Government Technology

 As cities have begun to collect and release unprecedented amounts of data, questions about citizen privacy have become increasingly relevant.

As municipal governments in New York City, Seattle and elsewhere vocally oppose a repeal, leaders also say they are preparing resources to monitor its impact once it happens.  City gov tech leaders said that a repeal is all but certain to make it more difficult for municipal governments to foster digital equity. As Internet access has become essential to modern life — for applying for jobs, helping kids with homework, finding health care, etc.

Government technology leaders throughout the country have once again condemned a plan to repeal net neutrality regulations proposed by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai.New York City Chief Technology Officer Miguel Gamiño is one of the loudest voices decrying the rollback, while Seattle’s IT Department has released an oppositional statement and technologists in city governments from Detroit to Cincinnati to Kansas City, Mo., have taken to Twitter to urge the FCC to reconsider. The effort is concentrated and fierce, and it's been going all year.

There’s no exact metric for gauging if Kansas City (MO) is the smartest city on our continent at present, but it’s doubtful that many other US cities would want to call CIO Bob Bennett out on the legitimacy of his claim. Kansas City’s smart city infrastructure is strong — strong and advancing rapidly. Now, as it continues to move forward, city officials have added a new data visualization map aimed at keeping track of digital inclusion efforts as well, so that all populations within the city will benefit from the technological growth of its infrastructure. This new map contains information about Internet speeds provided by AT&T, Google and Time Warner (now also known as Spectrum), with speeds pegged by a Federal Communications Commission support, and it cross references that info with US Census data about poverty levels, creating what is quite likely the first map in the country to do so. In addition, the locations of Kansas City’s popular smart street cars are also available there in real time.

A recent study by Ohio State University (OSU) researchers found broadband access severely lacking in the state’s rural areas, a deficit they reported could yield significant economic growth if corrected — but if resolved could also lead to other, unintended consequences.

Connecting the Dots of Ohio’s Broadband Policy found that 76 percent of Ohio households had broadband subscriptions in 2015, a share that led neighboring states and lagged just 1 percent behind the national average of 77 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey. More troublingly, the report from OSU’s Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics highlighted a disparity between urban Ohio areas, where fixed broadband access is “near universal” and adoption in metro areas ranges from less than 60 percent to more than 90 percent; and rural communities where 31 percent of the population lacks access to fixed broadband — and lives in areas where extending service is “prohibitively expensive.” Overall, the report found more than 1 million Ohioans still lack access to fixed broadband service.