With the Washington, DC, local elections looming just two weeks away, I had the opportunity to attend today’s Washington Post Mayoral Debate at the Newseum. Even though filled with ticketholders, the room was buzzing with laptops and smartphones as those of us in our seats sent debate updates out to our friends and social networks online. Want to submit a question for the candidates? Broadband powers your access to the Washington Post website to submit your question. Want to follow the discussion live on Twitter? You could follow the discussion online here http://www.slurp140.com/dcmayor. Want to learn what the experts thought of the debate? Broadband powers searchable news.
The candidates themselves are also embracing broadband technologies so that voters can access their messages and give donations at their convenience online. Political ads may run once or twice on TV, but they are available on demand through candidate websites, and generating thousands of online views. Of course, no campaign is complete without a social networking strategy, so local candidates are embracing tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to access voters at on the websites they visit daily.
From local to national, as politicians (and the publications that cover them) increasingly rely on broadband tools, it is critical for voters to adopt broadband to be a part of the dialogue.
Broadband plays a large role in many aspects of our public safety. However, we most often discuss the role of broadband in public safety in terms of improving first response systems and national security. But with the latest threat to the public being food safety, Daniel Castro of technology think tank ITIF takes a closer look at how better use of broadband technology could minimize damages in “the next Salmonella Egg-idemic.”
Castro points out that today’s big farms (egg and otherwise) are widely embracing technology already, from monitoring soil moisture to RFID tags to track livestock. But with a larger trend of foodborne illness outbreaks in the United States in recent years, Castro suggests several ways technology could be used to help with detection and prevention, even beyond the CDC’s Pulsenet, an information system used to detect foodborne illness case clusters.
In the future, better information could allow public health officials to identify and trace outbreaks more quickly. For example, if a nationwide system of interoperable electronic health records were made available in real-time for public research, this could allow epidemiologists to track outbreaks from unreported or undiagnosed illnesses by looking at data on reported symptoms. The FDA is also developing new technologies to rapidly capture, analyze and share data on foodborne pathogens through a web-based, interactive system.
Castro goes on to cite several government and private sector food safety projects in development that will take full advantage of today’s broadband technology. He concludes by encouraging a policy framework that will best enable these potentially life-saving innovations to flourish, reminding policymakers “IT has an important role to play in monitoring, detecting and responding to public health threats and protecting the safety of our food supply.”
Today, a New York Times tech article takes a closer look at recent Pew data to reveal that broadband usage among African-Americans jumped 22 percent this year over 2009. The article notes that despite digital divide challenges such as relevance and digital literacy, the economic downturn seems to be serving as an impetus for turning to broadband to help with career information.
“Although the rise in home broadband usage among African-Americans seems surprising in light of the current recession,” said Aaron Smith, senior research specialist at Pew, the fact that a greater percentage of African-Americans say lack of broadband access is a disadvantage, particularly for obtaining career information, “speaks to a recognition within the African-American community that digital connectivity is essential, even — and perhaps especially — during hard economic times.”
As broadband delivers job skills, research, and opportunities, it seems that our current economic downturn could be a trigger for further broadband adoption.
One of the very important sectors of society that broadband is helping to improve is health care. With firm evidence of the progress that broadband-enabled telemedicine applications provide in treatment, costs, and overall efficiency, the FCC is charging forward with their rural telemedicine plan. NPR’s All Things Considered took note with a feature yesterday walking listeners (and readers) through examples of the opportunities broadband powers in rural health care.
Two afternoons a week, Dr. Alison Semrad, an endocrinologist, sits at a desk and consults with patients over a broadband video conference.
In a recent conference, Laura McKewan sat in a chair in front of a camera at a clinic 300 miles away in Eureka. She has Addison’s disease, a rare condition that affects the adrenal glands. McKewan would have to drive six hours to San Francisco to see an endocrinologist, so she jumped at the chance to consult with Semrad.
This comes on the heels of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s recent trip to a Seattle Children’s Hospital for a demonstration of their video conferencing system, which is improving their patient care. Of course, this is just the beginning. As facilities and patients adopt broadband at greater rates, more people in rural areas will be able to embrace video conferencing as a standard part of their health care. In fact, the vice president of information systems of Kadlec, the company that demonstrated at this event, predicts that eventually “they’re going to become as commonplace as telephones.” Read more: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2010/08/14/1301149/kadlec-talks-to-specialists-via.html#ixzz0wyUELyfm
Last week, I had the opportunity to sit down one-on-one with the two term former Mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana, Graham Richard. This was our premier event in our Broadband Connections series, where we’ll be talking with numerous people powering our broadband revolution. Watch the video below (also aired on C-SPAN!) to hear us discuss how broadband helped him to improve jobs, education, health care, and so much more, in his community, along with the advice he’d like to share with the Mayors of today and tomorrow!
