. In other words, Connected Nation works with providers, accepting the data that they are given. The basic map begins, then, as the map that providers would have us see.

There are multiple reasons to be skeptical of this base map as an outcome. But it is only the first step.

Some providers dramatically overstate their coverage, though it's not always who you might think. Many suspect that Verizon and Comcast claim availability where it is not to make it appear that the broadband challenge is smaller than it may appear. But, according to my conversations with Connected Nation's mapping team, many small providers claim universal access in their service areas. Anyone who claims to be lacking service can get it simply by asking. Whether the data come from large or small providers, there's no way to challenge the assertions providers make other than through address by address verification.

So without attributing motives, we can stipulate one simple fact: for numerous reasons (reticence of providers to cough up accurate data as well as evolutionary nature of their networks) no national broadband map can be accurate.

And given these manifold flaws, the best verifier of any map is the public itself. Hence the importance of some sort of crowdsourcing effort as a corrective to any national map (whether prepared by Connected Nation, some other private sector entity, the providers themselves, or the FCC). In fact, Connected Nation realizes the importance of verification and has, as it happens, probably gotten more inputs from its own rather quiet crowdsourcing efforts than BroadbandCensus.com.

A Google Opinions on Broadband

2009-07-18T12:51:00.004-04:00

So Google is encouraging folks to "Submit your ideas for a National Broadband Plan". At the time of this writing,

1,719 people have submitted 440 ideas and cast 35,988 votes...

As one might imagine, there's a lot of chaff, but there are some solid ideas. It's worth taking a look if only to get a sense of the breadth of opinion (and misinformation).

A few examples:

"Investigate ways to increase the span of wireless networks and make it more advantageous for local governments to provide free wireless internet."
swankestZACK, Louisville, KY

So these are probably both good goals. Longer range wireless networks. Free wifi. Awesome. But the vision isn't matched with tactics. Make it advantageous? Uh, great, but how?

"Make Broadband a Utility. Internet is like phone service, water service, or electricity. It is quickly becoming almost necessary to have it. Since Internet itself is a service, it should become a Utility with no filtering."
Navarr, Spring, TX

So the key for the National Broadband Strategy should be definitional? (I.e., redefining Internet as utility?) What difference would this make at a practical level?

I could go on. But suffice it to say there are a lot of well-intended ideas. But how these would (or will) fit together as a coherent strategy remains to be seen. My hat's off to Google for providing the space to try.

And there are a slightly more articulated visions:

"Encourage investment from diverse companies in broadband infrastructure and support innovative public-private collaborations to reach remote, unserved parts of our nation, so everyone is connected to an increasingly robust Internet."
NextGenWeb, Washington, DC

Okay, sure, so you'd expect NextGenWeb to have a reasonably lucid vision. Of course, like the other ideas, this is a vision, not an implementation plan.

Still this might be an interesting forum. It'll be interesting to see how many ideas and voices will be raised at the Google site.

Henchmen?

2009-07-17T06:05:00.008-04:00

So don't know if you've seen it, but techdirt has an illuminating piece by Paul Masnick, who is largely sympathetic with Art Brodsky's (valedictory?!) rant aginst Connected Nation.

Masnick first makes this overwrought claim about Connected Nation:

First, it's just a "mapping" organization and it's run by the telcos themselves, allowing them to continue to fudge the data to make markets look a lot more competitive than they really are. And, yet, thanks to all the political love that goes out to Connected Nation, it looks like they're about to get hundreds of millions of dollars in broadband stimulus money.

Of course, it's disappointing that Connected Nation continues to be seen by its critics as merely a front for the telcos. But the larger disappointment is, without belaboring the point, this characterization of Connected Nation's work completely fails to acknowledge that Connected Nation believes mapping to be only the first step in improving broadband. In states like Tennessee, Ohio, and Kentucky the map has only been stage one run in tandem with statewide, county-by-county planning efforts that foster local empowerment and decision-making focused both on improving demand and channeling that demand toward feasible, meaningful, local improvements in supply.

After swallowing the bromide against Connected Nation hook, line, and sinker without critically engaging the organization's actual work or its results, Masnick then ends with this little bit of confusion:

I certainly agree that better data is important, but I have to admit I'm still somewhat confused as to what real problem we end up solving with mapping alone? Yes, it will give us more data to figure out just what the current situation is when it comes to broadband deployment, but that's got little to do with actually improving our broadband infrastructure.

Ahem, welcome to the party.

And if you'd look beyond your suspicion and prejudicial rage against Connected Nation, then you'd seen the organization's actual focus lies beyond the maps, too. The map is merely the first step in improving conditions on the ground. And those conditions will be vastly improved by enlisting the support and efforts of local leaders and residents and leveraging any and all willing assets, broadband platforms, and potential solutions. Not by throwing out the baby with the bathwater as Connected Nation's critics so often seem willing to do.

How Fast?

2009-07-17T05:20:00.002-04:00

So the de facto standard for broadband seems to be 3 megabytes per second. The broadband stimulus will favor proposals (at least for now) coming from areas in which more than 50% of residents have under 3Mb/s.

Many folks argue that in order to be competitive with better-wired nations, we need to set a higher national standard. Say, 20 Mb/s everywhere. Or 50. Or more. By this logic, the broadband stimulus needs to support improvements in bandwidth universally, not just showing a preference for un- and underserved areas.

