Over the next two months, the Federal Communications Commission will be holding a series of open public workshops on various aspects of the emerging “National Broadband Plan,” which it is mandated to deliver by the end of the year. The workshops cover everything from deployment of broadband services to how these new services may help improve health care, education, job training and the environment, and they are bound to be an important locus of ongoing debate as the powerful FCC gets reshaped under the Obama administration. Indeed, our very own Andrew Rasiej has been invited to participate in the first one, this coming August 6th on e-government and civic engagement.
We think these workshops could be very enlightening, and appreciate that the commission is making the process so open to the public. So we’ve lined up a bunch of techPresident bloggers and PdF friends to track the broadband workshops, which will be webcast live as they happen around the country. We won’t be formally “live-blogging” the hearings but you should expect to see timely reports on each of the following hearings:
-E-gov and civic engagement, August 6, by Nancy Scola
-Deployment to the unserved and underserved, August 12, by John McEnany [UPDATE: Due to an unexpected emergency, John was unable to blog this session.]
-Technology/Wireless, August 13, by Josh Levy [UPDATE: Due to travel obligations, Josh was unable to blog this session.]
-International lessons, August 18, by David Isenberg
-Consumer welfare, August 20, by Shaun Dakin
-Energy, environment and transportation, August 25, by Dave Witzel
-Technology applications and devices, August 27, by Alan Rosenblatt
-Health care, September 2, by Esther Dyson (tentative)
If you’d like to volunteer to guest-blog one of the remaining sessions, feel free to drop me a note at micah-at-personaldemocracy-dot-com.
August 02, 2009