FCC Releases National Broadband Plan with Lofty Goals

Posted on March 16, 2010 by Mike Schechter

The FCC released the National Broadband Plan today, setting out ambitious goals for how the federal government conducts business in cyberspace. The Plan targets several concrete goals, including

  • 100 million homes with affordable access to 100 megabit per second internet access.
  • At least one institutional (e.g., hospital or university) connection at one gigabit per second in every community. 

Closer to open local government’s home, the Plan’s “Civic Engagement” chapter may raise the bar for municipalities in providing access to records and officials. Although the Plan is directed to the federal government, citizens are likely to expect the same level of service from all government agencies, including their local city hall.

Some Plan recommendations that could make their way to local government requirements in the next few years include:

  • All responses to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests should be made available online (rather than delivered only to the requester), in part to cut down on time and money spent processing multiple similar requests.
  • All government meetings, hearings, and town halls, should be broadcast online.
  • Government should accelerate the adoption of social media technologies given the success stories to date, e.g. 37 million views of H1N1 flu-related media feeds.

Given the potential impacts of the Plan (and technological innovation generally) local government stakeholders would be well-advised to educate themselves about broadband technology and its impact on citizen interaction with their government leaders.

 

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FCC Sees Broadband and Social Media as Building Blocks of More Open and Transparent Government

Posted on March 4, 2010 by Mike Schechter

The FCC’s Government Operations Director Eugene Huang recently discussed how the forthcoming National Broadband Plan broadband access will help transform how citizens interact with the federal government. In his comments at M.I.T.’s Center for Future Civic Media, Huang discussed the need to make primary legal documents “free and publically available online.” Huang noted the need to stream government meetings, public hearings, and town hall meetings online as well as provide public government data to the internet in machine-readable formats.

Huang’s comments hint at a number of broad initiatives in broadband access, open government, and social media use that will be contained in the National Broadband Plan when it is released later this month. Development of the National Broadband Plan is an FCC project authorized in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Huang’s speech can be found online at the FCC’s Broadband blog.

The National Broadband Act, due out March 17, will likely have some impact on local governments. Although many local jurisdictions are far ahead of the federal government. in providing data access and streaming meetings, as Washington, D.C., opens up, local governments are likely to face increasing pressure from citizens to provide similar services and information. Of course, as we have discussed before, new and improved access and communications, such as blogs and twitter feeds, will also have far-reaching impacts on public records management responsibilities for local governments.

We’ll provide more information and analysis as details of the National Broadband Plan become available during the next two weeks.

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