A Step in the Right Direction: USASpending Site

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.