Civic Promise of the National Information Infrastructure
A Vision of Change:
Civic Promise of the National Information Infrastructure
A Public Interest Agenda
Introduction
A National Information Infrastructure, designed for Democracy, will help
our country work smarter with a better informed citizenry more fully
engaged in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Americans will
enjoy more efficient, less costly government; produce high quality jobs
and educated citizens to fill them. We will pave a road away from poverty
and promote life-long learning. Such a promise fulfilled will improve the
public health, the cultural life of our communities and revitalize our
civic institutions. This is the civic promise of information
infrastructure -- not simply "video dial-tone," 500 channels of movies,
home shopping, or interactive video games.
President Clinton has called civic networking a major application area
that the Federal government should promote and develop -- on the same
level as health care and agile manufacturing1. The Administration,
Congress and State legislatures now have a solemn obligation to fully
understand the full civic promise of the NII, and to swiftly reframe the
current debate driven by telecommunications carriers:
* The value of activities in the United States that could be
affected by networked, imaged information to the home in areas such as
public health, formal and non-formal education, civic participation,
emergency services, sustainable development, small business opportunity,
individual privacy, poverty, literacy, numeracy, job training and access
to employment markets, could be in the range of hundreds of billions of
dollars annually.
Congress in particular must understand and respond to the economic and
social costs to our society, if ubiquitous access to this national
multimedia nervous system is impeded by limited visions of telephone and
cable companies motivated to maintain entrenched positions in a rapidly
evolving marketplace.
If organized swiftly, grassroots telecommunications initiatives will help
shape public interest communication policy at the State level,
establishing precedents for Federal policy during a narrow window of
opportunity that will likely close by 1996. The window is open now because
the communications industry is restructuring, a broad bipartisan consensus
to reform national communications policy is emerging and the
Administration is favorable to the input of public interest groups in this
arena. The window will likely close by 1996 because the communications
industry "shake-out" will have passed, resolutions and legislative agendas
to reshape antiquated communication policies will have been established
and there is no guarantee the present Administration will be re-elected.
The time to act is now.
What is Civic Networking?
Grassroots telecommunications initiatives providing civic and community
services are influencing new State policies that can in turn shape Federal
communication policy for the 21st Century. With accelerating social
mobility, political representatives serving millions rather than
thousands, long commutes to jobs not connected to local communities and
increased cultural diversity, traditional community forums for public
deliberation have eroded. Civic networking can revitalize them.
Civic networking describes:
* The transformational power of information infrastructure to create
new public works and public spaces for the 21st century.
* The relationship between the "load-bearing" power of information
infrastructure to support and even revitalize civic institutions and local
economies in sustainable ways that replace layers of bureaucratic
hierarchy and deplete fewer natural resources.
* The public's power to use information infrastructure to recapture
a nearly lost art of democratic decision-making and community building --
the essential discourse and debate around important issues that informs
before the vote, where the public shares views, and learns tolerance.
* A new interdisciplinary ethic among information architects,
community activists, organizers and planners, public policy analysts,
facilitators and engineers who, with the public, can reforge the
democratic partnership between citizens and the government they own.
The National Information Infrastructure Can Revitalize the American
Economy and Civic Culture.
A National Information Infrastructure can be an aqueduct irrigating arid
new land from which cultivation, enterprise and community life blossom and
flourish by:
* Revitalizing local economies. We can enable small businesses --
the engines of job growth -- to collaborate together through enterprise
networks, to share resources, skills and services to better compete in the
global economy -- and serve their local communities. We can create new
opportunities for new information services, where anyone can "hang a
shingle on the net" and reach a global marketplace from anywhere.
The Colorado Advanced Technology Institute conducts a five year community
and economic development planning program with twenty five towns
throughout the state. The planning projects focus on the use of
telecommunications and information technologies. The program is partly
funded through Department of Commerce Economic Development Agency grants
and targets five cities a year, per your, for five years. Towns having
completed the first year of planning projects are already developing new
ideas for establishing teleradiology links to remote hospitals,
implementing communitywide information systems, integrating Internet
services over local cable TV plant and tourism information and referral
services.
Telluride, Colorado is a small rural community in the Rockies. The
Telluride Infozone is a pilot project for broad spectrum community
development and education in rural areas using public Internet access,
two-way interactive cable services and community radio for K-12 and
lifelong learning, libraries, health care, government and civic services,
arts and culture and economic business development. While the resort town
of Telluride enjoys a tourist economy, other communities in the county's
10,000 residents are in poverty, and the Infozone seeks to create economic
opportunity in the broader region.
Linton, North Dakota is an isolated farming community of 1,500. The local
economy has been stimulated through 200 data processing jobs for a large
travel agency in Philadelphia. Such employment opportunity through
telecommunications is beginning to reach across the nation's remote
landscapes, providing jobs, diversifying farm economies and easing the
effects distance has on economic isolation. While Telluride may attract a
high-tech breed of writers, stock-brokers and other well-paid
telecommuting "lone eagles", the surrounding communities may begin to
benefit initially through basic job opportunities that could lead to a
more general revitalization, an incrementally better educated population
and increasingly better employment over time.
Lane County Oregon is undergoing a major transition in its traditional
economic base, the timber industry. A civic networking initiative, Lane
OnLine seeks to provide public telecommunication and information services
to assist workers and families in transition, new business development,
community development and ecosystem restoration.
* Improving the delivery of government services, and reducing costs
of government. Networked public kiosks have shown promise in providing
services 24-hours a day throughout our communities. Creative use of
information technology can leverage existing government workers to provide
better service to more citizens. We can weave together public agencies and
private (nongovernmental, both non-profit and commercial) organizations to
create new civic networking markets for delivering government services
using information technologies.
