Government Technology

Austin city officials and community leaders have long sought to stem the growth of economic disparity by providing equal access to technology. For many years, such efforts have been known nationwide as bridging the digital divide, and they’ve largely sought to ensure all citizens have access to computers and the Internet. Recently, however, the issue has grown more nuanced and complex. Access to high-speed Internet is no longer the sole measure of whether citizenry has equal digital opportunity, as such access is now readily available via smartphones and other devices. As a result, the issue now seeks to address whether all populations have equitable access to things like tech training, high-speed Internet at home, and education that emphasizes the importance of going online to apply for jobs, finish homework, access better and more efficient medical care, and do the millions of other things enabled by the Web.

As such, the phrases "digital equity" and "digital inclusion" are now being used to frame the discussion. Digital equity is what cities want; digital inclusion is how they obtain it. Initiatives that fall under this umbrella still include old digital divide stuff like getting computers into low-income neighborhoods, but they also increasingly entail skills training, support programs and guarantees of meaningful Internet access. This semantic shift is making it easier for nonprofits and city programs to proliferate around the cause, said Angela Siefer, director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, the leading group in the matter. “The reason is because there are so many digital divides,” Siefer said. “You might close one divide, but there’s another that pops up tomorrow.”

[Commentary] Local elected leaders, administrators, public utility managers and community stakeholders are stepping up their advocacy game in response to recent legislative losses. Whether or not a state has municipal network restrictions, any city that has even small aspirations for building a network should have a 12-month public relations plan. In addition to the threat of prohibitions, many state legislatures are pursuing an array of broadband policies, so cities should get in front of these discussions. PR is broadly defined as actions taken to influence a group of people with whom you do business. State legislatures influence cities’ ability to access money, resources and permissions. Subsequently, design a PR plan with the goal of influencing legislators’ hearts and minds regarding community broadband.

[Settles assists communities with developing their broadband business and marketing plans, and help communities raise money for broadband projects]

[Commentary] Now that wireless can comfortably reach 40 to 50 Mbps in the home and gig wireless capacity backhaul is working in the field, can hybrid wired/wireless infrastructure dial back some of the hype? To lower their susceptibility of getting caught up in the hype, community broadband planners could start by understanding that the average person doesn’t much care how they get their data, so long as it's reliable, affordable, secure and fast. Many variations of wireless — including fiber-powered Wi-Fi radios and almost all configurations of fiber — can meet those for criteria.

[Craig Settles assists communities with developing their broadband business and marketing plans, and help communities raise money for broadband projects. ]

Hard data enables Louisville (KY) residents to know their broadband speeds and it's also proving beneficial to the city, which is looking to kick off new connectivity projects.

Last spring the city teamed with the IT developers at PowerUp Labs to produce the broadband speed-test site SpeedUpLouisville.com. Since then, nearly 4,000 citizens have logged on to test their Internet speeds, at the same time generating a first-ever view of what the providers are delivering and where the city infrastructure may be lacking. The idea for the test site percolated up at a code-a-thon hosted by the Civic Data Alliance. Results of ongoing speed tests show a number of stark contrasts. Seventeen percent of tests showed broadband speeds limping along at less than 5 Mbps, with geography playing a big role. In the slowest ZIP codes, testers clocked in at an average 7.32 Mbps versus more than 183 Mbps in the fastest neighborhoods.

The smart devices we carry with us and cling to represent treasure troves of personal data; they could be the linchpin a prosecutor needs to prove a person's location when a crime occurred, which is why agencies are more active than ever in going after them. Together, our personal technology's value and the related privacy issues has become a new sort of frontier for law enforcement and our courts. And the parameters around law enforcement's access — and whether access is even given — must be dealt with.

For US Magistrate Judge Stephen Smith, who began his term as a magistrate judge in Houston, Texas, in 2004, computer and device searches present an interesting challenge. When he started the federal judgeship, he said the rules of around technology were still solidifying and opinions were difficult to come by. “We need to make our warrant docket just as publicly accessible as the civil and criminal docket is. Obviously you can’t immediately disclose the warrant applications or the tracking device applications because you’re going to blow the investigation,” he explained. “So some limited degree of sealing is necessary, but it doesn’t need to be sealed forever. It seems to me that there is some information about that application that ought to be available to the public immediately.”

