Creating Cyber Places

Telecommunications Policy in the Public Interest:
Putting Communities First

by June Holley
October 16, 2002

As we discuss and debate what constitutes the public interest in the area of telecommunications development, it's useful to picture in our minds the thousands of low-income communities dotting our landscape, where people and organizations struggle daily to craft places where life is healthy, safe, and basic needs are met. These communities, whether in an urban ghetto or hidden in the hills of Appalachia, are like the canary in the coal mine ‹ the damage they experience is a harbinger of worse to come for the entire society. Perhaps we can best approach issues of information access and equity by asking: how can telecommunications policy support the creation of healthy communities, and as it does this, help bring forth a healthy world?

We are talking here about transformation ‹ rapid, basic change in our social landscape. We know that change can happen very rapidly. The last two decades of development in the telecommunications and information arenas are certainly an example of the breathtaking pace at which new technologies can stream through our society.

Most often change courses by us, seemingly out of our control, massive, undefinable. Yet the last decades have also seen extraordinary breakthroughs in our understanding of change processes. Scientists in many fields are developing the artful science of complex adaptive systems (including current trends in chaos theory), which describes transformative change in complex systems. However, very little of this understanding has been applied to the study of complex systems such as telecommunications and information infrastructure, let alone the structure of society as a whole. We urge policy makers to draw from the tremendous wealth of knowledge in this field as the basis for telecommunications policy truly in the public interest.

In human systems, the primary medium of transformation is relationships. Very simply put, the fastest way to produce beneficial change in a human system is to change who is relating to whom. Many of the problems with which we are currently struggling are due to isolation and separation of groups and individuals from others who are different from them. The world is speckled with monocultures of people, and yet to spark the creativity needed to solve the problems facing us today, we must have social fields seeded with a broad diversity of perspectives, ideas, and experience.

We are convinced that we can generate tremendous positive change in a very short period of time by enabling people who don't normally interact, due to differences or distances, to begin dialogues that enable them to find common interests and organize joint projects. When we evaluate telecommunications policy we need to first examine whether the policy encourages these creative community-building processes. Putting communities first in the process of re-inventing our information infrastructure will lead to transformed and healthier communities and society.

Specific features of a communities-first telecommunications policy and process follow:;

  (1) Telecommunications policy needs to support interactive processes that enable people in communities to experiment, create, and then continually improve what they have created.
   (a) The information infrastructure needs to build on existing human networks anchored in neighborhoods and communities. It needs only to amplify, not create, these networks.
   (b) It needs to link individuals in these communities to others in the community with whom they seldom interact as peers. Our experience has shown that when small groups representing broad spectrums of society ‹ and always including people with low incomes ‹ get together to design a new program or service, it's significantly more effective than any created by a single group.
   (c) It needs to link communities to other communities around the world so that all have access to a thick portfolio of provocative ideas and nourishing resources.
   (2) Telecommunications policy needs to provide for facilitation of these creative processes. People anchored in the community can link people with similar interests or needs and assist groups of people who are discussing an idea online or through interactive video to move it into implementation.
  (3) It needs to support learning processes. People who have accomplished something together must be encouraged to share their successes (and even more important, their failures) with others so that learning can occur rapidly and spread throughout the system.
   (4) It needs to link communities and the firms in them to new, emerging markets since the availability of jobs that are creative, engaging, and well-paying is the foundation of healthy communities. It needs to encourage schools, banks, social service agencies, and community groups to work collaboratively to design specific projects to support new job creation and firm expansion ‹ through custom designed training programs, transitional support, access to capital programs, modernization programs, and marketing support. In this scenario, social and governmental services are no longer a stand-alone phenomenon that unwittingly fosters dependence, but a set of concrete, customized services to support people and firms transitioning into the mainstream economy.
  (5) Telecommunications policy needs to invest in communities, rather than establish a whole new set of rigidly defined and implemented government services. Transformative processes can occur in many different ways, and in the long term many of the processes can work on a market basis. Communities need to be supported as they develop information and communication systems that grow from their history and meet their needs ‹ as they identify them. Communities need to be the ones designing the telecommunications system that serves their community. Telecommunications systems need to be customizable and capable of ongoing modification as the community changes and flourishes.

June Holley is co-director of the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks (ACEnet), 94 North Columbus Road, Athens, OH 45701; telephone (614) 592-3854, fax (614) 593-5451; email: jholley@tmn.com