Hawaii Information Network Corporation (Hawaii INC), is a private
corporation created by the State of Hawaii to encourage and promote the
development of an information industry in Hawaii, and operates Hawaii FYI,
the State's electronic services gateway. Hawaii FYI is a public access
gateway to the State's electronic services and video conferencing
facilities on each of the islands. Hawaii FYI provides a legislative
information service called ACCESS that allows any citizen in the State to
obtain current legislative information, including the full text of bills
and provides for participation in electronic forums with legislators and
others. Hawaii INC also operates Hawaii Access, a touch screen kiosk
system; ASK-2000, an operator assisted referral system, and various agency
bulletin board systems.
* Revitalizing civic institutions and public debate. Libraries will
blossom into community information centers, serving as gateways of
opportunity to the world at large. Vast databases of visual, geographic,
and statistical data will be transformed into civic intelligence
assessments on regional planning issues delivered through terminals in
libraries, schools, city offices, museums, parks, shopping malls and other
public places. Intelligent and informed debate concerning school, health
care and welfare reform will flow from council hearings woven together
with public access cable-cast panel discussions, community computer
services providing access to government publications and public
discussion, call-in radio talk shows, and op-eds in local newspapers.
The public Internet will extend the public library -- not replace it.
Public libraries are an indispensable part of our national information
infrastructure. The public library is a global institution with a local
orientation, linking classes, races and generations. Libraries shocked the
elite in the 19th century by opening their doors on Sundays to allow
six-daya-week laborers to use their holdings. Throughout the Great
Depression not one public library closed. Our nation is served by more
than 15,000 public libraries. Six of every ten Americans visit their
library every year, and four out of ten use one every month -- to find
books periodicals, government databases, government documents, recordings,
videos, to search databases and to participate in community events.
Knowledge must be acquired in many ways: through books, through live
performances and debates, and through face-to-face interaction with
neighbors and co-workers. Today, as the national information
infrastructure evolves, library budgets are being slashed, hours cut, and
staff laid off. Electronic information alone will not serve all our needs2.
In Cambridge, the Center for Civic Networking organizes the Civic Forums,
an on-going city-wide citizen dialogue to develop innovative solutions for
a vibrant and healthy 21st century in partnership with community and
business groups, public libraries and individual citizens. Diverse media,
such as cable television, radio, the press, and electronic bulletin boards
will be used to sustain broad and ongoing Civic Forum discussions
organized around a "Topic of the Month".
The government can easily encourage use of networking technologies and
services for community development and broadening the role of the library.
For example, community block grants require public planning hearings. The
government could require that such public hearings have components for
electronic dissemination through public libraries to enhance the planning
process. In this context, information infrastructure could be employed
within the public library institution by extending the discussions of
public meetings.
* Reducing poverty and changing welfare as we know it. Access to
culturally appropriate, networked educational, job training, childhood
nutrition, and personal health programs in the home, community centers in
public housing projects, or libraries could generally increase the
numeracy, literacy, and health of the poor, promoting a higher-skilled
workforce. Using decision support systems in the benefits application
process will create higher quality relationships between clients and
social workers less burdened by paperwork and rules. Using debit cards to
replace Food Stamp coupons, and networking the Social Security
administration could reduce entitlement costs while improving service and
increasing benefits.
In Ohio, the Youngstown Freenet, a public computer network which provides
free access to Internet mail, a social services directory is available.
Low income persons can go into a public library and sit a terminal, using
only the arrow and enter keys, requiring minimal literacy. It is possible
to navigate through a directory, alphabetically organized, of many social
service agencies, churches, and health and human services -- and make
descisions based on what is learned at the terminal. This kind of social
service "gateway" helps poor people gather intelligence to make better
informed choices. In Santa Monica, there is the important case of homeless
people using a public access network called "PEN" to organize with citizen
groups to raise funds from the City to provide showers and locker space to
assist in job searching during the day. Similar activities have also taken
place over the Community Memory Project in Berkeley, where coin-operated
public terminals were placed in neighborhood Laundromats.
The Tulare Touch Project in Tulare County (CA) established 31 video
touch-screen kiosks to help clients apply for welfare benefits, a normally
tedious, error-prone process with detailed forms. Twenty percent of those
using Aid For Dependent Children (AFDC) use the touch screen system. Most
seem to like it, partly because the social workers were overloaded with
clerical work and the system can speak in many languages such as
Vietnamese. Grant aid was received in 6 days of the initial application,
instead of 45 days, error rates were dramatically reduced and staff
numbers declined. It is important however, to be able to discuss welfare
as well as getting welfare checks. In a day of across-the-board cutbacks
in welfare all over the United States, a system such as Tulare Touch could
be viewed as a powerful cost containment opportunity. However, combining a
benefits service system such as Tulare Touch with a Santa Monica PEN or
Community Memory Project's ability to open discussion among the homeless
and needy and their broader community might actually help create new jobs
and service innovations -- much more than merely cutting welfare
administration costs.
The Sommerville, Massachusetts, Community Computing Center (SCCC),
computers in general are powerful tools for helping many disadvantaged
people. Adult literacy students gain confidence and facility in reading
and writing English by learning word processing. Unemployed workers
prepare resumes and cover letters and learn and improve keyboarding,
business applications and systems skills for re-entering the job market.
After-school and day care children learn how useful and fun computer
applications can be. The SCCC is part of a national network of community
computing centers organized by Playing to Win in New York City. The progam
is electronically linked through the Internet so staff from different
centers can exchange information with each other and further develop
skills and resources.
* Saving billions of health care dollars through prevention and
early detection of disease and by steramlining health care administration.
Rural and inner city health clinics will have access to diagnostic
facilities of major medical centers. Electronic exchange of medical
records and research among doctorsU offices, hospitals, medical schools,
libraries, and insurance companies will reduce administrative costs of
care. Networked, imaged information to and from the home will make remote
diagnosis possible, provide better individual health care decision-making,
reducing professional time for advice and counsel and enhancing patient
choice.
Savings in public health costs through the use of telecommunications could
be huge; estimates range between 36 to 100 billion dollars a year.