I won't quibble with that argument. I think it's largely true that for too many years our federal policy failed to push speed. Just think, the FCC definition of broadband for most of Martin's tenure was 200 KILObytes/second! Pretty easy benchmark to meet.

I agree that much should be done to promote higher speeds ubiquitously. But for now, we have literally, borrowing from Matelart, a broadband archipelago: islands of pervasive, high-speed access and large oceans of nuthin'. This differentiation threatens to create (or entrench) a technological underclass that is not healthy for the nation as a whole. So stimulating broadband improvements in underserved areas is essential.

The question for those presently in the ocean, then, is what a tolerable level of service is. For some, the stimulus may mean that the capital exists to build a fiber network. For many (if not most) underserved areas, though, the stimulus will be sufficient for fixed wireless, which tends not to allow bandwidths as high as fiber.

So do we hold all communities, rural and urban, to the same standard? I think a national goal of 100 Mb/s is laudable (hell, I support it myself). But I'm enough of a pragmatist to realize that this standard is out of reach without a much larger federal investment than $7.2 billion.

As such, I contend that the excellent should not get in the way of the good. A national goal (say, 100 Mb/s) should not interfere with local build-out at some lower level. When local actors deliberate over their present needs, their perception of future requirements, and the extant logjams to creating service, the outcome is generally a realistic depiction of what standard should obtain for that locale. This is the strength of statewide planning efforts in places like Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, California and elsewhere: coalitions of local residents and leaders have considered (and continue to consider) what solutions are possible for them. Right now. This pragmatic approach should supercede any national standard (which is essentially arbitrary anyway) because it based on a finer-grained depiction of local conditions.

In short, speed standards should be pushed by federal policy. But in the near term definitions of broadband should be an emergent property of a nationally-promoted, locally-conducted grassroots planning process.

Muni Broadband In The Cold?

2009-07-16T14:05:00.002-04:00

According to Ed Gubbins the rules for obtaining funding through the Stimulus Package (the name pales in rhetorical comparison with "New Deal", doesn't it?) are leaving municipalities with little hope. Specifically, the NTIA's definition of "underservice" keep most areas of any size out of the running for broadband dollars in the near term.

One group of broadband stimulus hopefuls that has been in large part swept out of the running by the specifics of the plan is individual municipalities of any size. Though the stimulus plan stoked broad interest from municipalities earlier this year, many of them have been frustrated by the program’s preference for “underserved areas,” which the government has defined as areas where where at least half of all households lack broadband, where fewer than 40% of households subscribe to broadband, or where no service provider advertises broadband transmission speeds of at least 3 Mb/s.
Those rules sent the city of Northfield, Minnesota, for example, which had hoped to secure stimulus funds, back to the drawing board in its efforts to finance its plans. Melissa Reeder, Northfield’s information technology director, told the local press, “Honestly, I don’t think there’s a single Minnesota city that would qualify.”

I've written before in this space that the urban-rural divide doesn't make a lot of sense anymore. I'll acknowledge that the "unserved/underserved/served" trichotomy may create as many perversions. The bottom line is that any one-size-fits-all federal definition or standard of service or need is likely to have a similar effect. This reality brings us back to the importance of local engagement and planning for broadband. If standards of service are the product of sober thinking coming from local actors, then local conditions and logics of feasibility can dictate what the ideal level of service is.

A Step in the Right Direction: USASpending Site

2009-06-30T21:32:00.002-04:00

Haven't had much of a chance to poke around it yet, but the newly released USA Spending site is definitely worth a long look.

The purpose of the site, mandated by the Transparency Act:

To provide the public with information about how their tax dollars are spent. Citizens have a right and need to understand where tax dollars are spent. Collecting data about the various types of contracts, grants, loans, and other types of spending in our government will provide a broader picture of and much needed transparency to the Federal spending processes. The ability to look at contracts, grants, loans, and other types of spending across many agencies, in greater detail, is a key ingredient to building public trust in government and credibility in the professionals who use these agreements.

The Map Is Not the Territory

2009-06-30T07:53:00.004-04:00

There's been quite a bit of acrimony in the recent debate over the FCC's soon-to-be-released rules for a national broadband map and plan. The stimulus package (or ARRA of 2009) fully funds provisions of the Broadband Data Improvement Act of 2008, which calls for a national strategy for improving broadband, an integral part of which rightly should be mapping where broadband is and isn't available (and with some reliable gauge of the type and speed of service).

As Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge rightly puts it, however:

It’s unfortunate that the issue of broadband mapping is taking up any time and energy, much less about $350 million in stimulus money. Discussion of mapping takes away from discussion of the real issue – deployment, and why large companies have to be begged to provide service to some areas while they go to court and to state legislatures to prevent others from filling the gap.

Brodsky is entirely correct. Mapping, while important, even crucial, to a sound broadband deployment strategy, is only a small fraction of the challenge. Mapping is relatively cheap. Done well, it benefits all parties (consumers and providers). And with knowledge of existing networks, sound strategies to fill gaps in service can be devised.

But the map is only the beginning. No broadband map can be 100% accurate (not even briefly). Providers do not gather spatial deployment data in a consistent way. Many small providers do not gather spatial data on their networks at all. Maps must be verified. And the best means of verification is through consumers themselves, not by trusting the validity of data providers cough up through any data gathering and compiling process.

