SAI: Data-Driven Governance for Broadband Infrastructure

加强美国基础设施（SAI）是NSF的一项计划，旨在促进以人为本的基础和潜在的变革性研究，以加强美国的基础设施。有效的基础设施为社会经济活力和广泛改善生活质量奠定了坚实的基础。强大、可靠和有效的基础设施刺激私营部门创新，促进经济增长，创造就业机会，提高公共部门服务提供的效率，加强社区建设，促进机会平等，保护自然环境，增强国家安全，并推动美国的领导地位。为了实现这些目标，需要来自科学和工程学科的专业知识。SAI侧重于人类推理和决策，治理以及社会和文化过程的知识如何使建设和维护有效的基础设施，改善生活和社会，并建立在技术和工程进步的基础上。这项投资的主要重点是改善宽带接入、采用和使用的公平性。为了为这项工作提供信息，需要可靠的数据来确定全国服务不足或未得到服务的地区。一个主要的挑战是，现有的数据和性能指标不适合得出结论，如何针对新的宽带投资，以确保所有美国人都连接到高速宽带的价格，他们可以负担得起的。该项目通过开发和验证新的采样和建模方法来应对这一挑战，这些方法用于在有意义的人类地理范围内测量宽带性能，例如街区，街区，村庄，社区，乡镇和城市。要使这些新方法发挥作用并为政策执行提供信息，就需要更好地了解将数据作为知识来源的治理进程如何在实践中展开和扎根。因此，该项目还确定了限制或允许采用新的互联网测量数据的因素。该研究为正在进行的宽带投资工作提供信息，并为宽带治理利益攸关方提供知识和工具，以收集自己的纵向互联网绩效数据，该项目在六个不同的社区开展工作，研究向当地宽带利益攸关方提供高质量的互联网绩效数据如何影响宽带基础设施投资部署决策。当地利益攸关方与研究小组合作，部署新的互联网测量软件，以收集每个社区家庭对互联网性能的持续测量。这项工作是由定性研究的补充，结合访谈和参与者观察，了解宽带利益相关者如何应对这一新的信息，在他们的决策。该项目开发的框架考虑了利益相关者组织（包括政府机构、倡导组织、社区团体和互联网服务提供商）的价值观、利益和恐惧。通过开发新的互联网测量数据来源，并更好地了解如何将这些数据最好地纳入政策实施决策，国家对宽带基础设施的投资更有可能到达最需要的地方。该奖项由社会，行为，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.The United States is at the start of a massive investment in the nation’s broadband infrastructure. A major focus of this investment is on improving equity in broadband access, adoption, and use. To inform the effort, reliable data are needed to identify areas of the nation that are underserved or unserved. A major challenge is that existing data and performance metrics are not well-suited to drawing conclusions about how to target new broadband investments to ensure that all Americans are connected to high-speed broadband at a price they can afford. This project responds to the challenge by developing and validating new sampling and modeling approaches for measuring broadband performance at the scale of meaningful human geographies, such as blocks, neighborhoods, villages, communities, townships, and cities. For these new approaches to be of use and to inform policy implementation requires a better understanding of how governance processes that incorporate data as a source of knowledge unfold and take root in practice. This project therefore also identifies the factors that constrain or enable the adoption of novel Internet measurement data. The research informs ongoing broadband investment efforts and empowers broadband governance stakeholders with the knowledge and tools to gather their own longitudinal Internet performance data.Working in six diverse communities, this project examines how the provision of high-quality data on Internet performance to local broadband stakeholders affects decision-making on deployment of broadband infrastructure investments. Local stakeholders work with the research team to deploy new Internet measurement software to gather continuous measurements on Internet performance from households in each community. This work is complemented by a qualitative research study, combining interviews and participant-observation, to understand how broadband stakeholders respond to this new information in their decision-making. The framework developed by this project accounts for the values, interests, and fears embedded in stakeholder organizations, including government agencies, advocacy organizations, community groups, and Internet Service Providers. By developing new sources of Internet measurement data and achieving a better understanding of how those data are best incorporated into policy implementation decisions, the national investment in broadband infrastructure is more likely to reach the places where it is most needed.This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.