Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/fade into you/being there/Rants/internet.poor

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                     network.communities/internet-poor.txt
                                                               3 August 1993





The Internet and the Poor


"Public Access to the Internet"
JFK School of Government
May 27,1993


Richard Civille
Center for Civic Networking

DRAFT

     A country that works smarter; that enjoys more efficient, less costly
government -- guided by a better informed citizenzry; that supports job growth
through small businesses; that promotes life-long learning -- will be a country
laced with a high-speed infrastructure for information with civic purpose.  Much
of this infrastructure will be a successor to the Internet.  Information
infrastructure promoted by government should target important non-market
applications such as preventive health-care, job training, informal education,
enhance civic participation in governance, and reduced costs of delivering
services.

     Federal policy for a National Information Infrastructure which leverages
private investments through partnerships, research or tax credits, must also
demonstrate positive effects on low and moderate income families, and a
potential for lifting Americans out of poverty rather than creating a two-tier
society of information haves and have-nots.


American Poverty is Growing

     There are 35 million poor people in the United States, about 14% of the
population.  Minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation for well over a
decade. Many working poor cannot escape poverty with full-time jobs.  Only
5% of males in their prime earning years, between the ages of 35 and 54 had
low annual earnings in 1974.  This percentage shot up to 7.5% in 1989 and then
again to 8.9% in 1990, one year later.  Dispite popular opinion, most of the
poor in this country are not minorities.  They're white.  Over 50% percent as
a matter of fact in absolute numbers.  Not only that, but the poverty rate for
white people in the United States is higher than any other industrial democracy,
and it is acclerating, from 9% to 14% over the past  two years.   One in five
children are poor.  I don't mean to gloss over poverty among minority  groups.
Over 50% of children under six years old are poor -- and black.  This past
recession has driven over 4 million more people into poverty.  Many are still
there.

     Even with four years of college individual earnings -- on average --
started heading south in 1987.  Yet the cost of a college education is rising, and
without it things are far worse indeed.  During the great depression, real
household income fell by 25 percent.  Two years ago, young male and female
high-school graduates earned 26% and 15% less, respectively, than in 1979.
Everything costs more, like rent.  This means flipping burgers, living at home,
and hanging out.  The Slacker generation does not generally show up as a
statistical group because so many still live at home and are carried as dependants
by their middle class parents.  As Wayne from Wayne's World once said:  "OK,
so I'm still living with my parents.  How bogus.  How unoriginal."    From
1981 to 1989, among Americans age 25 to 29, the number of homeowners
declined by 11 percent, while the number of renters rose by 16 percent.

     The Urban Institute has found that "Lifetime incomes are becoming
more unequal.  The bad jobs in our economy are now paying less in real terms
than they did in the early 1970s and the people who hold them aren't moving out
of them with any more frequency than before.  We can expect their lifetime
incomes to be lower than those of people who held these jobs in the past."
Indeed, the United States now has the largest low-income class, the smallest
middle class and the third largest high-income class of the eight major industrial
democracies.


The Information Highway has become a Personal Library

     An accelerating income gap in the United States over the past ten years
may well be related to a widening knowledge gap through the rapid expansion
of a two-tier information society of haves and have-nots as the economy is
further restructured away from its industrial antecedent.

     Resource discovery tools such as Gopher and WAIS have the effect of
transforming the Internet from an information highway with virtually no
"roadmap" to locate resources into a highly personalized research library which
can be casually browsed without difficulty or much expertise.   The metaphor
which shapes perception and policy debates concerning the Internet is shifting.
The information superhighway is rapidly becoming a personal library to the
more than 10 million individuals worldwide who have the privilege.

     Resource discovery tools have recently made it easier for smaller
institutions and individuals to create new information services -- to "hang a
shingle" on the net.   Ease of locating resources combined with a dramatic
increase of them represents a fundamental shift of what the Internet is, who it
is for, and how it can be used by the public.  It also raises the specter of a
widening gap between information haves and have nots.  Internet access is
important but does not in itself begin to divide classes of people.  However,
when the Internet suddenly becomes more useful --  a personal research library
-- access politics assume new importance.  Those who lack access will be left
even further behind, and more rapidly so than ever before.  Because of the
recent T3 upgrade and emergence of good tools for organizing, searching and
browsing, this "Cyberspace Cohort" stands to gain from accelerating
opportunities to use information strategically, particularly as the network is used
as a vehicle to deliver government services and information.  The change of
metaphors describing the Internet -- from a highway to a library; from a
transportation system to a public space; who it is for and how it is used reflect
fundamental changes in access politics which the federal government should
respond to.