Self-care in the home can be enhanced through access to interactive,
imaged information. Such information can aid in self-examination, finding
out when to seek professional help, learning the early warning signs of
conditions, and self-administering home care. Avoided costs in direct and
primary care would be substantial. For example, hundreds of thousands die
of heart attacks every year -- many die without knowledge of the early
signs of the disease which could be easily acquired in the privacy and
convenience of home access to the NII. Billions of dollars in unnecessary
operations are wasted annually because patients did not have convenient
access to information to make more informed choices. Such information
could be passed through the public Internet connected to consumer
electronics devices at home, similar to personal computers and television
sets within several years.
* Bringing all of our childrenUs education into the 21st century
regardless of income, location or background. Classrooms will be linked
with each other and with world-wide resources. Thousands of students in
public schools have already embarked on electronic field trips with other
students around the world learning global citizenship. Antiquated drill
and practice that prepared workers for assembly line jobs will be replaced
by powerful learning experiences teaching experimentation, analysis and
collaboration needed for high-touch, high-technology careers.
The American educational system was designed to prepare workers for
smokestack industries and bureaucratic hierarchies, not symbolic analysts,
generalists and entrepreneurs for the information economy -- and it still
does. 17% of all seventeen year olds are functionally illiterate, yet
another 20% are being well prepared to become marketing strategists, film
producers, writers, software engineers, sound engineers, research
scientists -- symbolic analysts. 20% of our children have attentive
teachers, small classes, get good health care when they need it, attend
good suburban public or elite private schools and are tracked through
advanced courses in the company of their fortunate peers (Reich, 1990).
They have access to computers, good science laboratories, video systems in
class, and increasingly -- the public Internet.
Public interest communication policy should be designed to embody not only
educational reform, but the processes necessary for achieving them. The
national information infrastructure is being deployed at the same time
school reform is taking place. Networked educational processes such as
distance learning, will develop more effective ways of organizing group
projects, support and incentives for scientist-teacher collaborations,
organizational arrangements for innovations such as on-line mentoring,
teleapprenticeships, peer collaborations, virtual classrooms, and student
participation in scientific research projects3. The public Internet will
help in the reeducation of vast segments of the American workforce by
making access to real educational opportunity far more convenient than it
is today.
For example, the National Capital Area Public Access Network (CapAccess)
in Washington, D.C. works with public school librarians across a three
state area. CapAccess provides free accounts, which include Internet mail,
to students. School librarians use recently published reference books that
catalog Internet mailing lists to help students identify interesting
topics to subscribe to. Free, public access to Internet mailing lists is a
valuable opportunity for children to broaden their networks of personal
acquaintances to include those far outside their schools and neighborhoods
to new persons who could broaden their educational and career horizons.
Free public access to Internet mail provides a means for a person to
easily broaden and maintain a network of personal acquaintances beyond the
parochial boundaries of school, community and close friends. This has
important implications for creating opportunities for low-income and
inner-city students.
* Reducing social costs of defense cutbacks, layoffs, and plant
closings. Access to employment information promotes a free labor market.
Effective multimedia training and non-formal learning programs will create
opportunities for changing jobs. Automated job banks will help match
skills of displaced workers with new positions. Access to network services
such as electronic mail will help broaden and maintain personal
acquaintance networks which can often lead to new opportunities and
careers.
Exchange of employment information promotes a free labor market. Such
public access could improve the economy. The Administration has proposed a
Labor/Worker Profiling program "to assist the States in developing
automated systems to identify laid-off workers who may have had
difficulties in finding new jobs, and to assist them in finding
employment". The public Internet could integrate such state-based
automated systems with job banks offered through civic networks under
development in many cities around the country. For example, the Buffalo
Free-Net, in conjunction with the job training services of the Town of
Tonawanda has begun to post job listings culled from Department of Labor
databanks. In the near future, such public access systems could combine
local job listings with networked employment data from around the country.
Internet mail is an efficient means of establishing and maintaining
personal acquaintance networks. Indeed, "distributed lists in email
systems greatly reduces the costs to the individual of discovering others
with common interests4." Maintaining a broad acquaintance network can play
a crucial role for an individual when he or she is forced to change jobs.
Such a situation often occurs when a person's job connections are likely
to be useless, but ties to individuals in other settings beyond the work
community might be very valuable. Acquaintances can be passively
maintained by continued subscription and occasional postings to Internet
newsgroups and mailing lists. This helps retain the option of starting up
more serious communications that could lead to new employment
opportunities before one has lost a job or has been laid off. In this
case, Internet mail is a public good that has implications for the types
of basic services that should be bundled into any new consideration of
Universal Access policies.
* Reducing costs of pollution, road maintenance and childcare.
Telecommuting via high speed networking to neighborhood office centers
could help expand employment opportunities, reduce commuting, balance work
and personal responsibilities, and provide flexibility to deal with
transportation disruptions.
With ubiquitous high speed networking, telecommuting can expand to more
kinds of companies and jobs, allowing additional workers to reduce their
commuting and be at (or closer to) home during working hours. In some
cases less mobile workers are enabled to become fully employed for the
first time as telecommuters. Workers who telecommute flexibly from their
homes can stay off the roads when they are impassable due to traffic,
weather, or other disruptions. Telecommuting arrangements also enable
workers to deal better with childcare, eldercare, community service, and
other responsibilities5.
Diamond Bar, California, a recently incorporated city in Southern
California seeks to reduce government related travel by nearly 2,000 trips
within two years. The Diamond Bar City Net, a partnership of citizen
volunteers, city government, and computer industry support, will serve as
a model to nearly 200 other cities in the Southern California Air Quality
Management District, of how a civic network can help reduce air pollution
while improving the delivery of government services. This pilot project
should attract state grant funds collected from driver's license fees
targeted at reducing government-related travel as a compliance component
of the Clean Air Act.
