New Report Highlights Participatory Action Research Project with Tech Goes Home

Developing a Digital Equity Theory of Change with Tech Goes Home (Report)

Over the past year, my team and I at the Digital Equity Research Center at METRO co-led a participatory action research project with Tech Goes Home (TGH). The purpose of the study was to develop a theory of change for TGH, as well as an analysis of the challenges and opportunities facing community-based organizations in conducting equity-focused program evaluations as part of their their digital equity work.

We hope the findings from our study will help to inform state and federal policymakers as the NTIA’s Internet for All grant funding rolls out over the next five years.

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society published this summary that I co-wrote with Sangha Kang-Le (TGH) and Malana Krongelb (DERC). The article includes the following recommendations based on the findings from our participatory action research project.

For digital equity organizations, key recommendations include:

  • Allocating time, money, and intentional effort to capture insights and expertise from community members;
  • Engaging evaluation participants in their native languages; and,
  • Working with funders to balance reporting requirements with participants’ privacy and self-defined measures of success.

Policymakers play a critical role in supporting this work and should prioritize:

  • Set aside funding that organizations can use to conduct evaluation;
  • Technical assistance on effective program evaluation; and,
  • Allowing government funding to be used to compensate community members for their expertise.

(Image above by Becca Quon originally published on the Digital Equity Research Center website)

Defining “Adoption of Broadband” in the Infrastructure Bill

HR 3684It was thrilling to see that the definition of “meaningful broadband adoption” from my 2016 Benton Foundation report appeared in the final version of H.R. 3684, the “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.” This bill was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden on November 15, 2021. There are many people to thank and share credit with this success, including those who helped to deepen my own knowledge about and expand previous, more conservative definitions of broadband adoption. In the space below, I will share a bit more detail about how this language and understanding developed.

The credit begins over 10 years ago with my colleagues, Seeta Peña Gangadharan (London School of Economics) and Greta Byrum (Social Science Research Council) who were both employed at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute (OTI) at the time. In 2011, while I was a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I was selected to join OTI as a Google Policy Fellow. I spent 10 weeks during the summer in Washington, D.C. learning from and working with both Seeta and Greta, as well as many others inside the beltway.

During my time at OTI that summer and into the following year, I worked on a research project funded by the Knight Foundation to evaluate the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Hot Spots program. In a paper that I wrote about the research, I described the program in this way:

The Free Library Hot Spots are public computing facilities embedded within four community-based organizations located in North, South, and West Philadelphia, where several hundred thousand people lack access to the Internet at home (The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia Research Initiative, 2012, p. 5). The Hot Spots are funded by a 2-year grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The project has four objectives: (1) to increase access to computers and the Internet for individuals in underserved neighborhoods throughout Philadelphia; (2) to increase computer literacy and access to training; (3) to increase understanding of and comfort with computers and the Internet; and (4) to increase awareness of Free Library services and materials. 

Hot SpotsOne of the most significant things that I learned during this experience was how the Free Library Hot Spots helped people to adopt broadband outside of the home in community centers, including churches and community-based organizations. This happened in large part, as I argued, because the Hot Spots helped people to develop a sense of comfort as a precursor to their broadband access. By sense of comfort, I meant that people who worked inside the Free Library Hot Spots helped other people, in some cases their neighbors, in low-income communities in Philadelphia to gain the support, trust, safety, and respect from those working with them. These social aspects of internet use in public spaces had certainly been identified in previous studies, as I wrote about in my paper. However, these social and community contexts had not yet been as clearly articulated necessarily in the context of broadband adoption as a federal policy goal. As I described in the paper,

This broadband adoption literature, like the digital divide studies before it, has been largely defined and measured by Internet access and use at home. The approach is a practical one, based on data gathered through the U.S. census. However, recent federal initiatives have helped shift the policy focus. The NTIA, Rural Utilities Service, Institute for Museum and Library Services, and other U.S. government agencies and civil society groups have recognized that Internet access at home is only one way to measure broadband adoption.

