SAI: Data-Driven Governance for Broadband Infrastructure

加强美国基础设施（SAI）是美国国家科学基金会的一个项目，旨在促进以人为本的基础研究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的生活质量改善提供了坚实的基础。强大、可靠和有效的基础设施刺激私营部门的创新，发展经济，创造就业机会，使公共部门提供的服务更有效率，加强社区，促进机会平等，保护自然环境，加强国家安全，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有效的基础设施的建设和维护能够改善生活和社会，并以技术和工程的进步为基础。美国正处于对国家宽带基础设施进行大规模投资的开端。这项投资的主要重点是改善宽带接入、采用和使用方面的公平性。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并不能很好地适用于得出结论，即如何确定新的宽带投资目标，以确保所有美国人都能以他们负担得起的价格连接到高速宽带。本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，以衡量有意义的人文地理区域（如街区、邻里、村庄、社区、乡镇和城市）的宽带性能。要使这些新方法发挥作用并为政策实施提供信息，就需要更好地理解将数据作为知识来源的治理流程如何在实践中展开和扎根。因此，本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了信息，并为宽带治理利益相关者提供了知识和工具，以收集他们自己的纵向互联网性能数据。本项目在六个不同的社区开展工作，研究向当地宽带利益相关者提供有关互联网性能的高质量数据如何影响宽带基础设施投资部署的决策。当地利益相关者与研究小组合作，部署新的互联网测量软件，从每个社区的家庭中收集有关互联网性能的连续测量数据。这项工作还辅以一项定性研究，结合访谈和参与者观察，以了解宽带利益攸关方在决策过程中如何应对这些新信息。本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佳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、行为和经济科学理事会（SBE）支持。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，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.