An Arthur Anderson study has suggested that using fiber optic service
directly to homes and businesses might save $23 billion per year by
shifting 10 Q 20% of todayUs transportation to telecommunications. These
savings could include 3.5 billion gallons of gasoline, reduction of 1.8
million tons of pollutants, and a reduction of 4,700 fatalities and
300,000 injuries a year.
Public Interest Communication Policy
The Center for Civic Networking's approach to achieve public interest
communications policy is four-fold.
* First, by promoting Census surveys of individual use of networked
information, we will develop new socio-economic research understandings of
how Americans use networked information at home;
* Second, we will establish public interest communications policy
benchmarks to assess the data, guide policy formulation and measure
outcomes;
* Third, we will identify, develop and support civic networking
projects at the state and local level that show promise of influencing
public interest goals nationally;
* Fourth, we will identify State and Local policy models that could
influence Federal policy. We will actively promote such policies
state-tostate in a way that shapes Federal communication policy to ensure
good social outcomes in areas such as civic participation, public health,
sustainable development, education, job training, program diversity, and
the arts.
We believe that a public interest communication policy agenda must be
founded on a rigorous agenda of thorough socio-economic research, public
education and advocacy, and the monitoring of benchmarked outcomes. A key
focus of Total Quality Management (TQM) is continuous improvement. Quality
-- or good policy outcomes -- must be defined to be measured or improved.
The broad public benefits of the NII must be quantified so that
socio-ecoomic effects can be assessed over time. Benchmarking provides a
common measuring stick to evaluate process performance, measure change
over time and clearly state desired levels of performance.
Effectively benchmarking public interest communication policy goals will
require ongoing research and data collection in areas where little work
has been done. An NII must be shown to lift Americans out of poverty
rather than creating a two-tier society of information haves and
have-nots. Data on the individual use of networked information must be
collected and then be cross-tabulated with income, occupation, education,
location, ethnicity and other such variables.
Civic networking benchmarks will give the public a powerful tool to guide
and monitor Federal taskforces, Congress, State and Local governments. The
Oregon Benchmarks program of the Oregon Progress Board provides a model
for maintaining such oversight and accountability. This successful program
consensually translates policy goals into measurable objectives that
assign accountability. This approach has been demonstrated to be a
powerful tool for both encouraging public participation as well as
tracking results of public goals.
There is presently no comparable dataset available of any coherency or
benchmarked goals to monitor. Until there are, it will be difficult to
identify and track how various population groups may be affected by an
emerging national information infrastructure. Without such data, policy
development for an NII will largely be done in a vacuum.
Public interest communication policy for the National Information
Infrastructure must be founded on three Grand Challenges:
* First we must leverage our investments in existing infrastructure.
That is to say, the public Internet is the model for a national
information infrastructure, and the public Internet has already been
built. It is a robust and dramatically expanding model of what the NII can
and should be;
* Second, we must look at public access to the NII as an extremely
powerful economic weapon to reduce the Federal debt -- a bedrock notion as
fundamental as free expression and the open marketplace of ideas;
* Third, the greatest benefits of the NII may flow, if correctly
designed, to those who are poor, to the information have-nots. The issue
is not whether we are bound to create a two-class society of haves and
have nots, but to recognize the choice we have as a society, to design the
NII as a road away from poverty to increased opportunity for all.
These three Grand Challenges lay the foundation for a specific public
interest policy agenda that must work to lock-in budget, policy and
regulatory frameworks, by the mid-term election in 1996, that focus
promote broad public benefits at the regional, state and local level.
A Grand Challenge: Leveraging Investments in Existing Infrastructure
There must be reasonable restrictions upon competition else we shall see
competition destroyed -- Louis Brandeis, 1913
* The Rdata super-highwaysS and Relectronic city streetsS of the NII
largely exist. The Internet, comprised of interlinked data networks of
10,000 organizations worldwide, serves as a working model of what a true
NII can be. The nation's telephone and cable networks could extend this
existing global information infrastructure to small organizations, civic
institutions and the home. The grand challenge facing us now is to weave
these pieces together into an integrated whole that provides widespread
public benefit. Enlightened public policy is the essential missing
ingredient.
Twenty years, and billions of public and private (non-governmental, both
non-profit and commercial) dollars, have been invested in the RInternet,S
a world-wide collection of over 10,000 institutional networks P in
corporations, in government agencies, and in academia P woven into a vast
and seamless Rdata super-highway.S Contrary to popular conceptions, the
Internet is not simply a network for academics, nor is it simply another
Prodigy or Compuserve. It is a robust public information infrastructure --
a new public space for commerce, research, education and social
intercourse -- and a good model for the NII. This model presents important
social and economic implications for the country that Congress should
investigate in detail6.
The Internet already affords over 30 million people world-wide with
endless opportunities for resource sharing and collaboration, and is
increasingly used by Federal and state governments as an efficient means
to disseminate information to the public and for internal agency
administrative communication. A fairly small public investment
successfully leveraged a global information infrastructure that is now
over 50% commercial in use, that is growing at over 5% per month, has most
services provided by private companies, and that is supported by a
multi-billion dollar telecommunications industry in which the United
States dominates.
The nationUs telephone and cable networks are the electronic city streets
that can extend the Internet beyond the walls of large institutions P to
schools, libraries, municipal offices, small businesses, non-profit
agencies, and into the home P resulting in a true National Information
Infrastructure.
Building the Relectronic cloverleafs,S that link local telecommunications
carriers into the Internet, is the challenge that now faces us. For this
to happen on a Nation-wide scale, and in a way that ensures equitable
social benefit, will require the cooperation of many interests pulling
together to serve the commonweal.
We believe there is a key role for both Federal and state policymakers in
shaping this cooperation PJa role that extends well beyond present trends
towards total deregulation of telecommunications players. We believe that
it is only through a broad-based National vision, expressed through
enlightened legislation and regulation, that we can weave our existing
investments in information infrastructure into a true National Information
Infrastructure that advances the public good on all fronts (including
private, nongovernmental organizations and companies).