     Increasing the ease and convenience of network use can accelerate a
condition of haves and have-nots very rapidly as the network expands.   This
condition has important implications for minority communities who tend to lack
access to advanced information technology.  This condition will also affect
whether states move ahead or are left behind due to economic differentials
affecting investment capabilities in information infrastructure.


Reframing the Debate:  State of Current Research

     In March, the Competitiveness Policy Council recommended
overhauling the Communications Act of 1934.  This may signal that the
communications policy debate has finally begun to shift away from "Big Pipes
for Big Science" or "Home Delivery of Terminator III" to the real socio-
economic benefits of improving government services and their delivery,
broadening access to education and job training, and promoting civic
participation down home in real communities where the economy is directly
affected.

     Yet while equity issues gain currency, we have to become very
concerned with the current state of research in this area.  The study of
socioeconomic impacts of a growing national information infrastructure is pretty
much in its infancy, and hasn't really moved beyond the early phase of
rhetorical debate and assertion of moral imperatives.  This kind of academic
work must begin to parallel basic computer science research.  If government is
going to invest the public purse in high performance computing and networks
with the full assumption such technologies will become a primary domain of
commerce and livelihood, we have to start finding out whether these networks
will tend to lift Americans out of poverty --and help make work pay --or drive
them futher in while accelerating the widening income gap the country has seen
over the past ten years.

     Ron Doctor of the University of Alabama reviewed the literature and
found that it is characterized by vast differences of opinion regarding "how our
political and economic systems will change as we move into the information age.
The extremes are represented by technological optimism on the one hand to
neo-Luddite reaction on the other".  Commentors from one extreme to the
other make impassioned and reasonable arguments for their points of view.
They support their arguments with a wealth of anecdotal empirical evidence but
with little systematic data.  The situation is characteristic of a new policy
research area that is striving for definition."

     It is difficult to describe information gaps and how they are changing
over time.  We don't have good data on the geographical and socioeconomic
distribution of information resources or how they are used by individuals in non-
institutional settings.  We have fragmentary or out of date data, much of which
is not very coherent.  We have to rely on inferences.  This situation is
unacceptable and must change.

     What do we need to know about network literacy --the functional
equivalent of driver education for the 21st Century, and how do we change
curriculum to help prepare all students?  How can we go about examining
census and labor statistics to begin to see the effects of network growth on
various sectors of society in the creation of opportunities or the elimination of
them?


Towards a Definition of Information Poverty

Network Literacy

     In an accelerating information-based economy, good jobs require
analytical research skills, not simply the ability to read and write and follow
instructions.  Many workers are becoming, according to Labor Secretary Robert
Reich, "symbolic analysts."  Is a farmer a researcher, faced with sophisticated
analytical demands of modern agriculture, where critical choices balancing
integrated pest management, environmental regulations, weather and cost must
be factored into assessing commodity prices for future global markets?  Is a high
school college counselor a researcher when she must become increasingly aware
of minority institutions and scholarship opportunities and package such
information for particular low-income students?  Are elementary school students
researchers when they participate in climate studies by collecting local weather
and water quality data as demonstrated by the National Geographic KIDSNET?

     Reich says there are now three general types of jobs, two of them
dead-end -- which most poor and middleclass children are prepared for in school
-- and one with great promise -- which our most fortunate children are groomed
for.  These three are routine production workers, in-person service providers
and symbolic analysts.  For example, data entry operators (whose jobs move off
shore), janitors (the work can't move offshore, though your employer could),
or an architect.  A lawyer could be a symbolic analyst if creative -- that is
inventing new ways to sue, or could be just another routine production worker
-- churning out the same wills and contracts day after day.  We have cheap
software to replace that guy already.

