Category Archives: Digital Equity

Next Century Cities Virtual Event: Baltimore’s Broadband Movement

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Baltimore's Broadband MomentToday at 2:00pm Eastern Time, Next Century Cities will host the following event, titled “Baltimore’s Broadband Movement : A Virtual Event with Community Leadership.”

I look forward to joining these amazing leaders: Jason Hardebeck, Mayor’s Office of Broadband and Digital Equity, William Wells, Executive Director and Founder, aSTEAM Village and Digital KC Now, and Michell Morton, Broadband Program Specialist and Federal Program Officer, National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

During the event, I will discuss findings from my case study, titled “The Digital Equity Leadership Lab: A Case Study of Community Leadership Development to Promote Digital Equity and Justice” for the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation published earlier this year. Other cities and states planning to receive federal Digital Equity Grant funds will benefit from learning more about the City of Baltimore’s work to promote digital equity and digital justice.

Here is the description of the event:

“Unprecedented federal and state funding programs have changed broadband possibilities for communities nationwide. In Baltimore, a city where almost one and three residents face barriers to reliable, high-speed connectivity, broadband investments could help to revitalize communities that have been overlooked or excluded from the digital economy.

Join us for a conversation with local leaders who are developing ways to bring digital opportunities within reach for every Baltimore resident and the community organizers that make connectivity goals a reality.”

Here is a link to my presentation slides.

Announcing the Launch of Digital Equity Research Center

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cropped-DERCI am incredibly grateful to everyone who’s supported me over these past few months since leaving my position at Simmons University, including my colleagues at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society and the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry where I continue to keep affiliations.

Today, I am incredibly privileged to be able to announce my new role as Founder and Director of the Digital Equity Research Center at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. I am excited to lead this brand new initiative at METRO that will center social, economic, and racial justice in community-based and participatory digital equity research projects. Thank you to Nate Hill and the METRO Board of Trustees for this extraordinary opportunity. Today, we begin.

Here’s a snippet from the press release:

“The Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) is pleased to announce the launch of the Digital Equity Research Center (DERC), a new applied research center with a focus on working with communities to better understand and co-design meaningful responses to local digital equity challenges. DERC provides in-depth, high quality research and analysis to inform digital equity practitioners, policymakers, and philanthropic communities in New York City, Westchester County, and beyond. Toward this goal, DERC engages in community-based and participatory digital equity research to advance social, economic, and racial justice.

DERC assumes digital inequality must include analyses of structural racism, economic injustice, and other forms of oppression in order to understand and address the root causes of the digital divide. Digital equity will not be achieved simply by distributing technology and internet access alone. Therefore, DERC uses critical theoretical insights along with participatory research methods to ensure those most impacted by the digital divide are included, whenever possible, in interventions to promote digital equity and social justice.”

Digital Equity Leadership Lab Case Study Published

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DELL Blog Post Cover

I’m super excited to announce that the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation published my case study of their Digital Equity Leadership Lab (DELL) today. The case study began with the following key research question: How might DELL serve as a community-based leadership training model to develop the next wave of digital equity leaders?

Through my interviews with DELL participants, outside experts who led DELL workshop sessions, and Deutsch Foundation staff, I discovered three key findings emerged from my qualitative analysis:

Findings
  1. bringing national policymakers and advocates together with community leaders is powerful and transformative;
  2. digital inequality is a social not a technological problem; and
  3. community leaders need access to a shared platform and each other to create change.

Following from these findings the following three recommendations were provided, particularly for other grassroots organizers, philanthropic organizations, policymakers, and other key stakeholders interested in promoting leadership in digital equity and justice initiatives nationwide.

Recommendations
  1. Capacity building and train-the-trainer models are important for community leadership development, but without access to policymakers and advocates on a national level, community leaders may lack a holistic view and understanding of the problems and community- developed solutions to these problems.
  2. Community leadership development programs to promote digital equity and justice must provide support systems for community leaders to come together through a shared infrastructure, including both platforms to share ideas and spaces to convene, to continue the work after the training is over.
  3. Digital inclusion work is vital to help those without access to computers and the internet. However, this work must be rooted in an understanding of how power, privilege, and oppression shape digital inequality, as well as how this knowledge can be used to address systemic barriers to social and racial justice.

Here are links to the Executive Summary and the Full Report.

Many thanks to my CI Lab colleagues, Malana Krongelb and Jie Jiang for their research support with this study and to amalia deloney, Vice President and Director of Digital Equity at the Deutsch Foundation for inviting me to conduct the study.

Joining the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society

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Benton 40th Anniversary Logo

The thread throughout my career over the past twenty years, beginning as a young scholar in graduate school at Emerson College and proceeding shortly thereafter as a community media and technology practitioner at Cambridge Community Television, has been a focus on equity in access to information and communication technology (ICT) particularly for vulnerable populations. This passion has persisted as a beating drum that has helped move me and my family from Boston to Illinois to Oklahoma and back to Boston during these past twelve years. I am grateful for the privilege that I’ve had during this time to complete a doctoral program, gain tenure at an academic institution, and have the choice and opportunity to pursue an alternative pathway.

This week, I am starting off on this new path as the Senior Director of Research and Scholarship at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. While I’m sad to leave so many amazing colleagues at Simmons University, I am quickly realizing how perfect this new opportunity is for me. I’m also incredibly overwhelmed by all of the support I’ve received from friends and colleagues, as well as others online who I’ve not yet had the privilege to meet.

In this new role, I will be overseeing Benton’s research initiatives and invited fellows and their projects. I look forward to working to recruit a cohort of fellows that reflect the diversity and passion that exists in the fields of digital equity research, advocacy, and practice. I also look forward to continuing my work to better understand, document, and highlight the digital equity ecosystems that exist in communities across the U.S. The purpose will be to help guide and further inform research, policy, and practice to support social and racial justice in communities both with and without access to ICTs.

I am also looking forward to moving the Community Informatics Lab to the Benton Institute, which will continue to be a home for our work to better understand and co-design community responses to local information challenges. As local, state, and federal support and coordination builds to promote digital equity nationwide, it will be even more critical to document the challenges and opportunities facing digital equity ecosystems now into the future.

I am grateful to Benton’s Executive Director, Adrianne Benton Furniss, the Board of Directors, and Trustees for this amazing opportunity and honor.

New Issue of JoCI Published

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JoCI Vol 17The new issue (Vol 17) of The Journal of Community Informatics is now online!

There are several excellent peer-reviewed articles, including the following:

  • A study of community informatics and resilience in India during the COVID-19 pandemic;
  • The role of public libraries in supporting digital inclusion in Sweden; and
  • A comparative study of digital equity plans in four U.S. cities.

There is also a paper in our “Notes from the Field” section on ethics in social design and a wonderful review in our “Book Reviews” section of Daniel Greene’s (2021) excellent, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope published by The MIT Press.