A nationwide broadband map, then, is only as effective as the level of public involvement in scrutinizing and correcting it. In other words, the map, which is an artifact of a necessarily imperfect and incomplete and continually changing data collection is not the territory in which the public solicits broadband deployment and improvements in performance. Rather the territory comprises those far-flung locales where various publics either are or are not served adequately to meet their needs.

This reality is what makes Brodsky's blithe dismissal of comprehensive planning processes aimed at engaging those local publics so striking. In condemning Connected Nation, an entity for which Brodsky reserves especial venom, he claims, "Connected Nation charges up to millions of dollars for mapping and, in some occasions, to organize local teams to assess demand." In the same piece, Brodsky marvels at how small a ratio of Connected Nation's budget is dedicated to mapping. (Full disclosure: I have had a working relationship ConnectKentucky and more recently Connected Nation since 2004, consulting on the demand stimulation efforts.)

In unleashing his fury on the skewed nature of Connected Nation's mapping project budgets, however, Brodsky betrays his ignorance of the intricacies of broadband deployment. As is the case with all infrastructures, broadband is a socio-technical system. This means that supply and demand necessarily co-evolve along with regulatory institutions, legal frameworks, and even family life. Drawing a map of where broadband is available is essential. But doing so does nothing to mobilize interest at localities where it has never been available. Connected Nation's approach is two-pronged: mapping supply and working with providers to extend their networks while simultaneously working extensively with leaders at a local level to increase demand and adoption. In many instances, those local efforts have led to local and even regional broadband deployments when no provider was willing to step in and extend supply.

All these efforts are influenced by mapping and accuracy. Indeed, part of the process is to solicit extensive feedback from the public on the maps that Connected Nation produces. But mapping is only a fraction of the overall effort necessary to develop, extend, and improve broadband. Connected Nation's process demonstrates that they understand the complexities of the challenge. Brodsky's off-the-cuff dismissal of this approach is evidence that he doesn't have a clue.

Treading the Limn: Human, Non-Human, Agency?

2009-06-29T12:01:00.002-04:00

The WaPo's Shankar Vendantam has the most interesting piece I've seen on the implications of the crash last week.

Money quote:

"The problem, said several experts who have studied such accidents, is that these investigations invariably focus our attention on discrete aspects of machine or human error, whereas the real problem often lies in the relationship between humans and their automated systems."

My Contribution to the Local Debate

2009-05-20T20:44:00.003-04:00

So my letter to the editor got published in the local weekly.

I argue that commuter rail is a largely irrelevant part of contemporary commuting patterns but that that sad fact doesn't have to remain the case in the future.

Notes on Hughes: Rescuing Prometheus

2009-05-12T22:56:00.005-04:00

Rescuing Prometheus Thomas P. Hughes Pantheon, New York (1998) So I've already written a bit on this text. But I picked it up again. And I was particularly interested in reviewing two things:

1) Given my topic, I was pretty interested in looking at the final case study in the book (which deals with four different instances of projects, arguing that the arc of the 20th Century is toward the "postmodern" paradigm. In the final case study, Hughes provides a history of ARPANET, the DoD's network of networks that eventually became the Internet.

What is telling, given that Hughes is stressing the postmodern shift toward flat, open, consensus-reaching (etc., it's a long list and it appears on the last page of the book). What's noteworthy, though, is that the story focuses nonetheless on the system builder perspective.

2) The wrap up of the book (the case studies in which are well worth attention) is brief. But it's the place to look for the relationship of Hughes' welcoming of open, participatory planning into contemporary projects (uh, well, maybe welcoming isn't the right word for it...).

So a couple of the big distinctions between the modern (i.e., pre-WWII) firm and the PoMo:

a) The firm. Pre-WWII were big projects associated with big, stable manufacturing firms. The latter day projects were conducted through joint ventures and projects. (p. 301)

b) Pre-WWII: "The maintenance of a system for mass-producing standardized products" (p. 301) But standardization no longer a top priority. Contemporary managers are open to change and heterogeneity.

c) Before managers tended to view judgment and "problem-solving techniques" were the provenance of experience, masters. Today, constant need to revision, refreshing, relearning the state of the art.

d) Typical pre-War firm a big, integrated, multiunit firm. Big management hierarchy. i.e., Fordism and Taylorism. Today: "The numerous contractors participating in projects like SAGE and Atlas are loosely coupled by information networks and by a coordinating and scheduling systems engineering organization" (p. 302)

e) The modern firm could not achieve its ends without first establishing a "managerial hierarchy". The hierarchy was itself "a source of power, continued growth, and "permanence" (p. 302). New model focuses on R&D and thus the hierarchy gives way to flexibility necessary to encourage innovation. "The result compromise, called "black-boxing," allows local research and development team to choose the technology that will fulfill system specifications" (p.303)

f) Past: value on "highly trained" specialists from disciplines suited to solving problems were viewed through this lens. Today interdisciplinarity reigns.

g) Old projects depended on "technical and economic factors" (p. 304): "such matters as the environment, political-interest group commitments, and public participatory design concerns lay beyond the horizons of 1950s systems engineers". Now projects "take into account the concerns of environmental and interest groups. Through public hearings, the project fosters participatory design. CA/T [viz, the Big Dig] is not an elegantly reductionist endeavor; it is messily complex embracing of contradictions" (p. 304)

Only after the organizers of CA/T made clear that would take into account public concerns about neighborhood integrity and environment was the project funded. CA/T has been socially constructed, not technologically and economically determined (p. 304)

h) ARPANET also suggests role of counterculture: preference for a flat management structure.

