Brainstorming the National Broadband Plan
BY Nancy Scola | Friday, September 11 2009
The Federal Communications Commission has just launched an IdeaScale-powered section of their Broadband.gov site. You've seen these tools before. You vote ideas up, down, and you leave comments. Two thoughts, though. The first is that while it's a good step to invite more people into the process, we've reached the point of agreement amongst anyone who would actually leave a comment on this site that broadband is of phenomenal benefit and we really should be making it more available to more people more reliably at a lower cost. Yay, broadband. The sticky wicket, though, is how, exactly, you go about doing that. Neither the experts at the FCC nor the minds at America's telecom companies have managed to figure that out, so it would be enormously helpful to have a public discussion that focuses on that, rather than about how great it is to be able to remotely connect up with your doctor or take classes over high-speed broadband than you otherwise would be able to take.
The second point, and I think we're getting into "hobby horse" territory for me now, is that we musn't forget that, for all the new Twitter and blogging and IdeaScaling and online public workshops that the FCC is doing now, the FCC website is really, really bad. Chair Julius Genachowski joked at the Gov 2.0 Summit this week that the site was designed by Kevin Werbach back in 1996, and it hasn't changed since. If I'm a small advocacy group trying to arrange to get people in my city neighborhood or rural enclave high-speed Internet that they can afford, then I want to be able to reliably find, say, information on grants and programs that will actually put wire in the ground and dishes on rooftops, more than I care about the agency's banging new Twitter stream. As much as it's encouraging that some small section of the FCC, namely the new Broadband Plan wing, is experimenting and innovating online, it doesn't change the fact that the most basic building block of the FCC's public presence, the website, is 13 years outdated.