     The American educational system was designed to prepare workers for
smokestack industries and bureaucratic management, not symbolic analysts,
generalists and entrepreneurs for the information economy -- and it still does.
17% of all seventeen year olds are functionally illiterate, yet another 20% are
being well prepared to become marketing strategists, film producers, writers,
software engineers, sound engineers, research scientists --  symbolic analysts.
20% of our children have attentive teachers, small classes, get good health care
when they need it, attend good suburban public or elite private schools and are
tracked through advanced courses in the company of their fortunate peers.
They have access to computers, good science laboratories, video systems in
class, and increasingly -- the Internet.  They are taught the art of abstraction --
of finding the pattern that connects, as Gregory Bateson once said, of system
thinking -- seeing the whole, the big picture, how to experiment, test and fail,
and most importantly, how to collaborate, work as a team, and to negotiate.
     They are learning network literacy.  Most students in the United States
are not taught this way, and do not have access to these kinds of resources.  For
them, meaning is imposed, not discovered or owned.  Interpreting reality or
determining fact from fiction is someone else's responsibility.  However, in
low-income areas where dropout rates are out of control, there is the potential
for backlash in actually increasing the intensity of this kind assembly-line
rote-memorization instruction rather than embracing the need for fundamental
change.  Low-income neighborhoods are often very tradition bound.  Parents
often wish their children to be taught as they were.  Poor children are not taught
in the same manner as the elite, and the jobs they are being prepared for
increasingly no longer exist.


Network Growth as a Measure of Information Poverty

     Consider the growth of the Internet as a measure of information
poverty.  By many accounts nearly 20 million people are connected to the
Internet, most of them in the United States. This number keeps growing.  Many
users have the abstract,  analytical skills to use the net well as a research tool,
a personal library, and to collaborate with working groups in productive,
symbolic work.  The growth rate is about 5% per month, roughly doubling once
a year.  At this rate, we could expect the number of individuals productively
using the Internet to equal -- or surpass -- the number of Americans below the
poverty line within perhaps as soon as two years.  When the number of
Americans productively using the Internet for symbolic work equals or exceeds
the number of Americans below the poverty line, will we have quantified the
elusive definition of a two class society of information haves and have nots?
Two years is not far off.


Acquaintances, the Internet and the Job Market

     Two weeks ago I met with a group of concerned parents at a nearby
public school.  The group calls itself CAST, for Citizens Advocating Science
and Technology.  The school librarian had become involved in the National
Capital Area Public Access Network (or CapAccess) which among other
services, provides free electronic mail access to the Internet to anyone who
registers.  As a board member, I was invited by this librarian to speak with this
group about the value of the Internet to their children and to offer to get them
free Internet mail addresses.

     We described the vast array of topic-based Internet mailing lists to
which their children could subscribe to.  These lists could become a jumping-off
point to a young student, enabling him or her to not only follow the current
debate of a particular research topic but to actually find out about and acquaint
themselves with members of particular research communities.  We described
how messages distributed through mailing lists could provide the electronic and
postal addresses and even telephone numbers of a wide range of individuals,
some of whom their children might like to become better acquainted with.

     The librarian described books which catalog Internet mailing lists.
Such books serve as references she could use to help students identify interesting
lists.  We made the point that free, public access to Internet mailing lists was a
valuable opportunity for their children to broaden their networks of personal
acquaintances to include those far outside their schools and neighborhoods which
could broaden their educational and career opportunities.  Free public access to
Internet mail provides a means for a person to easily broaden and maintain a
network of personal acquaintances beyond the parochial boundaries of school,
community and close friends.  This has important implications for creating
opportunities for low-income and inner-city students.

     The range and quality of personal acquaintance networks has been
shown to affect individual success in the job market.  Granovetter's work in the
early 1970s on the Strength of Weak Ties proposed that "our acquaintances
('weak ties') are less likely to be socially involved with one another than are our
close friends ('strong ties')."  Networks of personal acquaintances serve as
"bridges" between islands of other close groups of friends, workers, business
associates or research communities.  Bridging these islands of personal
relationships through acquaintances broadens one's knowledge of the world,
expands horizons of opportunities, and helps in career advancement or changing
jobs in a weak economy.

     Strength of Weak Ties theory argues that:  "Individuals with few weak
ties are confined to the provincial news and views of their close friends.  This
will not only insulate them from the latest ideas and fashions, but also may put
them in a disadvantaged position in the labor market, where advancement may
depend on knowing about job openings at just the right time."  Through an
acquaintance I had made on the net some time ago, which I easily maintain
through occasional notes, I learned of a job description right down my ally
several days before the deadline.  I went ahead and applied.