And now the list from the final page of the book:

Modern	Postmodern
production system	project
hierarchical/vertical	flat/layered/horizontal
specialization	interdisciplinarity
integration	coordination
rational order	messy complexity
standardization/homogeneity	heterogeneity
centralized control	distributed control
manufacturing firm	joint venture
experts	meritocracy
tightly coupled systems	networked systems
unchanging	continuous change
micromanagement	black-boxing
hierarchical decision-making	consensus-reaching
seamless web	network with nodes
tightly coupled	loosely coupled
programmed control	feedback control
bureaucratic structure	collegial community
Taylorism	systems engineering
mass production	batch production
maintenance	construction
incremental	discontinuous
closed	open

On the Utility of the Urban-Rural Distinction

2009-05-08T16:02:00.002-04:00

We note without being prompted that we are in or out of and urban setting. Leveling the distinction between city and country is not normally a controversial thing. That said, as the distinction plays itself out as a matter of policy, the point at which one gives way to the other is crucial. At the margin, what defines a place as one or the other? I would argue that among other sine qua nons of urbanity or rurality is connection to infrastructure. Elsewhere in this blog I have argued that retaining the distinction for the purposes of allocating federal stimulus dollars makes a certain sense. At the same time, channeling funding for broadband through the Rural Utilities Service both prejudices the definition of the broadband challenge and biases our approach to resolving it. Yes, the present approaches to providing access where it doesn't exist and improving service and adoption where it does exist suggest a new understanding and definition of urban and rural. Namely, the service areas for high-speed wired broadband service can be taken as the outer fringe of what is urban and what will be urban in the near future. Areas where wired services don't exist (i.e., in those areas where wireless broadband is the only solution on the horizon) can properly be understood as rural. Of course, there are shades of gray. Places where wired services exist along transportation corridors, but where service is spotty away from highways and pockets of population density are likely to already be considered sub- and exurban. So for those of us who are wasting time with labels, perhaps existing infrastructure can be our defining characteristic (since it likely correlates strongly with other attributes.

One To Watch: Google Antitrust Case

2009-04-28T19:47:00.002-04:00

Keep your eyes on this one:

Justice Dept. Opens Antitrust Inquiry Into Google Books Deal (By Miguel Helft, NYTimes)

The skinny:

The settlement agreement stems from a class action filed in 2005 by the Author’s Guild and the Association of American Publishers against Google. The suit claimed that Google’s practice of scanning copyrighted books from libraries for use in its Book Search service was a violation of copyrights.
The settlement, which was announced in October, gives Google the rights to display the books online and to profit from them by selling access to individual text and selling subscriptions to its entire digital collections to libraries and other institutions. Revenues would be shared between Google, authors and publishers.
But critics say that Google alone will have a license over millions of so-called “orphan books,” whose authors and right holders are unknown or cannot be found. Some experts believe the orphan works account for the bulk of the collections of some of the major university libraries, that have allowed Google to scan books.
Some librarians fear that with no competition, Google will be free to raise prices. Some scholars have also said that the system for pricing books could raise antitrust concerns.

Martin Interview

2009-04-24T13:39:00.005-04:00

An interesting interview with Kevin Martin, former FCC Chair.

On Flyvbjerg and Phronēsis

2009-04-16T15:31:00.002-04:00

Some notes on Bent Flyvbjerg's Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and What Can Make It Succeed Again (Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Flyvbjerg begins with the fundamental problem of the social sciences vs. the natural sciences. I.e., is a true science of society possible given the variability and slipperiness of the human condition? Of course, this fundamental question goes way, way back. Flyvbjerg himself reminds us that this basic question plagues the social sciences from their origin. For example, Weber recognized the distinction between instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität) and value rationality (Wertrationalität), a distinction that Foucault and Habermas in different ways recognized as central to their own programs.

Consider, for example, the high-modernist apotheosis of urban renewal projects. The engineering model at the core of this effort recognized a host of pathologies endemic to cities (crime, poverty, disease, etc). Since these problems seemed to reside at a large scale, the solution during the 50s and 60s was large-scale demolition of large swaths of inner cities without regard to the preferences of individual dwellers of those places. In other words, instrumental rationality viewed urban decay as a problem and presented a solution (viz., destruction and reconstruction) as the proper solution. But this perspective failed to view the particular circumstances of the particular denizens whose homes and lives were turned upside down by the process. Planners point to this period as a moment of reckoning, an occasion to reflect on if not reject in whole cloth their approach. Rather than proffering solutions from the outside, planners shifted to accommodate the perspectives of those whose lives might be touched by such projects (i.e., to accommodate value rationality).

But, as Flyvbjerg describes, this recognition of the limits of human knowledge is nothing new. Indeed, Aristotle understood that scientific knowledge (episteme) is bracketed by specific contexts; there are certain domains where this sort of understanding (and action based on it) do not obtain.