A Grand Challenge: Public Access and Deficit Reduction
* Public interest communication policy should reframe and broaden
public access and promote it as a key tool in the arsenal for reducing the
federal deficit through cost containment: a device to reduce the federal
deficit. This is a completely different way of valuing the public
telecommunications infrastructure -- quite distinguishable from
traditional business models promoting, for example, interactive
entertainment and pay-per-view television.
It is important to understand the costs of not having easy, convenient,
and in many cases free public access to the emerging National Information
Infrastructure. There are certain social outcomes that will result only if
public policy encourages broad use of the NII. Public access to Internet
mail could reduce downtime between jobs through better maintenance of
personal acquaintance networks which could be used for employment
searches, or career moves while still employed. With a good information
infrastructure would Americans save at least a half day a year in dealing
with government? If so, the productive time saved would be about 1/500 of
GNP -- about $10 billion a year. The imaging power of technology can
provide a simulated task environment a worker needs to practice needed
skills. How valuable could universal job training be if such services were
interactively available in the home? IBM and Xerox spend 4% or more of
payroll on training. Estimates of how much is spent in the country as a
whole on formal job training vary between $30 and $44 billion, or perhaps
2% of annual payroll. If the economy could gain from training as much as
IBM or Xerox are willing to invest, the increase in value could be on the
order of $100 billion annually. Better informed decisions about surgical
procedures could save Medicare billions of dollars a year in unnecessary
procedures with overall estimates ranging from 30 to 100 billion dollars a
year7.
Estimates have placed the value of activities in the United States that
could be affected by networked, imaged information to the home for health,
governance and citizenship, informal education, job training, literacy,
numeracy, and English as a second language to be in the range of several
hundreds of billions of dollars annually -- not a one time savings, but
recurring and accumulating over time. If this economic valuation proves to
have substantial merit, the projected costs of bringing "fiber to the
home" with estimates in the 200 to 400 billion dollar range could
conceivably be offset by socio-economic benefits in five years or less.
While there are obvious considerations to closely examine in such a
scenario, there is a tantalizing prospect of dramatically drawing down the
several trillion dollar Federal debt by aggressively implementing a
National Information Infrastructure designed to encourage broad use though
public access. Home shopping pales in comparison.
A Grand Challenge: Information Infrastructure and Benefits to the Poor
* Possibly the greatest contribution of the national information
infrastructure will be to those who are poor. Federal policy for a
National Information Infrastructure that leverages private investments
through partnerships, research or tax credits must be shaped by data
demonstrating productive use of networked information by individual
Americans in their daily lives, and be benchmarked for positive effects on
low and moderate income families and workers.
New economic and social issues must be raised and addressed as the
implications of convergence are better understood. Working with
information becomes easier and more convenient when it can be located,
browsed, sorted, acquired, read, viewed, listened to or manipulated in
different ways. Convergence of the computer, telephone and television may
unfairly concentrate power to those individuals who can afford access to
new multimedia systems or integrative services. Public and affordable
access provisions in the new information infrastructure are essential to
maintain a level playing field in the information age.
In 1988, an Educational Testing Service survey indicated that home and
school access to microcomputers provides a significant educational
advantage to children. They also indicate that these advantages are
unequally distributed across economic, ethnic and gender categories. The
ETS study found that: 37% of children in families with incomes of more
than $50,000 have computers in their homes. Only 3.4% of children in
households with income less than $10,000 have computers at home. 17% of
all white children, 6% of blacks and less than 5% of Hispanics use a
computer at home. Yet, the survey also found that black children tend to
use computers at home much more than their white counterparts. White
children used home computers on average 2.8 days/week, black children
averaged 3.8 days/week. (Doctor)
Twenty-four strands of unused fiber were recently laid through Harlem,
where basic telephone service is barely at 70% penetration, where 40% of
the residents live below the poverty line and nearly 50% percent are not
in the labor force. The fiber was laid from terms dictated in a recent
cable franchise negotiation. The New York City Department of
Telecommunications and Energy is exploring potential applications for
interactive video conferencing between community rooms in City housing
projects and City government offices, schools, colleges, cultural
institutions and business centers. City college professors in early
childhood education could teach parenting to teenage mothers via
interactive video teleconferencing. Housing project residents could attend
GED classes already taught at many high schools, via teleconferencing.
Corporations with video teleconferencing facilities could be recruited to
develop tutoring and mentoring programs between their employees and youth
at the housing projects. These young people could be trained to operate
the video equipment, giving residents a bigger stake in the project and
offer inner city youth a chance to gain marketable skills.
In time, fiber could extend beyond the community room to the individual
apartment. Professor Francis Fisher of the LBJ School of Public Policy
describes such a scenario. Consider a family with a single mother in a
housing project in Chicago (Fisher, 1992). Her name could be Gonzales,
Nguyen, Hakim, or Jones. Working part-time she lives with her pregnant 16
year old daughter, a two year old grandchild and a 17 year old son on
probation. They have a telephone and a television -- connected to the net.
The mother switches to interactive health-care programs to learn about her
grand-daughter's asthma. The program gives guidance on medication and
home-care based on the little girl's symptoms. Another health care program
helps the mother assess a newly discovered mole on her face. Many pictures
are shown of good and bad moles. She learns that hers is not a bad mole.
Two trips to the health clinic have just been saved -- the taxpayers save
money while the mother becomes empowered. Much interaction with welfare
agencies is done over the television set, using a joy-stick to select the
appropriate department. If she cannot understand the words for various
agencies or benefit forms on the screen that she needs to fill out, the
set reads them out to her, patiently, line by line with an image of woman
speaking in her native tongue. She can connect to her daughter's school
and watch teachers explaining homework assignments for the week. Using a
voice mail utility, she can leave messages for her daughter's teacher and
check her message box for news about school events and parent's meetings.