     The chain of acquaintance, or weak ties that make the difference, are
those that actually provide a bridge to an entirely new community, set of ideas
or individuals.  Simply going through a "friend-of-a-friend" is often not
sufficient, especially if it only leads to new acquaintances within a community
boundary -- such as a low-income neighborhood.  The weak tie acquaintance
must be novel:  someone that no one you know, knows.  Email significantly
reduces the costs of acquiring and maintaining such novel, weak ties.

     This early work in weak tie theory has led to recent inquiries in the use
of electronic mail in the maintenance of personal acquaintance networks.
Internet mail has been found to be a highly efficient means of establishing and
maintaining personal acquaintance networks.  Indeed, "distributed lists in email
systems greatly reduces the costs to the individual of discovering others with
common interests."  This observation underscore Granovetter's core theory,
that weak ties serve as links between strong tie networks, thus expanding the
channels of information sources for the individual.  Not only information --
there is the potential for transforming weak ties of acquaintance formed over the
network by way of mailing lists into strong ties which can result in instrumental
actions and productive gains: "The maintenance of weak ties can play a crucial
role for an individual when he or she is forced to change jobs.  Such a situation
is a classic case when current job ties are likely to be useless, but ties to
individuals in other employment settings might be very valuable indeed."  Weak
ties can be passively maintained by continued subscription and occasional
postings to newsgroups and mailing lists.  This helps retain options of more
serious communications leading to new strong ties in other social or work
domains.  To tie my example and this academic digression up to a point:
"Exchange of employment information facilitates a free labor market." This
is a public good with implications concerning the types of basic services that
should be bundled into any new consideration of Universal Service policies.


Information Infrastructure and Benefits to the Poor

     Possibly the greatest contribution of the national information
infrastructure will be to those who are poor.  Twenty-four strands of dark fiber
were recently laid through Harlem, were basic telephone service is barely at
70% penetration, where 40% of the residents live below the poverty line and
nearly 50% percent are not in the labor force.  The fiber was laid from terms
dictated in a recent cable franchise negotiation, as part of an I-Net.

     "The New York City Department of Telecommunications and Energy
is exploring potential applications for interactive video conferencing between
community rooms in City housing projects and City government offices,
schools, colleges, cultural institutions and business centers.  City college
professors in early childhood education could teach parenting to teenage mothers
via interactive video teleconferencing.  Housing project residents could attend
GED classes already taught at many high schools, via teleconferencing.
Corporations with video teleconferencing facilities could be recruited to develop
tutoring and mentoring programs between their employees and youth at the
housing projects.  These young people could be trained to operate the video
equipment, giving residents a bigger stake in the project and offer inner city
youth a chance to gain marketable skills."

     In time, fiber could extend beyond the community room to the
individual apartment.  Consider a family with a single mother in a housing
project in Chicago.  Her name could be Gonzales, Nguyen, Hakim, or Jones.
 Working part-time she lives with her pregnant 16 year old daughter, a two year
old grandchild and a 17 year old son on probation.  They have a telephone and
a television -- connected to the net.

     The mother switches to interactive health-care programs to learn about
her grand-daughters's asthma.  The progam gives guidance on medication and
home-care based on the little girl's symptoms.  Another health care program
helps the mother assess a newly discovered mole on her face.  Many pictures
are shown of good and bad moles.  She learns that hers is not a bad mole.  Two
trips to the health clinic have just been saved -- the taxpayers save money while
the mother becomes empowered.  Much interaction with welfare agencies is
done over the television set, using a joy-stick to select the appropriate
department.  If she cannot understand the words for various agencies or benefit
forms on the screen that she needs to fill out, the set reads them out to her,
patiently, line by line with an image of woman speaking in her native tongue.
She can connect to her daughter's school and watch teachers explaining
homework assignments for the week.  Using a voice mail utility, she can leave
messages for her daughter's teacher and check her message box for news about
school events and parent's meetings.  She has begun to collaborate with a new
team of other low-income parents to urge the school to buy a vacant lot adjacent
to the campus.  This is the first time she has participated in any kind of civic
activity.  The mother's daughter uses the television to participate in a support
group of teenage mothers that meet over the network.  Her son uses the network
to get temporary job assignments in grocery stores around town.  He is using
the television to improve his English, in lessons adjusted to his skill level, and
is studying math to improve his skills to apply for a cash register position.  Both
literacy and math programs are available at a downtown learning center, but the
distance and his irregular work schedule make home study much easier -- and
much less embarrassing.