"Episteme thus concerns universals and the production of knowledge" (p. 56)

"Whereas episteme resembles our modern scientific project, techne and phronesis denote two contrasting roles of intellectual work." (p. 57)

"Episteme Scientific knowledge. Universal, invariable, context-independent. Based on general analytical rationality. The original concept is know today from the terms "epistemology" and "epistemic"

Techne Craft/art. Pragmatic, variable, context-dependent. Oriented toward production. Based on practical instrumental rationality governed by a conscious goal. The original concept appears today in terms such as "technique," "technical," and "technology."

Phronesis Ethics. Deliberation about values with reference to praxis. Pragmatics, variable, context-dependent. Oriented toward action. Based on practical value-rationality. The original concept has no analogous contemporary term." (p. 57)

Flyvbjerg explains episteme as "know why" and techne as "know how," but doesn't proffer a similar schtick for phronesis. I would suggest that it is "know when". It's also important to note that phronesis is embodied (i.e., it doesn't exist without the phronimos, or the person of practical knowledge). Phronesis is thus best thought of as the judgment about what can be done given specific circumstances rather than what is physically possible. Perhaps it is best understood as the skill of knowing what is feasible rather than possible. As an example, when is the best time to call for a vote on a bill?

Phronesis "focuses on what is variable, on that which cannot be encapsulated by universal rules, on specific cases….requires an interaction between the general and the concrete; it requires consideration, judgment, and choice." (p. 57).

Flyvbjerg's basic argument, similar to that made by other previous advocates of phronesis, is that the social sciences encounter questions such as "What should be done?" and "What is desirable?" and perhaps "Who gains and who loses?". There is no universal, scientific answer to such questions, because they are rooted in particularity both temporally and spatially.

Most importantly, Flyvbjerg offers a set of "Methodological guidelines for a reformed social science" in Chapter 9:

Focusing on values (p. 130-1): three questions animate the effort at steering toward value- rather than instrumental-rationality. (Where are we going? Is it desirable? What should be done?).
Placing power at the core of analysis (p. 131-2): Not just "who governs?" but "what "governmental rationalities" are at work by those who govern? Power is productive and positive (even though it can be restrictive and negative).
Getting close to reality (p. 132-3): "Phronetic researchers seek to transcend this problem of relevance by anchoring their research in the context studied and thereby ensuring a hermeneutic "fusion of horizons". This means being close to the ground (the group or phenomenon) at all stages of research.
Emphasizing little things (p. 133-134): focus on minutiae, work phenomenologically. "thick description".
Looking at practice before discourse (p. 134-5): focuses on practical activity and practical knowledge in everyday situations.
Studying cases and contexts (p. 135-6): cases exist in context. And the essence of those particularities is only possible in attending to those cases.
Asking "How?" Doing narrative (p. 136-7): quotes MacIntyre, "I can only answer the question, "What am I to do?" if I can answer the prior question "Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?"
Joining agency and structure (p. 137-8):
Dialoguing with a polyphony of voices (p. 139-140):

And Now For a Sample of What is To Come...

2009-04-15T13:55:00.004-04:00

So I've written before about the rather clunky (if not anachronistic) set of agencies that will be driving the Broadband Stimulus $$. My claim in the past is that the relative slowness off the blocks of this initiative is attributable at least in part to the unwieldy set of agency interactions that the program calls for. Take, as a mere example, the ambiguity at the core of the Broadband Stimulus: is this an effort to address a rural problem or an "underserved" problem (since they're not one and the same, especially as our definition of what meets a basic level of service evolves).

Now we see that this fundamental problem of definition exists within a single agency. A report released on Monday (4/13/2009) by the Department of Agriculture's inspector general finds that the Rural Utility Service has been making too many loans in non-rural areas (tsk! tsk!):

In 2007, Congress requested that we determine if RUS had taken sufficient corrective actions in response to the issues disclosed in our report. In particular, members of the Appropriations Committee expressed concerns that RUS, “instead of focusing on rural areas that have no broadband service,” continues, “to grant loans to areas where broadband service is already being offered by private providers. Such practices penalize private providers that have already built broadband systems in the area. Such practices also do nothing to further the goal of bringing broadband to unserved areas.”

Take note of the distinction between rural/urban and served/unserved. And ask yourself whether a 200 k.b.s. standard is sufficient to claim that service is being provided. And while you’re at it, ask yourself if having a single location in a given zip code operate at this anemic standard is sufficient to claim that service is being provided. In both cases, the FCC claims it is. Hopefully, in the coming months (or years), we’ll have better data on present and planned deployments and have federal policy pushing a higher standard. But not yet.

Back to the report, since Congress raised this concern, the inspector general’s office issued a report to RUS, outlining several steps the agency should take. Alas,the IG report

found that RUS has not fully implemented corrective action in response to 8 of the 14 recommendations from our September 2005 audit report.

And the real kicker:

We remain concerned with RUS’ current direction of the Broadband program, particularly as they receive greater funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2008 (Recovery Act), including its provisions for transparency and accountability.

In my estimation, the essence of the broadband challenge isn't in some arcane internecine pissing match over how we're applying the definition of urban and rural. The problem is one of standards of service (where service exists) and providing service where it doesn't.

Are the Bigs Taking the Cash?