By showing that the Free Library Hot Spots, like many other public computing initiatives before them, had played a critical role in helping new and existing internet users learn how to adopt broadband in public spaces outside the home, the need to incorporate more social, community, and ecological definitions of broadband grew in momentum and importance in digital inclusion research, practice, and policy at this time.

It is thanks to Seeta and Greta, particularly in their convening of scholars, policymakers, and practitioners who participated in the April 2012 Defining and Measuring Meaningful Broadband Adoption event at the New America Foundation that helped set the stage and lay the groundwork for a new way of understanding and articulating broadband adoption. The papers presented at the event in April culminated in a special issue of the International Journal of Communication, which was also published in 2012. In Seeta and Greta’s introduction to the special issue, they added a key contribution to the broadband adoption literature through their definition of “meaningful broadband adoption,” which is described in the following paragraphs:

We call this approach to digital inclusion research the study of meaningful broadband adoption, by which we mean the systematic observation and analysis of the social layer of broadband access. This social layer depends upon an individual’s interaction with his or her community, which in turn helps shape the degree of relevance of broadband technologies to his or her life. The social context may determine levels of comfort and satisfaction as well as the context for use of broadband technologies, including place of access (home, public or community institution, work) and modality (wireless or wired).

Thus, when we talk about meaningful broadband adoption, we imply an ecology of support—institutions, organizations, and even informal groups that serve to welcome new users into broadband worlds; share social norms, practices, and processes related to using these technologies; and help policy targets make sense of and exercise control over how broadband enters users’ lives. Meaningful broadband adoption thus refers to a range of broadband-related activities and experiences that target populations and their supporters construct, and often define, for themselves. We also imply a rigorous research agenda that explores a range of outcome variables as well as a range of independent variables.

This experience of researching the Free Library Hot Spots, participating in the event at New America, and publishing my first academic journal article as a result, is all thanks to Seeta and Greta’s support as well as several others who I thanked in the acknowledgement section of my paper in the special issue. I later learned that this experience would have a significant impact on helping to shape federal broadband policy in the years to come.

Benton ReportIn 2015, I had the extraordinary opportunity to become a Faculty Research Fellow with the Benton Foundation to conduct a study of digital inclusion programs in communities across the U.S. For this opportunity, I am grateful to Angela Siefer (National Digital Inclusion Alliance) and Amina Fazlullah (Common Sense Media) who introduced me to Adrianne Furniss, Executive Director of the Benton Foundation. During this time, the Federal Communications Commission was working to reform the Lifeline Program to become a program that provided a broadband subsidy for qualifying low-income consumers. This was a huge deal at the end of the Obama Administration, because the Lifeline program for years (since the Reagan Administration) had only focused on helping low-income individuals gain access to telephone service. For those working with low-income individuals and families to adopt broadband this was an exciting development that could have a huge impact on addressing the digital divide.

As part of the study, I was particularly interested to know what else besides low-cost internet opportunities and digital literacy training were important for policymakers to consider as the FCC worked to reform the Lifeline program. In other words, if the FCC was going to help make low-cost internet more accessible to low-income individuals and families across the country, what else should federal policymakers be aware of in efforts to promote broadband adoption?

The findings from my research were published in a 2016 report for the Benton Foundation, titled “Digital Inclusion and Meaningful Broadband Adoption Initiatives.” And, it’s the definition of broadband adoption in the report that made it into H.R. 3684, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

Here is the definition of broadband adoption which is found on page 8 in my report for the Benton Foundation:
Meaningful Broadband Adoption

Here is the definition titled “adoption of broadband,” which can be found in the final version of H.R. 3684 on pages 781 & 782:

HR 3684 Definition

As these examples show, the two definitions are almost identical. It is also not entirely surprising however that the definition from the Benton report made it into H.R. 3684. This is because the definition of meaningful broadband adoption in my 2016 report was added to the Definitions page on the National Digital Inclusion Alliance website. The NDIA also played a critical role in the development of both the definition itself as well as the Digital Equity Act of 2021. Therefore, I am grateful to Angela Siefer and NDIA, as well as the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, where I am currently the Senior Director of Research and Fellowships, for sharing my work on digital inclusion and broadband adoption toward this goal.