She has begun to collaborate with a new team of other low-income parents
to urge the school to buy a vacant lot adjacent to the campus. This is the
first time she has participated in any kind of civic activity. The
mother's daughter uses the television to participate in a support group of
teenage mothers that meet over the network. Her son uses the network to
get temporary job assignments in grocery stores around town. He is using
the television to improve his English, in lessons adjusted to his skill
level, and is studying math to improve his skills to apply for a cash
register position. Both literacy and math programs are available at a
downtown learning center, but the distance and his irregular work schedule
make home study much easier -- and much less embarrassing 8.
Benchmarking Public Interest Outcomes
* Civic networking benchmarks must guide Federal information
infrastructure application research, demonstration and pilot projects, and
communication policy positions towards measurable public interest
outcomes. A benchmarking process must be established to enable the public,
the research community and policy makers measure positive public interest
outcomes. The Center for Civic Networking will organize an NII
Benchmarking Project for this purpose.
Public interest benchmarks need to be established to measure positive
outcomes areas such as public health, formal and nonformal education,
civic participation, emergency services, sustainable development,
diversity of programming content and system financing, small business
opportunity, individual privacy, pricing economics, poverty and equity
issues, literacy, numeracy, job training, employment markets, and English
as a second language.
Using a benchmark mechanism, the Oregon Progress Board shows great promise
in bringing public accountability to governance by calculating progress
towards specified results, rather than relying on traditional
"input/output" measures of funds spent and services provided. In 1988 the
state developed a long range plan called "Oregon Shines" to further a
number of social and economic goals for an emerging information-based
society. The Oregon Progress Board was established to identify measurable
objectives, called "benchmarks", to help guide state policy9. These
benchmarks are approved by the legislature following substantial public
hearings and input. The Progress Board assigns agency responsibility and
monitors benchmark status.
Use Pilot Projects to Collect Data
* Important pilot project initiatives such as HR 2926 proposed by
the NTIA must include formative evaluative criteria and reporting
requirements that will provide ongoing data on individual use of networked
information, demographics of served populations, affective change and
other information useful to benchmarking public interest goals and to the
research community.
Collecting ongoing data from pilot projects, similar to monthly reporting
requirements of many Federal programs can provide important information to
guide policy development of the NII. The Center will work with all levels
of government to ensure that pilot and demonstration projects contain
rigorous reporting requirements that will illuminate ongoing effects of
information infrastructure applications on target population groups.
Funding NII Economics, Equity and Literacy Research
* The Human Genome Project contains a 5% appropriation for Ethical,
Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) research to anticipate public policy
implications of genetic research. An amendment to the HPCC Act would
establish a similar mechanism to fund NII economics, equity and literacy
research projects. This would provide about $150 million for social
research over the next five years10.
The Boucher bill, HR 1757, passed by the House in July contains a
provision similar to the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications ("ELSI")
language in the Human Genome Project Act. Funding is to be established to
study long-range social and ethical implications of high-speed networking.
It is important that this language be preserved in Senate and conference
versions of this bill, and similar authorizing measures that will
establish government communication or information infrastructure policy.
Survey Individual Use of Networked Information
* The United States Census Bureau must develop a plan to enumerate
individual use of networked information as a regular component of the
Current Population Survey (CPS). The United States Census Bureau should
administer a mail-in follow-up questionnaire to accompany the October 1993
Current Population Survey (CPS) of home use of personal computers. This
follow-up survey would enumerate individual use of networked information
and may begin to points towards important emerging socio-economic trends,
which will become more evident over time with implications for policy
development and budgeting priorities.
The Census Bureau should develop a plan to improve the collection,
assessment and dissemination of certain supplements to and products of the
Current Population Survey (CPS) concerning individual use of networked
information. The plan should at minimum affirm public access to the raw
data from the October survey of home computer use, which will enable a
wide range of analyses to take place, rather than the single brief report
typically released for such supplements in the past.
In particular the Census Bureau should promptly assess the feasibility and
cost of a supplemental mail-in questionnaire to the October 1993 Current
Population Survey. The October CPS will examine individual home personal
computer use. A follow-up mail-in questionnaire to respondents with home
computers could enumerate more detailed use of networked information than
would be collected in the October questionnaire, which is authorized in
its present form and cannot be altered.
A follow-up mail-in questionnaire and subsequent surveys could provide
important new data concerning the individual use: of networked information
by Americans in seeking and maintaining employment, informal education,
job training, and health care; the individual use of touch-tone telephones
in reaching government services which utilize voice mail and automated
attendants; amounts spent annually on networked information as a
proportion of household income; time spent annually searching, browsing,
retrieving and organizing networked information; differential use of
networked information by income, race, occupation, age, geographic
location and gender.
Symmetrical Regulation Research
* In anticipation of a general restructuring of the Communications
Act of 1934 policy research on symmetrical regulation must map important
principles embodied as common carriage, PEG access, municipal sovereign
police powers over rights-of-ways, intellectual property,
interoperability, spectrum reservations or prior restraint prohibitions
into a new convergent media regime11. The Center for Civic Networking will
research how traditionally distinct and separately regulated media
industries interact within the Internet, an almost entirely un-regulated
model of the emerging National Information Infrastructure12.
Segmented regulatory regimes served the country well during an era of
technologically distinct media industries. With digitization, traditional
media industries are on a clear collision course. Many regulations once
effective in protecting the public interest are either no longer working
or are seriously impeding new market and service innovations. The various
regulatory models may still be reasonable frameworks to build new policies
upon, but the categories, i.e. cable, telephone, publishing -- are not.
Communications delivery systems should be treated fairly and equally. As
industries use telecommunications and information technology to cross over
into new lines of business, the old regulatory distinctions increasingly
become anachronisms.
This is particularly important concerning the Internet's growing role as
an almost purely un-regulated model of an emerging National Information
Infrastructure. How the public Internet will affect the publishing,
telephone and cable industry is completely unknown. Already however,
traditional magazine publishers are providing Internet versions of their
products; commercial Internet providers are teaming with cable operators
to provide high-speed local network access, and several regional Bell
operating companies are financing Internet access to public schools. The
relationship of previously distinct and separately regulated media
industries converging through an almost completely un-regulated and
rapidly growing information infrastructure -- the Internet -- is an
enormous opportunity to study the effects as they play out, before new
laws come into being.
