| What is an e-Community? | Company News |
Escondido CA, July 2004 - The Public Sphere Information Group has played a central role in developing a new guide designed to provide a benchmark of a community's current readiness to participate in the enormous economic, social, governmental and personal changes that high-speed communications entail. PSI partnered with consultants from ConnectedCommunities, the Local Government Solutions Group, Rivera/Lanthier & Associates, and Aldea Communications to develop the guide, published by the Corporation for Educational Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) as part of its "One Gigabit or Bust Initiative".
The CENIC Guide is designed to provide a benchmark of a community's current readiness to participate in the enormous economic, social, governmental and personal changes that high-speed communications entail. More importantly, the guide provides a vision of specific steps and actions communities-government, businesses, schools, community groups and citizens-can take to benefit from these changes.
The decisions that communities make regarding their futures and how they will address the challenges of technological and telecommunications infrastructure are only as good as the information that they receive. The purpose of the guide is to gauge the "Demand Side" and the "Supply Side" of the broadband equation at the same time. It attempts to benchmark current deployment of high-speed telecommunications and data networks and current applications that take advantage of those networks by the public and the private sector. It then asks members of different sectors (government, education, business, health care, community-based organizations, among others) to think about their future needs.
The result is a powerful integration of information that can be leveraged for an effective community planning process.
The guide revisits groundbreaking and internationally-utilized work done by the Computer Systems Policy Project.
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