     In this scenario, a computer, television and telephone are merged into
one modestly priced consumer electronics device.  Does this require some kind
of gee-whiz megapipe broadband firehose?  We'll get there, but consider what
we could be doing very soon.  Families were buying interactive CD players last
Christmas.  25,000 units a month.  Give your kid a joy stick and an interactive
encyclopedia, plugged into the TV.  Are we really that far away from using the
cable networks, or ISDN to switch to resources on the net?  Some studies assess
the value of the activities in the United States which could be affected by
interactive imaged information to the home, for  purposes of health, governance
and citizenship, informal  education, job training, literacy, numeracy, and
English as a second language to be in the range of several hundreds of  billions
of dollars annually.


NII, Cost Containment and the Deficit

     With a good information infrastructure, Americans might save, say, a
half day a year in dealing with government.  That might come to roughly 1/500
of GNP, or about $10 billion a year.  Job training:  The imaging power of
technology can provide a simulated task environment a worker needs to practice
needed skills.  How valuable could universal job training be if such services
were available in the home?  IBM and Xerox spend 4% or more of payroll on
training.  Estimates of how much is spent in the country as a whole on formal
job training vary between $30 and $44 billion, or perhaps 2% of annual payroll.
If the economy could gain from training as much as IBM or Xerox think its
worth the increase in value could be on the order of $100 billion annually.
Better informed decisions about surgical procedures could save Medicare billions
of dollars a year in unnecessary procedures.   Yesterday, someone remarked
that we needed to understand the costs of NOT having public access.  Public
access to Internet mail could reduce downtime between jobs through better
maintenance of personal acquaintance networks which could  be used for
employment searches.  Viewed in these terms, a telecommunications
infrastructure represents cost-containment.  This is a completely different way
of valueing the information infrastructure and is quite distinguishable from
traditional business models promoting, for example, interactive entertainment
and pay-per-view television.  Yet --again --the economic research in this area
is poor, and only at the earliest stage of inquiry.





Current Population Survey and the Internet

     Demographic surveys of non-institutional, individual use of the Internet
are lacking.  There are good statistics concerning connected internetworks,
connected institutions and connected machines or resources.  We speculate that
somewhere between 5 and 40 million people around the world use the Internet.
That's like saying that somewhere between 5 and 40 million people live in
California.  We just don't know yet how many people inhabit Cyberspace now,
what their attributes are or how those attributes are evolving and we need better
data.

     In 1988, an Educational Testing Service survey indicated that home and
school access to microcomputers provides a significant educational advantage to
children.  They also indicate that these advantages are unequally distributed
across economic, ethnic and gender categories.  The ETS study found that:
37% of children in families with incomes of more than $50,000 have computers
in their homes.  Only 3.4% of children in households with income less than
$10,000 have computers at home.  17% of all white children, 6% of blacks and
less than 5% of Hispanics use a computer at home.  Yet, the survey also found
that black children tend to use computers at home much more than their white
counterparts.  White children used home computers on average 2.8 days/week,
black children averaged 3.8 days/week.

     The Census Bureau found in 1989 that 15 percent of American
households had computers.  However, only 7 percent of households with income
under $25,000 had computers in their homes, versus about 40 percent for
households with income over $50,000.  Less than 5 percent of those age 65 and
over had home computers.  Only about 8 percent of black households and 8
percent of Hispanic households had home computers (versus 18 percent overall
for whites and non-Hispanics.)  Those with a high school education were about
half as likely to have home computers as those who are college graduates.
Those with less than a high school education were half as likely to have home
computers as those with a high school diploma.  Home computer use on its
own, however, does not imply network literacy, and this is the area we need to
learn about.

     October 1989 was a long time ago.  Remember the Berlin Wall?  It fell
that month.  Things have changed.  Since October 1989, of course, the personal
computer and on-line information services markets have exploded.  Federal
purchases of personal computers doubled, Internet connectivity has increased
exponentially with over 50% usage in the private sector, private BBS systems
have grown dramatically.  Personal computers have followed a now predictable
pattern of falling prices combined with ever increasing power and capacity.
Modems which cost $200 in 1989 could transfer perhaps 7-10 pages a minute.
Modems for less than $200 bought today can transfer over 50 pages a minute
rivaling ISDN.  We could perhaps expect the 1989 figures to follow a similar
path.

