Transforming Everything? (eBook)

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.