Mark Myers remembers his very first day on the job in January 2015 as the state of Arkansas’ CIO and director of the Department of Information Systems (DIS). “I was with Gov. [Asa] Hutchinson in the mansion, and he said, ‘Hey, Mark, you have got to get this K-12 broadband thing fixed,’” he recalled. Myers admits that at the time he knew very little about the Arkansas Public School Computer Network (APSCN), which provides connectivity to all of the state’s K-12 classrooms. He did some research and found that APSCN was averaging a pokey 5 kilobits per second (Kbps) per user. In contrast, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has set a K-12 Internet access target of 100 Kbps per student.

In 2014, the FCC made resources available to close the connectivity gap across the country by increasing its investment in K-12 broadband by $2.5 billion per year to a total of $3.9 billion annually. This should be sufficient funding to connect every public school classroom in America to high-speed broadband. With a goal of increasing the number of state school districts meeting the FCC Internet access target of 100 Kbps per student to 100 percent, Hutchinson directed DIS to upgrade APSCN to an all-fiber network.

The government organization charged with building the nation’s first high-speed data network for first responders says it will make its first contract award soon. It will likely happen in November, although no firm date is set. With an award on the $7 billion First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet) program potentially just weeks away, first responders say that despite years of planning, they still have more questions than answers when it comes to the future LTE communications backbone. “How will this thing be deployed? What are the subscriber fees going to be? What will be the impact will be on the local budget? How will the network be controlled?” said Yucel Ors, federal advocacy program director for public safety at the National League of Cities. “There are a lot of unknowns still.”

Officially no one even knows who is in the running. FirstNet won’t release the names of bidders, under the rules of the federal procurement process. Unofficially, three groups say they have put their hat in the ring: AT&T, Rivada Mercury and pdvWireless. This alone is noteworthy. When the Federal Communications Commission auctioned public safety spectrum in 2008 it failed to receive a single viable proposal. Many wondered whether the 2016 procurement effort would draw credible attention from potential network builders. It has.

Before “open data” became a catchphrase for innovation, there was Data.gov, the first open data portal for federal agencies. Under the direction of President Barack Obama and the guiding hand of US CIO Vivek Kundra, the site went live in 2009. It was the first platform to deliver federal data to citizens, civic hackers, academics and anyone else seeking insights from government information.

In the beginning, it could arguably be described as an experiment. Yet its growth soon became an inevitability as the Obama Administration, along with bipartisan research and transparency groups, latched on to the site as a persuasive tool to drive policy with data. The site has gone on to publish more than 180,000 data sets from federal agencies, embracing a belief long held by successful companies like Google and Amazon that information supersedes the heated emotions and rhetoric of politics. It’s this idea that fueled the president’s 2013 executive order urging agencies to make open data a default practice. Since then, the White House has leveraged technology and data to find solutions to a host of pressing societal problems. Some of these prominent works have included the Police Data Initiative, which partners with police departments to publish crime data, the Opportunity Project, which publishes open data apps to assist citizens, and coordination of the National Day of Civic Hacking, an event that encourages data-driven hackathons in communities in all 50 states.

Change in government is slow. That didn’t stop a lot from happening in government during President Barack Obama’s two terms, including many technology firsts, but that’s to be expected, because the world changed a lot too. Chronicling President Obama’s tech legacy isn’t a matter of tallying everything he did, but isolating what he did differently from what another person in his position might have.

It was the impression left on the federal government’s culture that this president will be remembered for, said Jennifer Pahlka, Code for America’s executive director. “Ten years from now, I think the biggest impact...will be on leadership in government and how they think, more than anything else,” said Pahlka. “One thing that could have absolutely gone differently was the way in which he called on people from the outside to rescue HealthCare.gov. The fact that he so much stood behind that and was willing to back these outsiders, that I think was a turning point, and the fact that he learned the right lesson from it and decided to institutionalize it.” The president led on open data, cybersecurity and the creation of new government roles, but his greatest legacy lies in his constancy, said former Philadelphia Chief Innovation Officer Adel Ebeid. Backing programs he believed in and serving as a template that others could model themselves after, President Obama lived up to his charge as a spiritual leader.

The initial build-out of Kentucky’s broadband project, KentuckyWired, will take place soon in the eastern part of the state. This was welcome news to those who viewed the lack of broadband in the state as an inhibitor to businesses starting in or migrating to the area.

Kentucky has traditionally lagged on broadband availability with more than a third of rural residents lacking access to fixed advanced telecommunications. The network will consist of more than 3,000 miles of fiber-optic cable and more than 1,000 government and post-secondary education sites that will be connectivity points in communities for local Internet service providers to tap into for last-mile service to customers. They system is expected to be completed between March and June of 2019.