|
|
Getting Started
Welcome to the self-assessment guide for communities. This guide is designed to provide a benchmark for your community’s current readiness to participate in the enormous economic, social, governmental and personal changes that high-speed communications entail. More importantly, this guide provides a vision of specific steps and actions your community—government, businesses, schools, community groups, and citizens—can take to benefit from these changes.
Using the Guide
This guide is a self-assessment tool designed to help determine the readiness of your town, city, county, or region to undertake broadband deployment. It offers a clear snapshot of where different communities fall along a continuum of readiness – from a stage-zero community with none of the necessary infrastructure to a stage-five community, which has full broadband deployment and ubiquitous applications. Wherever your community falls along this continuum, the guide will provide a framework to facilitate discussions, drive decisions, and produce results.
Using this guide effectively requires the coordination of a substantial amount of information. We believe the guide will be most useful if used collaboratively by a coalition of community members concerned about the area’s technological and economic development. Working together, community members can pool knowledge, data, and experience to produce a shared strategic plan.
In order to use this tool effectively, we have chosen to divide the community into nine separate sectors. Each of these sectors covers a different part of the community that has use for broadband technology, but may have different criteria for defining how broadband access affects their activities. For each sector, we have defined criteria to assess readiness for broadband deployment. There are three categories that best represent the elements required to measure the penetration of all levels of broadband in your community - Networked Places, Applications & Services, and Leadership.
There are hundreds of criteria that one could use to assess readiness for broadband deployment. We selected the following categories that we believe best represent the elements that need to be in place to capture the benefits of full broadband deployment in each sector.
|