Internetworking Economics
* Economic research is needed to assess the financial history of the
public Internet. In order to determine investment policies for the NII, it
is first necessary to identify all sources of public and private
expenditures that have developed, operated and commercialized the Internet
since 1973.
[NEED DESCRIPTIVE PARAGRAPH. Discuss Brian Kahin's project investigating
the economics of the Internet]
Legislation and Regulation
Implementation of the NII must be played out in a legislative and
regulatory climate that stimulates cooperation toward a common vision.
Accordingly, we suggest the following approaches at the Federal, State,
and Local levels of Government.
Federal
Broad-based Public Hearings
* Congress should conduct hearings within Public Works, Agriculture
and other relevant committees to broaden policy discussions beyond the
confines of Commerce and Science committees, including regional hearings
around the country and in the home districts of members. State
legislatures and city councils have an equal obligation to work
aggressively in the coming years to broaden public participation in
developing communications policies at all levels of government.
The Administration has directed the Information Infrastructure Task Force
to begin a series of Universal Service public hearings by December, 1993.
Congress should respond to such leadership and broaden hearings
significant to the national information infrastructure within many
committees concerned with agriculture, education, labor and welfare. State
assemblies, county boards and city councils can all work jointly or
individually in conducting public hearings concerning the impacts of a
national information infrastructure on communities and regional economies.
[TACTICAL APPROACH...BATTLE PLAN?]
Assess Environmental, Social and Economic Impact
* Congress should direct the Office of Technology Assessment to
evaluate the effects of national communication policy on the quality of
life. OTA should involve lay assessment participation and encourage
competing teams of partisan assessors in this study.13 This study should
be completed before 1996.
This study should specifically address: 1) Fossil fuel offset and lives
saved through transportation avoidance; 2) economic impact of increasing
access to public information, 3) rates of change and demographics
involving wealth distribution, poverty, education, disease and 4) impact
on democratic institutions at the federal, state and local levels.
[TACTICAL APPROACH...BATTLE PLAN?]
Resolution for Symmetrical Regulation
* In preparation for a general restructuring of the Communications
Act of 1934, the Administration should propose and Congress should pass a
Resolution for Symmetrical Regulation. This resolution would recognize
that the segmentation of regulatory models is breaking down in an era of
converging media and digitized content and endorse a general finding that
all delivery systems be treated fairly and equitably while preserving key
regulatory features that flow from Constitutional first principles that
benefit all people.
The Administration has recently formulated an Information Infrastructure
Task Force (IITF) to "articulate and implement the Administration's vision
for the NII". A Telecommunications Policy Committee will formulate
consistent Administrative positions on key issues. This committee will
likely draft farreaching legislation for introduction in 1994 that could
well lead to a general reorganization of the Communications Act of 1934.
Any major, structural legislation of such scope and scale should not be
introduced without a general consensus building process that a
Congressional resolution, similar to that submitted yearly to initiate the
budget process, could provide. The stakes are too high, the entrenched
commercial interests too powerful and the public interest too important to
ignore a general resolution in advance of changing fundamental law
affecting the democratic fabric of society.
[TACTICAL APPROACH...BATTLE PLAN?]
Redirecting the budgets of open source intelligence assessments
* Timely public dissemination of unclassified intelligence products
and assessments would be of great value to government employees,
individual citizens, business analysts and the research community. There
is currently no plan for improving access to unclassified information
gathered by the intelligence community. Such a plan must be developed, in
a consensus process involving many groups14.
A new era is emerging where open, non-classified sources are proving
themselves generally superior and more cost-effective than classified
information. Open source intelligence is a multi-billion dollar per year
government industry producing non-classified strategic assessments for key
agencies. The widely used and publicly available CIA World Fact Book is a
good example of an open source assessment product available to the public
both in print, and widely across the Internet. If gathering civic
intelligence is key to the deliberative process of debate and consensus in
American political life, then electronic town halls, as forums for
networked, civic debate should provide timely, tailored policy assessments
to the American people, to assist their deliberations. The necessary
resources and funding for networked civic debate could be paid for through
the downsizing of the intelligence community, and the redirection of open
source assets to the American people through the Internet and its
successor, the National Information Infrastructure.
[TACTICAL APPROACH...BATTLE PLAN?]
Federal/State Preemption -- Universal Access
* The Information Infrastructure Task Force (IITF) must play a
partnering role with the Administration, Congress and state public service
regulators to determine areas of Federal pre-emption in a symmetrical
regulatory environment the NII will likely operate under.
The FCC must re-affirm municipal sovereign police powers over rights-ofway
as the foundation of local utility and telecommunication franchises.
America's cities must have control over the onramps to the national data
superhighway, with regulation by their states -- not the Federal
government. State legislatures should explore Universal Access financing
mechanisms. For example, Universal Access funds based on gross receipts
taxes of all communications services to finance public access and basic
services in competitive local exchange markets need to be developed. The
states are in the best position, in partnership with local government, to
determine for themselves what best defines Universal Access or service, in
a converging media arena. Again, the prospect that broad public access to
an emerging national information infrastructure could become an enormously
powerful tool to curb and reduce the Federal debt cannot be overstated and
must become a central theme in any deliberation on the future of such
basic policy that began long ago with the simple premise of a phone in
every home.
[TACTICAL APPROACH...BATTLE PLAN?]
Collocation Tariff for Flat-rate data service
* The Information Infrastructure Task Force should immediately
propose that the FCC study local-loop tariffs that can support
small-business and residential access to the public Internet.
In particular a co-location tariff for flat-rate packet data service
should be investigated. Such a tariff would allow entrepreneurial vendors
to provide affordable Internet access to small businesses, non-profit
agencies, schools, libraries, municipal agencies, and individual
households.15
[TACTICAL APPROACH...BATTLE PLAN?]
