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March 17, 2003
local government & online civil society
"Reduction in Civics Classes Mirrors Decline in Youth Vote": this is a pretty good article on youth civic engagement in yesterday's Boston Globe.
I gave a paper today at the American Society for Public Administration's Annual Conference, arguing that local governments should support independent voluntary associations in producing elaborate websites with databases, interactive maps, searchable archives, researched and edited articles, structured deliberation forums, and streaming videos. I believe that local governments can and should help in some of these ways:
- Providing modest grants and technical assistance. Even a total pool of grant money on the order of $100,000 in a county of (say) one million people would catalyze a lot of good work
- Publicizing the availability of relevant information that can be put online in enhanced and creative forms—information such as GIS mapping data, historical records, and photographs.
- Regulating local Internet service providers (ISP's), especially cable companies, to ensure that they do not provide services that discriminate against nonprofits or against people who want to create their own websites. If an ISP were to block you from visiting a particular site, you would switch carriers (as long as there was a choice). But ISPs can discriminate more subtly by speeding up content from certain favored commercial sites and slowing down other sites, by making certain portals and search engines the defaults for their users, by making it artificially slow to transmit data, etc.
- Creating state-of-the-art local information networks (especially wireless
ones) that provide cheap access and do not discriminate on the basis
of the type of content transmitted.
Posted by peterlevine at March 17, 2003 03:27 PM
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