2009-04-03T14:52:00.005-04:00

So Ryan Singel has an interesting perspective on recent speculation as to whether or not AT&T and Verizon's will apply for broadband stimulus cash.

What's really at stake here are definitions: what kind of service will the government define as 'broadband,' what counts as an 'open' network, and what areas are 'underserved' or 'unserved.'

I couldn't agree more.

Yes, defining and operationalizing these terms is precisely what is at stake in coming to the table (or not) for the Bigs. And as I've argued, they are precisely the matters that are unresolved in the present NTIA/RUS/FCC plan for investing the $7.2 billion of stimulus cash. What will happen? I'm still waiting to see.

The Grid

2009-03-25T15:39:00.003-04:00

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)

2009-03-25T13:18:00.002-04:00

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

2009-03-16T14:17:00.006-04:00

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

2009-03-13T11:10:00.006-04:00

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

2009-03-12T18:59:00.015-04:00

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?

2009-03-11T14:04:00.005-04:00

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

2009-03-10T11:23:00.006-04:00

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

2009-03-10T11:10:00.005-04:00

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

2009-03-10T10:56:00.004-04:00

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

2009-03-10T10:36:00.006-04:00

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

2009-03-10T10:00:00.004-04:00

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).

Infra-Economy: Braudel's Structures of Everyday Life

2008-04-24T14:55:00.005-04:00

So back in the Winter, I re-read Fernand Braudel. I had encountered the early portions of The Structures of Everyday Life before. But this time, I believe I found what I was looking for.

For some vague reason, I've been pondering quite a lot the origins of capitalism. The basic logic is this: I'm thinking these days about infrastructure (and how things become infrastructural). From the STS crowd, I've come to appreciate that infrastructure is characterized as much by humans, norms, and institutions as it is by specific technological artifacts. So, as I considered the large infrastructure projects that characterize (indeed, usher in) the modern era, it's hard not to wonder where the cart and where the horse should go.

So I began thinking about capitalism generally as a framing device, an infra-infrastructure that foregrounds the construction of canals, road systems, railroads, etc. And that led me to think about Braudel. Well, first I was thinking about the Hanseatic League (i.e., the emergence of free cities that had for themselves a bevy of infrastructure problems and set about addressing them). But my curiosity about the League, as a protocapitalist set of institutional arrangements, is really curiosity about the origins of capitalism. Or perhaps I'm still interested in the League, but can't find a good overview or history in English (let me know if you have any recommendations).

Okay, so what do I find in Braudel? His explanation of his enterprise: In the emergence of modern economies, we really witness the rise of several economies. The one we study in textbooks, the economics of "production and exchange", comprises those economic activities that are readily observable. And hence, economics confines itself "within this privileged arena".

But Braudel is interested in "another, shadowy zone, often hard to see for lack of adequate historical documents, lying underneath the market economy: this is the elementary basic activity which went on everywhere....This rich zone, like a layer covering the earth, I have called for want of a better expression, material life or material civilization."

The things we take for granted in the study of economics that focus on the former, readily formalizable topics are in fact wholly reliant on the latter, inchoate realm of everyday life. Braudel refers to it, in fact, as the "infra-economy," providing already a set of "active social hierarchies" upon which the market economy could base itself.

Relating this basic position for a moment to the process of infrastructuration, consider for a moment the famous example of marketing automobiles in the hinterlands described by Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch ("Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States," Technology and Culture, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Oct., 1996), pp. 763-795). The appropriation of cars as mobile power units rather than as transportation devices is an example par excellence of the law of unintended consequences. Or really, unintended repurposing. But what Braudel's approach bids us to consider is that the world of latent demand is framed by everyday life. In other words, system-builders construct based on their perceptions of this vie quotidienne.

New Time; New Channel

2008-04-02T14:44:00.003-04:00

It's been a while. Time to re-engage the blog of a season of hibernation. Here's a short list of topics I aim to tackle in the coming weeks: a) theory: how do both the literature on planning and the infrastructure literature differ and converge in my project on broadband? b) methods; I've been investing immense amount of time learning how to evaluate the spatial data at the heart of my empirical claims c) policy: there are quite a few big decisions in the pipeline at a federal and state level that relate to my academic work.

A Tangent: On Telecoms and FISA

2007-10-25T11:08:00.001-04:00

I've written elsewhere that the single most cited saw in the STS literature is the law of path dependency (with its attendant, self-explanatory paradigmatic example, the QWERTY keyboard.

Because choosing paths requires certain trade-offs, with respect to digital infrastructure and its various applications, it is far too early to accept limitation by fiat. Policies, laws and regulations that begin with "thou shalt not ______" should be treated with some suspicion. Those that enable the proliferation of paths that we can later become overdependent upon are worthy of at least occasional consideration; those that foreclose possibilities (thus limiting those very paths) should be viewed skeptically.

An example: although there are reasons why it is not always preferable to have governments involved in planning, building, and running broadband infrastructure, legislation such as that existing in presently 14 states that precludes government involvement in those activities. True, the "patchwork" of models, providers and networks is creating complexities, but they are not preventing innovation, detracting investment, or limiting the proliferation of platforms, applications and technologies.

So what does this have to do with FISA? Well, I have a position on granting immunity retroactively to telecommunications companies that may have too readily divulged their customers' private information.