In 2022, there is still much more work that needs to be done to assist people in adopting broadband inside and outside the home. With the passing of H.R. 3684 and recent efforts to promote digital equity in states across the nation, there is even more urgency and need to embrace social, community, and ecological approaches to broadband adoption and digital equity in the months and years ahead. This is why I also believe that gaining a deeper understanding of the role and impact that digital inclusion coalitions play in promoting what I am calling digital equity ecosystems is critical toward this goal.

 

CBSN Interview on Affordable Internet Access and Biden’s Infrastructure Plan

This evening, I joined CBS News political contributor and BluePrint Strategy founder Antjuan Seawright to talk with CBSN’s Lana Zak about the necessity of affordable internet access and President Biden’s infrastructure plan.

For more on the “Homework Gap,” I would recommend my colleague, John Horrigan’s excellent work in the recent Alliance for Excellent Education report, “Students of Color Caught in the Homework Gap” and the Common Sense Media report, titled “The Homework Gap: Teacher Perspectives on Closing the Digital Divide.”

For more information about the necessity of affordable access to the internet, please see my 2019 article, titled “The Ability to Pay for Broadband” for the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society with my colleagues, Dr. Bianca Reisdorf and Madison Bishop. To learn more about the high cost of internet service in the U.S., check out the excellent “Cost of Connectivity” report from New America.

Finally, to learn more about the Federal Communications Commission’s Emergency Broadband Benefit program, which will provide subsidized broadband access and internet-enabled devices for qualifying low-income consumers, see this excellent primer from Next Century Cities and additional information and resources from the National Digital Inclusion Alliance.

Research Cited in CSR Report

Congressional Research ServiceThe Congressional Research Service is a department within the Library of Congress that has been providing timely research to the U.S. Congress that is “objective, authoritative and confidential, thereby contributing to an informed national legislature,” since 1914.

I am honored to share the news that my research on Digital Inclusion and Meaningful Broadband Adoption published by the Benton Foundation was featured in a April 6, 2020 report by the CSR, titled “State Broadband Initiatives: Selected State and Local Approaches as Potential Models for Federal Initiatives to Address the Digital Divide.”

Continue Reading

Broadband Workarounds

In our new article, titled “The Ability of Pay for Broadband” in the journal Communication Research and Practice, my co-authors Dr. Bianca Reisdorf, Madison Bishop, and I introduce a term that we are calling broadband workarounds based on the findings from our research. The concept builds on research by the late Les Gasser who I had the privilege of working with during my doctoral program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Here is an excerpt from our article, which is freely available online for the next four weeks:

“Despite significant barriers to broadband access, there is evidence that low-income individuals and families, as well as the community-based organisations who serve them, will go to great lengths to access broadband. These factors indicate that individuals and families in low-income areas understand the value of broadband but simply cannot afford it – a sentiment that was reflected in interviews, focus groups, and the survey. Participants described what we are calling broadband workarounds, which are broadband-related activities such as splitting the cost of broadband with neighbours, using a friend’s home internet connection, and relying on public computing sites such as libraries and other community technology centres. Similar to Gasser’s notion of ‘work-arounds’ (1986) as ‘adhoc strategies to solve immediate and pressing problems’ (p. 216), we use the term broadband workarounds to describe the everyday strategies that participants described to address the cost-related barriers to broadband. Local digital inclusion organisations, including public libraries, work to alleviate the need for broadband workarounds by creating and connecting people to low-cost broadband options. A focus on these local community assets as a starting point for broadband policy can sharpen awareness of the innovative solutions that already exist in low-income areas.”

UPDATE (6/19/19): After sharing this blog post via Twitter today, John Horrigan responded in this tweet by noting that he had called “online access at the library part of a ‘workaround ecosystem'” for work he did a few years ago with Monica Anderson at the Pew Research Center, which can be found online here.