Transforming Everything? Evaluating Broadband's Impacts Across Policy Areas

Broadband, or high-speed internet, has been called the most important infrastructure challenge of the century. It has the potential to connect remote communities, streamline health care services, and support innovation across education, economics, and numerous other fields. Given the growing and widespread investments in broadband, how can citizens and policymakers determine whether the promise of broadband is being fulfilled? Transforming Everything? offers a comprehensive guide to the complexities and possibilities of broadband as a social technology. It addresses challenges for evaluating broadband initiatives across diverse contexts and proposes guidance and methods for evaluation for policymakers and researchers. Contributors draw on pioneering research in program evaluation and information technology to explore broadband applications in health, education, and civic engagement. They also address key measurement and evaluation challenges in the field today, including issues in privacy and security and inadequate research methods for target populations. Collectively, the chapters in this volume raise important questions for improving research and evaluation in broadband use and producing actionable evidence in a highly dynamic environment. Transforming Everything? prepares readers with a critical understanding of broadband technology and the necessary evidence to assess whether broadband programs and policy are truly empowering the communities they serve.

Karen Mossberger is the Frank and June Sackton Professor in the School of Public Affairs and Director of the Center on Technology, Data, and Society at Arizona State University. Her research includes digital inequality, digital government, impacts of technology use, and local government. Her co-authored books on technology include Digital Cities: The Internet and the Geography of Opportunity (2012, Oxford), Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Participation and Society (2008, MIT Press), and Virtual Inequality: Beyond the Digital Divide (2003, Georgetown University Press). She is an elected fellow in the National Academy of Public Administration. Eric W. Welch is Professor in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University, where he teaches organization and network theory, institutional design, and science and innovation policy. He received his doctorate from the Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs where he specialized in science and environmental policy. Dr. Welch currently directs the Center for Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy Studies (C-STEPS) at ASU. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, refereed proceedings, and book chapters. Yonghong Wu is Professor in the Department of Public Administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received his PhD from the Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs where he specialized in public finance and science and technology policy. Dr. Wu's recent research has focused on state and local fiscal policy-making, public finance, and government funding of research and development. He has published one book and over 30 peer-reviewed articles, refereed proceedings, and book chapters.