But I'll stick the accusation aside (for now), and make the observation that the fallout from FISA-telecom imbroglio points to yet another benefit of the "patchwork" approach. In the era of telecom consolidation, when a single provider releases information to the government, the privacy of millions of customers is potentially compromised. If customers are distributed among thousands of providers, then if a single provider acquiesces to government's pressure for revealing proprietary data, the number of affected parties is potentially drastically reduced.

So when it comes to structural firewalls against government overreaching, a large number of small providers may be more effective than a small number of big ones.

Into the Breach

2007-09-26T16:01:00.000-04:00

Okay, so how many times can you say infrastructure on a written page? Here's the latest abstract of the diss abastract:

This dissertation project uses the particular contemporary challenge of cyberinfrastructure as an occasion to explore the potential of the community planning process in infrastructure provision generally. In short, my research aims to assess whether and the extent to which local planning efforts have a measurable effect in terms of cyberinfrastructure deployment. Given that access to cyberinfrastructure is taken to be an essential to economic viability, more and more communities are engaged in both demand- and supply-side efforts at increasing their use of and infrastructure for high-speed Internet access. Since infrastructure deployment is a moving target, explaining the diffusion of infrastructure to underserved areas is both a methodological and policy challenge. In the wake of lagging private sector investment and the increasing affordability of wireless technologies, the public sector has shown an increasing willingness to engage in infrastructure provision, renewing debates of long standing. Given the attendant controversy regarding public sector involvement in telecommunications infrastructure provision, many communities have stressed the need to encourage demand, hoping that such stimulation will encourage private investment in infrastructure. This dissertation assesses a set of community planning processes in the state of Kentucky that have the potential to bridge the (often ideological) gap between private and public investments. Making use of extensive data on broadband deployment gathered as part of the Kentucky initiative, this dissertation project presents evidence that the public planning process may serve to identify pockets of demand for services previously invisible to private sector providers. This project makes two contributions to scholarly discourse, one theoretical and one methodological. As will be detailed in the literature review below, this dissertation is situated between two streams of discourse that need bridging—theories of infrastructure (and other socio-technical systems) and theories of local and public involvement in the planning process. My contention is that the role suggested for the planning process mediates in important ways between the prerogatives of system-builders and the needs of communities, demonstrating a necessary space of articulation that treads the boundary between supply and demand. Moreover, methodologically, this dissertation attempts to harness the techniques of multi-level modeling and geostatistics to determine whether or not a “planning effect” explains infrastructure deployment.

Hughes and Second Creation

2007-09-25T15:09:00.002-04:00

So this is one piece I need to hang on to from the original blog:

So I've been reading Thomas P. Hughes. Some stuff I've been revisiting (such as Networks of Power and “The Evolution of Large Technological Systems” from The Social Construction of Technological Systems. It seems the standard reading of Hughes is that he's a social constructivist, which means, you know, like that people make machines, right?

Well, yeah. And, in turn, machines make people, too.

I have to admit that I was rather delighted by Rescuing Prometheus because it showed the subtlety of Hughes' thinking. Or maybe I'm just humoring myself because I believe that Hughes is saying something that validates my own argument.

Namely, front and center, I am trying to show that public involvement in broadband projects (among other instances of public engagement) is having several noteworthy consequences. At the very least, it is a shift away from infrastructure construction by engineers and managers, a shift that Hughes (rather clunkily) describes as a postmodern paradigm of project development.

More crucially, Hughes tells us that the integral part of that shift toward the postmodern is the role of the public:

"A key characteristic of the new approach is public participation. This implies the need for a public informed about the creative process of system building and the ways in which its values can be embedded in the second creation. Prometheus, the creator, once restrained by defense projects sharply focused upon technological and economic problems, is now fee to embrace the messy environmental, political, and social complexity of the postindustrial world." (Rescuing Prometheus, p. 14).

That messy environment is precisely what I'm interested in. Hughes account of what's new and important about contemporary public projects.

Hughes describes the shift toward messiness as a rejection of Fordism and Taylorism(which is really a questioning of the received wisdom of the Enlightenment model):

"During the half-century following World War II, America continued to produce a cornucopia of material goods through modern management and engineering. Alongside this capitalistic, free-enterprise achievement, the country's capacity to create the large-scale technological systems that structure our living spaces has grown as well. Post-World War II government-funded projects have introduced a creative management and engineering style substantially different from one called modern that flourished during the period between the two world wars.

"The modern, or pre-World War II, managerial and engineering approach associates management with large manufacturing firms rather than with joint ventures and projects such as SAGE, Atlas, Central Artery/Tunnel, and ARPANET. Unlike post-World War II managers and engineers invovled with projects that introduced new technolgogical systems, such as computer networks and urban highways, the prewar managers and engineers became employees of well-established firms whose products changed only incrementally." (p. 300)