State and Local
Public Participation in State Telecommunications Strategic Planning
* Grassroots initiatives and state information policy and strategic
planning must shape Federal communication policy for the 21st Century. The
Center for Civic Networking and the Center for Policy Alternatives will
jointly produce a series of regional conferences around the United States
in alliance with other organizations. These conferences will showcase
grassroots initiatives, educate local cable commissioners, city councils
and school boards and enable regional policy makers to explore common
issues and identify useful policy models and frameworks.
A small but increasing number of states have conducted long range
strategic planning for telecommunications. Earlier efforts tended to be
"network modernization" studies which provided telephone companies a basis
to promote large public investments and rate increases -- often with a
poor understanding of either adverse public consequences or good public
interest benefits. More recently, however, several states including
Alabama, Vermont and Oregon have undertaken broader strategic planning
efforts which attempt to examine how telecommunications can benefit
education, job training, public health and agriculture.
For example, almost two years ago, Vermont citizens became upset over
proposed rate increases in their basic telephone services. Now, as a
result, a new model for public participation in telecommunications policy
is taking place. Over twenty bills concerning telecommunications,
government information and public access were introduced after citizen
groups and the assembly held hearings for a year around the state. There
is a gross-receipts tax proposal to finance a universal service fund
gaining popular and bipartisan support. Both regulated and non-regulated
telecommunications providers would be taxed to ensure equitable public
access in an era of increased deregulation and competition. This proposal,
under debate now for over a year, could improve the similar but sketchy
universal service fund provision in S. 1086, the Telecommunications
Infrastructure Act that the Administration's newly formed Information
Infrastructure Task Force has been assigned to use as a model to develop
major legislation for 1994. In Vermont, the postponed rate case will
reopen in October -- this time with a well informed public.
These are planning processes which the public can and should become better
informed, and participate in. These strategic plans are useful in helping
public interest coalitions come together to help shape state communication
policy. Still, before effective public debate can begin, awareness of
these opportunities among civic leadership and the public interest
community must dramatically increase.
Groups such as the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National
Governor's Association, the National Association of and the Chambers of
Commerce need to aggressively promote public participation in reasserting
the municipal sovereign police power to franchise utilities and
infrastructure services. State legislatures could also promote
public/private partnerships that can create new financing models for local
information infrastructure development.
Conclusion
A true National Information Infrastructure has the potential to save our
society hundreds of billions of dollars through fundamental change in our
conduct of day-to-day business and our relationships with government. If
the NII is built for everyone, it can help reverse the disintegration of
our cities, our economy and our society. The manner in which the NII is
developed will have a long range effect on the distribution of opportunity
and wealth in the United States. The value of activities in the United
States that could be affected by networked information to the home for
health, governance and citizenship, informal education, job training,
literacy, numeracy, and English as a second language could be in the range
of several hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
Simple deregulation is unlikely to produce these social benefits or
deficit reductions. There is a real danger that further deregulation will
lead to hard to reverse investments in speculative telco and cable
services that do not link into a seamless NII P somewhat akin to the
telephone environment prior to the RKingsbury Commitment" of 1913 where
the Nation had many private phone systems which did not interconnect.
There is the danger of highly differential market-driven deployment
creating unnecessary social inequities. There is a narrow
window-of-opportunity during which we can shape policies that steer
private investments toward an NII that serves the broad public interest.
If we do not seize this opportunity, we may struggle through twenty years
of increasing deficits and social chaos after which we will need a repeat
of an AT&T-like monopoly to pull together an NII that we could have had
today.
The true public policy question is whether we can afford the costs of not
putting in place visionary public interest policies today. 1 [in Executive
Order ___ (Sept. __)} 2 [Libraries for the Future works to raise public
and government awareness of the library crisis and their important role in
the emerging national information infrastructure.] 3 [Beverly Hunter
(citation)] 4 [Hardwiring of Weak Ties (citation] 5 [John Niles] 6
[Contrary to another common belief, the Internet has never been a
"Government run telecommuncations company competing with private
carriers." The intra-organization components of the Internet (e.g. an
internal corporate or campus-wide networks) are owned and operated by
those organizations. The more general inter-organizational networks are
operated as Value-added Networks where almost all telecommunications lines
are leased from local and inter-exchange carriers.] 7 [Malmud and Fisher,
1991] 8 [Fisher (citation)] 9 [Oregon Progress Board, Oregon Benchmarks:
Setting Measurable Standards for Progress, January, 1991.] 10 [We
acknowledge the leadership of the 21st Century Project in promoting the
inclusion of the ELSI research model established in the Human Genome Act,
to information infrastructure legislation.] 11 [The Center acknowledges
the leadership role the Aspen Institute Communications and Society
Program's Communications Counsel Forum in examining such future regulatory
scenarios.] 12 [Aspen (citation)] 13 [OTA "should include compatibility
with democracy as a highest order evaluative consideration. Beyond
studying one kind of technology at a time, OTA should study the
interaactive social implications generated by complexities of different
kinds of technologies." condensed from Richard Sclove, Technology and
Freedom: Towards a Democratic Politics of Technology, Architecture and
Design (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, in press).] 14 [The Center for
Civic Networking acknowledges the leadership of Open Source Solutions,
Inc., Robert Steele, President in promoting positive structural changes
within the intelligence community.] 15 [The incremental cost of Internet
access for a large site is under $25/user/year, while the cost to a small
user for comparable service can exceed $12,000/user/year. Current
technologies, that are compatible with existing telco and cable
facilities, can bring this cost down to under $1200/year and be profitable
to local loop carriers P if policies that promote universal service,
mandatory interconnection, and common carriage are extended to this new
telecommunications arena.]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Cen-
Center for Civic Networking Richard Civille P.O.
Box 65272 Washington Director
Washington, DC 20035 rciville@civicnet.org