Initial details regarding the actual parameters of the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) are finally beginning to be released. The information is rather limited, but here's what we can glean thus far from the Recovery.gov website:

• Applications for the first wave of funding requests are going to be due[released by] June 30, 2009 (to be awarded in December 2009). This is remarkably short notice to turn around a well thought out proposal -- especially since the details of what these proposals should actually look like haven't been released.
• The second wave of funding requests will be from October to December, 2009.
• The third wave will take place from April to June 2010.
• All awards must be made by September 2010.
• $350 million will be available for broadband mapping.
• $250 million will be avialable to encourage sustainable broadband adoption.
• $200 million will be available to increase public computer center capacity.
• The key metrics for measuring success (and thus, evaluating the competitiveness of each grant application) look to be:
  Jobs created
  Census tracks served
  Homes/businesses passed
  Investment funding ARRA leverages
  New equipment/capacity/users of the network

Hopefully, more information will be release soon as this info is woefully incomplete. In the interim, many of us continue to search for insight into what NTIA and RUS have planned regarding the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

If you have more info, please let me know.

Below is my testimony before NTIA from March 16, 2009. While most of the other folks who presented focused on the impacts for corporations, I wanted to bring the conversation back around to what was primarily important -- the potential positive impacts on local communities. Here's what I said:

Thank you very much. It is good to be here.

For those who know me, I will be taking a slightly different perspective on things. I spent the past decade in addition to my work at the New America Foundation also doing community technology deployment. I have been climbing on roofs, building coalitions and suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous local politics, and I have been successfully implementing solutions in communications that people said were impossible to deploy.

So let me begin by restating what I hope is obvious, which is that private profits are the byproduct of the critically important digital inclusion work -- work that needs to be done desperately in this country -- but they are not the end goal of the stimulus funding.

Our fundamental goal should be to search for the most efficacious eligible entities, both public and private, and maximize the social and economic benefits of this national intervention. It is critically important for NTIA to evaluate each application on its own merits, and not disallow any specific entities or organizations from applying a priori.

The fact is that broad band stimulus is so desperately needed is indicative of the woeful state of current service provisioning within many communities. It's very existence that of the BTOP program points to the need for new thinking and innovation and new strategies that dramatically differ from prior attempts.

The types of eligible private entities we must support must go far beyond usual suspects. Within the private sector NGO's of all types must be eligible and must include nonprofits, hybrid partnerships with municipal entities, etc., etc., etc.

Current measures, business models and implementation plans have far too often marginalized considerable resources and expertise within local communities. The deprioritization of local control and accountability has too often led to far less effective IT training for local residents, lowered educational outcomes, decreased salience to local constituents of the systems that are deployed, and the marginalization of these communities that these resources are supposed to be serving.

So NTIA has an opportunity to begin to address these digital injustices. We have both an obligation to ensure that the very best organizations receive public funding, and the concomitant duty to ensure that the most socially and economically just outcomes are deployed. Diversity ensures that universal and broadband access and the widest span of digital resources becomes a reality.

To sum up, digital inclusion is not just about the services offered, it's about the local control and accountability of these organizations. It's about finding the right institutions and organizations to deliver these services in the first place.

I very much look forward to the following discussion and public comment. Thank you.