Self and Net/Lifeworld and System

2007-09-24T20:24:00.001-04:00

Well, after that last entry, I gazed upon a stack of papers I've been meaning to work through. One popped out, "Communicative Action and the Network Society" (JPER, 2004) by Verma and Shin. Not a bad kernel of insight, so far as it goes. But, as is often the case with anyone dealing with Castells and Habermas, it resides at a fairly high level of abstraction. That's gripe number one. Gripe number two is that it is a crime of omission that most planners who cite Habermas still get all het up about his (laudable) work from the 70s. I've yet to read a good account in planning theory of Facticitaet und Geltung. Why on earth not? I'll get to gripe number one further in a minute and leave gripe number two behind (sticking in my craw...). Verma and Shin work through a brief description of Castells' notion of the "network society" and draw comparisons between it and Habermas' notion of lifeworld and system. Their basic interpretation: there is a lot of common theoretical ground between Castells and Habermas. Castells raises a concern that the growing hiatus between individuals and the Net creates a form of alienation that form and be formed by the creeping irrelevance of the nation state. This concern parallels, the authors argue, Habermas' basic model of colonization of the lifeworld by systems resulting in withdrawal of support and legitimacy. While Castells is more focused on diagnosis than cure, if redemption is to be found it is, surprise, surprise, in civil society (which for Habermas, of course, is the space in which communicative action tends to function and can "work its way up" into formal political and other discourse). For both, the question centers on reproduction of the lifeworld. How in either late capitalism or in the network society do "grammars of everyday life" take root? Or are they thoroughly colonized? For Castells, it seems, the big threat of the Net is that the immediacy of presence is lost, meaning that identities and social movements cannot coalesce. Castells sees very little potential for social movements online because, as the authors describe, they do not have a formal ("real") character. So, what does this have to do with infrastructure? Well, perhaps not much. I was arguing that communicative action and the tensions resident between lifeworld and system as described by Habermas may be a useful analytical approach for understanding the breach between system builders and adoption. This breach is the fundamental problem of infrastructure as I see it (and methodologically between LTS theory and SCOT). So Verma and Shin and barking up a similar tree. And they are working through Castells in order to do it. But they're not interested in "building" in the way infrastructure studies is. Rather, they remain at the level of meaning construction in an online world. So their work will warrant a citation, but isn't adding much to my thinking (today).

Back in the Saddle

2007-09-21T14:45:00.000-04:00

Ooops. I've let the blog slide. And it's such a good way to get moving... Well, this entry is back in the saddle in more ways than one. While I've been mulling, pulling out hair (what's left), and writing, I've been returning, as a dawg to its vomit, via the problematic of "the breach", as we've uncovered it, to Habermas. (sigh) Namely, as I have been conceiving it (why do I say "I"? my conception is heavily indebted to theories of large technical systems generally, particularly those of a social-constructivist bent (if that's not all of them), as well as to latter day critics, such as actor-network theorists), infrastructure is properly best seen as process. Upon reading Paul Edwards' musings on "infrastructuration" (fascinating and original approach; terrible word...), I've been re-coding my thinking a bit by way of Habermas. As Paul describes it, "Infrastructure and Modernity" (.pdf), theories of infrastructure are often (one surmises, pathologically) bifurcated methodologically by scale. On one hand, we have Hughes' sweeping grand history of systems builders. On the other, we have, say, the social meaning of the telephone. In other words, infrastructures appear to be built by folks who rig gigantic stretches of hardware. On the other, infrastructure is best seen as a question of adoption by a lay public, whose randomness and manifold nature are the wellspring of the various flukes and compromises (ah, the QWERTY keyboard!) that define and shape. The obvious problem, of course, is that both of these perspectives are crucial to understanding how the Second Creation gets built and integrated into everyday life. Paul argues that what is necessary is a multi-scalar approach, one that links these rather different domains (as well as their rather different lifespans). For Paul, infrastructuration is essentially a dance among these scales and levels. The dance is hardly choreographed, formalized or readily apparent. Indeed, it is bloody hard to specify and study. My general agreement with Paul's perspective has caused me of late to re-ruminate on Habermas, particularly his notions of system and lifeworld. Infrastructure, then, gets built as system-builders conceive and superimpose their creations (whether they be water systems, railroads, telephones, or broadband) on a world in which the everydayness of existing systems is already taken for granted. As systems settle into the frame of expectations of folks, they become, a component of shared meaning, which is precisely how Habermas defines the lifeworld. In my own project, I'm interested in assessing how community-level engagement (dare we call it communicative action? Nah...) leads to changes in (in my cases increases in) how hardware gets deployed. I'm looking, in other words, at the breach between system and lifeworld and asking how communicative action pushes system-builders to appreciate and instantiate the prerogatives of the latter.

Abstract Moving

2007-08-17T21:12:00.000-04:00

So I'm migrating to blogger. Much as I love it, I won't be at the present location forever after all.... Had a great time at the JPER workshop for new scholars in Berkeley. Met a great group of folks and the normal white trash (Anna, I never said it, sorry). Anyway the outcome of the event is my new abstract (such as it is):

Infrastructure studies focuses on the troublesome interface between “system builders” (or suppliers) and the specific contexts of adoption (or demand). In the case of cyberinfrastructure (which includes among other elements telecommunications networks that provide high-speed Internet access) the digital divide can be seen as existing precisely at this interface. The potential uses of cyberinfrastructure are an abstraction from everyday life for denizens of underserved areas; meanwhile market providers are blind to this very conundrum. This paper argues that the community planning process can play a vital role by identifying particular potential uses of cyberinfrastructure, motivating and framing the actions of suppliers and community members alike. Making use of extensive broadband deployment data gathered as part of a statewide planning initiative in Kentucky, this paper presents evidence that the community planning process focusing on articulating demand can in fact lead to increases in supply.