Because of the pandemic, for the past two years the annual Net Inclusion conference had been held virtually. This year Net Inclusion 2022 – bringing together digital inclusion advocates, academics, Internet Service Providers, and policymakers – will return to an in-person event. 

As in years past, the conference is being organized by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), a national grassroots organization that works collaboratively with digital inclusion practitioners and advocates “to craft, identify and disseminate financial and operational resources for digital inclusion programs while serving as a bridge to policymakers and the general public.”

The three-day conference, which will be hosted at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon Feb. 15-17 and livestreamed to accommodate those unable to travel, will feature interactive sessions that range from celebrating the “Digital Equity Champion Awards,” a plenary on federal broadband funding, another that explores structural racism featuring NDIA's own Regina Cooper Benjamin, culminating in a fireside chat with FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel.

The panel speakers are a Who's Who of community broadband experts. ILSR’s Christopher Mitchell will be on a panel to talk about “Building Subsidized & Affordable Broadband.” Deb Socia of the Enterprise Center will join a panel on "Economic Development and Digitial Inclusion," while Next Century Cities' Francella Ochillo will be a featured speaker on a panel that explores "Local Government Funding, Office, Coordination & Policy." 

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance's Net Inclusion conference this year is a webinar series, running eight consecutive weeks between April 7 and May 26. One-hour webinars at 1pm ET on Wednesday each week will feature a diverse cast of policy experts, advocates, city officials, and nonprofits to talk about what's going on at the local and state level. Register free here.

The first panel, titled "The Structural Racism Behind Digital Inequity," will feature Chrissie Powell (Executive Director, Byte Back Baltimore), James Walker, II (Founder/CEO, Informative Technologies Inc.), Quincy B. (Founder & Director, EraseTheRedline Inc.), and Rebecca Kauma (Economic and Digital Inclusion Program Manager, City of Long Beach). The panel will be moderated by Alisa Valentin (Special Advisor, Office of FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks). 

See the list of subsequent panels below:

• April 14th: Digital Navigators: Models, Partners, Assessment, and Funding
• April 21st: Coalitions and Digital Equity Planning
• April 28th: Local Government and State Digital Inclusion Funding, Offices, Coordination, and Policy
• May 5th: Weaving Digital Inclusion into Existing Community and Government Programs
• May 12th: Partnering with Healthcare Organizations to Increase Digital Equity
• May 19th: Filling the Gap – Building Subsidized & Affordable Broadband

During the final event on May 26th, the NDIA will announce the winners of this year's Digital Equity Benton Awards. Two awards will be handed out this year. The first is the Digital Equity Champion, which “will recognize an outstanding individual who has made a difference in the field of digital equity.” The Emerging Leader Award, on the other hand, will “acknowledge an up-and-coming digital inclusion practitioner.” 

Read more about the awards here.

Register free here.

It’s February, which means the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) is once again taking applications for the 2021 Charles Benton Digital Equity Champion Awards. The deadline is February 12th. 

From the announcement:

Named for Charles Benton, the founder of Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, NDIA created the awards to recognize leadership and dedication in advancing digital equity: from promoting the ideal of accessible and affordable communications technology for all Americans to crafting programs and policies that make it a reality.

Two awards will be handed out this year. The first is the Digital Equity Champion, which “will recognize an outstanding individual who has made a difference in the field of digital equity.” The Emerging Leader Award, on the other hand, will “acknowledge an up-and-coming digital inclusion practitioner.” 

Winners will be chosen based on their past work and commitment to advancing digital equity across the country. Nomination will be judged according to individuals’:

• Sustained commitment to digital inclusion programs, practices, and/or policy work
• Applied innovative approaches to addressing and solving problems
• Extensive use of data and evaluation to shape digital inclusion programs and share best practices
• Demonstrated leadership in his/her community, and/or
• Collaboration that can be scaled and replicated

Winners will be announced at the upcoming Net Inclusion webinar series, which runs from April 7th to May 26th. You can register for the event here.

Past winners include Rebecca F. Kauma, Economic and Digital Inclusion Program Manager at The City of Long Beach, for her work on leading more equitable economic and digital inclusion outcomes for the city’s low-income neighborhoods and community of color, and Deb Socia, CEO of the Enterprise Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

On Episode 3 of Connect This!, Christopher is joined by Angela Siefer, Executive Director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, Deb Socia, President of The Enterprise Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Travis Carter, CEO of US Internet. 

Tune is to hear them talk about solving the broadband gap and all of the obstacles it presents, from digital literacy training, to redlining, to funding programs. Along the way they also talk about how the federal government has failed to connect people over the last nine months and whether they're optimistic about a Biden administration and the future of broadband.

