Stimulus ties spending on broadband to civic participation

A Federal Communications Commission initiative to create a nationwide plan for expanding high-speed Internet access also is expanding e-government, FCC officials said.

The $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act set a February 2010 deadline to create a plan that would provide high-speed Internet access to all Americans. By law, the plan must include using broadband to increase civic participation in policymaking, also known as e-government. A cornerstone of the Obama administration's transparency agenda, announced the day the president took office, has been to increase public participation in government through the Web.

"In coming up with the national broadband plan, we are really practicing what we are preaching in terms of trying to solicit public input far and wide," said Eugene Huang, the government operations director for FCC's national broadband task force. "The goal has been to make sure that this is an open and participatory process."

FCC launched a Web site that allows the public to submit examples of how the Internet can help achieve national priorities such as health care delivery and energy independence. The platform lets users comment on the submissions and vote for the most relevant ones.

In addition, FCC has attracted 136,730 followers on the blog broadcasting service Twitter, ahead of the Justice Department -- which has 134,966 followers. By comparison, CDC Emergency, which provides updates on public health crises, has about 1.09 million followers. FCC is ranked 531st by number of followers on Twitterholic, a site that tracks the most popular users.

"We're still very much in the data collection phase" for the civic engagement strategy, Huang said. For that part of the plan, the commission is looking at best practices at all levels of government and seeking examples of successful e-government initiatives from the public.

He pointed to Maine, which offers an online tool that lets residents view the state's most current budget projections, adjust expenses and revenues to see the hypothetical results, and submit balanced budget proposals to the governor.

FCC also publishes a blog dedicated to the national broadband plan called Blogband, where people comment on opinions expressed by officials who are crafting the roadmap.

The agency kicked off an ongoing series of workshops for the plan with a session focused on e-government. The Washington workshop, held on Aug. 6, was broadcast online, allowing remote participants, such as users in the virtual online world of Second Life, to pose questions to federal participants, including the federal chief information officer Vivek Kundra.

"At the end, there will be a very specific set of recommendations for Congress, the administration and the FCC," Huang said.

Darrell M. West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said in an interview that the national broadband plan offers great potential for engaging citizens in the act of government. Before joining Brookings, West conducted annual studies on electronic government at the federal, state and international levels.

West moderated a discussion on Monday sponsored by Brookings that looked at the challenge of investing in a broadband infrastructure that would be robust enough to handle the increasingly video-intensive medium. In addition to being accessible to every American, the nationwide plan also must support machine-to-machine Internet services such as smart grids, which convey energy usage information between a home or business and a power utility, he noted.

"I think it's unquestionably the case that with the advent of sensors, the kind of machine-to-machine [communication] you're talking about will be increasingly important," said John Horrigan, a consumer research director at FCC, who participated in the talk. "The national plan demands that FCC look at energy grids. . . . That is going to be a tremendous bandwidth driver."

The cost to handle the increasing amount of data will be unavoidable, some panelists said. Potential payment options include tiered-pricing plans for consumers based on the amount of graphics, music, video and text they download per month. An alternative could be higher charges for content providers that offer bandwidth-heavy services such as the video-sharing site YouTube, which many federal agencies use.