     What does the Census survey tell us about network literacy?  We have
to infer.  For example, in 1989 23% of all households with computers had
modems.   For young people in their late teens, use of bulletin boards was the
same or in some cases higher than the use of spreadsheets.  Electronic mail use
was reported at about a half percent of the total sample, although curiously,
electronic mail was used more heavily by part-time rather than by full-time
workers.  More curiously, electronic mail use by households with family income
less than $10,000 was twice as great than households earning more than $75,000
a year.  Bulletin board use among low-income households follows the same
pattern, with use twice as heavy than moderate income households, whose use
of bulletin boards is heavier than high income households.  The data is only
suggestive and is by no means significant.  Yet, it appears that home use of
bulletin boards and electronic mail is more valuable to the low and moderate
income user than the high income user.  Better and more recent data could
illuminate this observation.

     The Census Bureau will conduct a third survey of computer use by
Americans next October, 1993, and we can expect to see some long term
longitudinal patterns emerge against the two previous surveys.  The questions
will be updated slightly to, for example, inquire about CD-ROM and as to how
many computers are in the home.  However, simply surveying whether
electronic mail or BBS applications are used is inadequate because it gives us no
attribute information.  For example, we would want to know if a household
member has Internet access and if so by what means?  We would want to know
whether e-mail is being used to create and maintain new relationships, if e-mail
was used for job searching, whether BBS use was purely recreational or whether
it was being used for non-formal educational purposes similar to how a public
library would be used.

     These types of questions are too detailed for a Current Population
Survey to administer, and the survey questions for October have been
determined already and OMB approval has been secured.  However, if funded
through a public and private partnership, Census would be able to administer a
follow-up mail-in questionnaire in Februrary 1994, when the October data frame
was completed, to those households in which computers were being used.
Census estimates that about 26% of households would now own and use
computers, up from 15% in 1989.  That would be 26% of 60,000 households
surveyed in the October CPS, or 15,600 households that could be surveyed for
detailed applications use including networking.  A 50% response rate could be
expected, about 7,000 households.  This would cost perhaps a half million
dollars.  This funding could be assembled through a public and private
partnership comprised of executive agencies needing better demographic data for
promoting the national information infrastructure to private foundations seeking
better data to guide funding priorities for researching and promoting information
equity issues.

     Such a mail-in questionnaire ought to explore the penetration of the
Internet into the general population, service usage, and the manner connected.
These results could then be cross-tabulated with income, occupation, education,
location, ethnicity and other such variables.  Until then, it will be difficult to
identify and track how various population groups are affected by an emerging
national information infrastructure.


New Options for Federal Policy

Community Applications

     In Ohio, the Youngstown Freenet, a public computer network which
provides free access to Internet mail, a social services directory is available.  If
you are poor, you can go into a public library and sit a terminal.  Using the
arrow and enter keys are about all  you need to do.  People figure it out.  You
can navigate through a directory, alphabetically organized, of all manner of
agencies, churches, services -- and make your own descisions based on what you
can learn at that terminal.  And people do.  This kind of social service
"gateway" helps poor people gather intelligence.  In the not too distant future,
these gateways can be provided by internetworking through the television set
with a Nintendo joystick.  In Santa Monica, there is the important case of
homeless people using a public access network called "PEN" to organize with
citizen groups.  Such activity has also taken place over the Community Memory
Project in Berkeley.

     What about job banks?  A $14 million dollar Labor/Worker Profiling
program in 1993 and 1994 is proposed "to assist the States in developing
automated systems to identify laid-off workers who may have had difficulties in
finding new jobs, and to assist them in finding employment."  Such
automated systems, developed by states, could be readily integrated into job
banks offered through non-profit public access computer systems under
development in many cities around the country.  What if local civic networks,
like the Youngstown Freenet, maintained an online job bank that was
interconnected with this envisioned federal system?  And what if you could
navigate this job-bank at home, using your existing television set or a very
inexpensive PC with a joy stick?