Mentioned during the course of the episode: An episode of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast with Deb Socia and Geoff Millener about digital inclusion in Chattanooga during the early months of the pandemic, and a white paper about tier flattening by Verizon and AT&T which forces users to pay high costs for decaying broadband infrastructure.

Subscribe to the show using this feed. 

Watch the episode below.

Podcasts can be a great way to glean important insights on all things broadband – from the policies and politics that shape the digital landscape to the pathways and platforms that connect us to or keep us from the Internet.

If you haven’t already tuned into our own weekly podcast, "Broadband Bits", consider this an invitation to do so. (Or the brand new Connect This show.) But, we also want to highlight two new limited podcast series that we think are worth checking out.

#SpreadtheTech

One is #SpreadtheTech created by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) and Digital Charlotte – a ten-episode series that “showcases interviews with digital inclusion stakeholders and practitioners from across the country highlighting their community-based efforts to address the digital divide.” This Verizon-sponsored podcast is hosted by NDIA Executive Director Angela Siefer, Digital Charlotte’s Executive Director Bruce Clark, and the Director of Operations for Digital Charlotte, Andrew Au.

In the first four episodes, #SpreadtheTech covers how digital inclusion advocates have pivoted their work to focus on the significance of Internet connectivity as we deal with the on-going Covid-19 pandemic.

The first episode looks at how the North Carolina Department of Information Technology is responding to connectivity challenges brought on by Covid-19. The featured guest of that episode is Amy Huffman, Digital Inclusion and Policy Manager for the Broadband Infrastructure Office within the North Carolina Office of Information and Technology Services.

Huffman reports on how the state created an interactive searchable map that allows North Carolina residents to enter their address to see if they have access to one of the discount or low-cost programs the state’s Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are offering. The map also shows the locations of community anchor institutions (libraries, schools, and community colleges) which have Wi-Fi hotspots in their parking lots that allow residents to access the Internet from their cars.

This piece was written by Christopher Mitchell and Ry Marcattilio-McCracken

The second round of Techdirt’s Greenhouse Policy forum lands on the topic of broadband in the age of Covid and brings together a collection of voices speaking to facets of an important conversation. “The triple whammy of limited competition, regulatory capture, and Congressional corruption,” Karl Bode writes in introduction, “has resulted in the U.S. being utterly mediocre (or worse) in nearly every major broadband metric that matters.” Deb Socia and Geoff Millener have contributed to talk about online education, Harold Feld writes about radio spectrum, Terique Boyce talks about New York City’s Master Plan, and Jonathan Schwantes writes about treating broadband like a public utility. We likewise contributed an essay on community broadband and the steps local governments have taken to get citizens connected.

We encourage you to read it over at Techdirt, but will repost it below.

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When it comes to the goal of ensuring all Americans have affordable and reliable Internet access, we are pretty much stalled. Sure, the FCC will make noise every year about our quest to bridge the digital divide, but it has focused solely on for-profit private solutions. And while there are many hundreds of good local companies making important local investments, the FCC has tended to throw the most money at the few extremely big ones (the same big ones that are on the other side of the revolving door at the FCC for most employees, whether staff or political appointees.)

In a new essay published by the Nonprofit Quarterly, Christopher tackles the connectivity gap in the context of the ongoing pandemic and how it could be solved by a variety of proven nonprofit models that are already connecting tens of thousands of Americans efficiently to fast, affordable networks.  

See an excerpt below, but check out the whole piece over at the Nonprofit Quarterly:

One of the longest-lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic may be the lost education opportunities for millions of children. While the vast majority of children studying remotely are adversely affected, several million students have no home broadband Internet access at all. As a result, they have been extraordinarily disadvantaged. For too many, public schooling has effectively ended.

[S]omewhere between 15 and 41 million Americans cannot buy a reasonable broadband connection today because their home is not served by an ISP. Most, but not all, of these homes are in rural America, and we typically talk about this problem as being one of “access.” Tens of millions more Americans live in a location that’s served by an ISP, but they cannot afford the fees or face other barriers such as lacking a device or digital literacy. This problem is typically referred to as a lack of digital inclusion, or the digital divide, although these terms are often tossed around loosely.

There is no single policy to solve the broadband problems faced by the nation. In most cases, better networks and lower prices would really help, but achieving that would require different strategies in rural or urban areas. Challenges around literacy and online safety/security will be more difficult.

The answer then is the answer now: nonprofit business models. In a nation as large and varied as the United States, a single business model rarely meets everyone’s needs. Universal electricity required some 4,000 municipal electric departments and nearly 1,000 rural electric cooperatives. And it worked. Not because municipal networks and cooperatives are magical, but because they have the right incentives.