Participants ranging from government agencies, emergency management professionals, disaster response organizations, tech companies and concerned citizens will be discussing how to most effectively harness the power of new media to improve emergency and disaster response communications. Topics will include:
Harnessing Collaboration in Emergency
The Technology Behind Social Data
Federal, State, and Local Government: Responding to the Challenge
Language, Technology and Connecting Responders
Click here for the full agenda. And tune in below to watch!!
The National Endowment for the Arts, a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, released new findings on American participation in the arts through technology in a report titled Audience 2.0. The interactive report explores whois and how are people participating in the arts through electronic media, including the Internet, television, radio, computers, and handheld devices. In an introductory video message from NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman released with the report, he clarifies that contrary to the theory that technology is the nemesis to the arts, it is in fact enhancing the field and creating new audiences.
Consider these findings:
For many Americans — primarily older Americans, lower income, and racial/ethnic minority groups — electronic media is the only way they participate in benchmark arts events.
The 15.4 percent of U.S. adults who use media only to engage with the arts are equally likely to be urban or rural.
Twenty-one percent (47 million) of all U.S. adults reported using the Internet to view music, theater, or dance performances in the last 12 months. Twenty-four percent (55 million) obtained information about the arts online.
In conjunction with the release of the report, NEA also launched their official agency channels on YouTube and Facebook. “We are faced with the Internet, social media, and other new technologies, and I believe the arts field must embrace them and integrate them into our work.” said Chairman Landesman in his video greeting.
Yet another compelling reason Americans need broadband access and adoption.
The theme for this year’s Supernova conference was “perestroika,” which is a word from the last days of the Soviet Union meaning “building around.” Of course at the Supernova conference, the word was applied throughout numerous keynotes and panels to reflect the current re-structuring of technology and related policy. Representatives from government, industry, startups, communications, and numerous other sectors, contributed their expertise to evolve the conversation on open government, entrepreneurship, broadband regulation, and more.
NextGenWeb spoke with conference founder Kevin Werbach about what he hopes conference participants took away from the two-day event. Werbach believes that one of the greatest challenges in government is the isolation. He finds that the current administration is working hard to get out of that bubble and hopes that this conference is a part of that. Watch the video below for more:
The Supernova conference isn’t just about broadband technology and tech policy, but also about the fields that they enable, like innovation and entrepreneurship. In a panel dedicated to exploring the new, networked business operation, the following experts weighed in on the latest in corporate strategy, collaborative platforms, and who is winning in today’s start-up world.
Hsu was first to present and attributed the importance of networks for innovation to the following three areas -
1) Knowledge specialization (low hanging fruit already covered)
2) No single organization or individual has a monopoly on the inputs to innovation
3) Increased competitive pressure
Kopelman believes that today’s networks are key platforms, going beyond summits and meet-ups, to sharing ratings and reviews. As these networks become more robust, there is increased access to information from hires, to PR, to pitches. Kopelman cited a situation when Mint.com first launched at the Techcrunch 50 conference and the response was so abundant that the system crashed. It was tapping into the network of fellow venture capitalists (VC’s) that helped him to rapidly identify an expert and get the problem resolved within an hour.
Betaworks’ Weissman agrees that there is a radical shift in the way people interact with media and social media. Weissman, co-founder of the New York based incubator, is thinking about API’s, apps, and the ways that users experience the Internet to create organizations that reflect the way businesses interact today.
Department of Commerce’s Berejka applauded the US for leadership in the Internet entrepreneurship space. He believes the role of policymakers has to be light touch, do no harm, but protect the free flow of information.
A member of the audience asked if the trend of transparency in funding and VCs is leading to an increase in deals. The panel was unanimous that the networks are definitely helping as the technology has lowered the costs of entry, for both sides, and has eliminated middlemen. However, the flip side of that is now your network is part of your value, so you will also be judged by the worth of your community.
Representatives from several unique arms of the U.S. government sat on a panel at Supernova today to update attendees on where we, as a nation, stand in technology policy and open government, a year and a half into this Administration.
Danny Sepulveda of the Office of Senator Kerry says that the Administration is creating broadband opportunity via stimulus grants, broadband policy, and spectrum access. He finds that although there are challenges to open government because of the varying interests of Members of Congress and the White House, he believes the key to success is working together to establish and implement joint principles of an open government.
Tom Power of NTIA is highly involved in broadband opportunities under the stimulus programs of the Recovery Act. He says that NTIA works toward funding projects that can sustain themselves and will also help with broadband adoption, noting that access can’t be solved with infrastructure alone. Power also mentioned the Broadband Match program, the agency’s online collaboration portal that helps connect grantees.
Beth Noveck is the U.S. Deputy C.T.O. and leads the White House’s Open Government Initiative. Noveck believes the open government concept goes beyond government transparency, to applications, collaboration, and the economy. She believes the key to success with open government is to combine traditional ways of working with new options. Noveck also assured the audience that privacy and national security are considered before the release of data.
The panel concluded in agreement on not only the challenge of laws that were created before the Internet age, but also that although we’ve come a long way, we still have a long way to go.
Sign up for email and Twitter updates.
social networking
Stats, news, and info on broadband and the networks that support it.
social networking