     The Administration had proposed $64 million in stimulus funding for
Information Highway demonstration project grants for schools, cities, and
non-profit organizations through the National Telecommunications and
Information Administration.  While such funding failed passage in the stimulus
bill, this appropriation could rise to $150 million a year by 1995.  Civic
networking initiatives -- that is, regional and local public information systems
and services -- fit this investment framework well.   NTIA grants for local,
non-profit demonstration projects could help leverage other federal efforts, such
as the Labor/Worker profiling program as well as state and local funding.

     Proposed Community Development Banks would receive $350 million
over four years to finance small businesses and service programs in depressed
inner-city locations, while a rural development initiative would pump hundreds
of millions targeted to small, emerging "micro-enterprises."  These investments
would provide "increased employment opportunities for rural individuals, and
upgrade community infrastructure to improve the quality of life for all rural
residents."  Such infrastructure, particularly to support very small businesses,
could also support locally operated information services which could bring
additional incomes to rural communities.  Within this mix again, are set-aside
opportunities for civic networking at the regional and local level, where such
activities show promise in quality of life improvements or community
development.

     In fact, set asides for local public access telecommunications which can
enhance the service mission of federal programs or increases their efficiency
needs to be established for every line item in the domestic budget where
applicable.  This should be a key recommendation of the National Performance
Review.

     The Federal government could leverage the internetworking of rural
America for less than the cost of a B1 bomber.  The Really Big Number would
be about $747 million dollars over five years.  Here's the picture.  There are
3,100 county extension offices around the United States, each with about five
professional and two support staff.  Why not make county extension offices
Internet nodes that will extend tangible benefits to rural communities?

     Five year capital procurement cycles are coming due, so let's say all
these offices get new Macs, a laser printer, a terminal server, an Appletalk
Internet router, and a few high-speed modems, perhaps $35,000.  Toss in a
$300 a month leased-line back to the Land Grant college.    Hire a support and
leadership staff person to get the schools, libraries and small businesses on-line
at about $35,000 a year.  We just spent $73,000 for the first year to upgrade an
average county office.

     Next, for years two through five, assume a 10% maintenance contract
of $3,500 a year, $35,000 for the support and leadership position and $3,600 for
the leased-line:  $42,000 a year not counting annual adjustments such as
cost-of-living.   A county office onramp to the information highway might cost
$284,100 over five years.  If you carry that figure across 3,100 extension
offices, the price tag is $227 million for the first year, and $130 million a year
after that.

     Consider how this might really play out.  First, as time goes by,
computers cost less and get more powerful.  Each state will procure new
technology when its ready -- next year, or the following year, so procurement
costs decline over time.  Second, someone must serve in a support and
leadership role -- to get the community connected.  President Clinton wants a
new National Service Program to help graduates pay off student loans through
two years of community service.  In this case, the new staff position becomes
an "off-budget" item -- leveraged through a separate program, a savings of over
$200 million.  Third, the monthly leased-line cost to the Land Grant college
should be split among the groups which access the net through the county
extension office -- $300 a month drops to $100 a month, saving over $30
million.  Finally, the Really Big Number is going to be spread around evenly
between federal, state and local budget authorities.


Conclusion

     Information infrastructure funded by government should target
important non-market applications.  Such non-market applications should
promote preventive health-care, job training, informal education, enhance civic
participation in governance, and reduced costs of delivering services.  Pilot
projects should be funded within strict criteria which could demonstrate and
evaluate the use of available, open platform technologies which use
internetworking tools, in coordinating and integrating local public activities
conducted across all media -- radio, television, cable and computer.   The
October 1993 CPS will collect data on home computer use.  A mail-in followup
questionnaire should be administered in February 1994 to gather detailed
information on individual network use from households with computers.
Finally, any long-term strategy for a National Information Infrastructure which
uses public money (that is to say, where the NREN is heading) -- particularly
if used to leverage private investments -- must also demonstrate positive effects
on low and  moderate income families, and potential for lifting Americans out
of poverty rather than creating a two-tier society of information haves and
have-nots.

     An infrastructure is not only a set of facilities, but the people and skills
needed to use them.  Facilities, people and skills must be commonly available
to further activities of both public and private parties.  Ultimately, when people
have access to, and the skills to use the infrastructure, they more fully share in
its benefits, and the nation will as a whole, will benefit as well.