 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks so much for coming to MIT for this symposium and announcement from the FCC Broadband Initiative. My name is Chris Juxen-Mihai. On behalf of MIT, the MIT Media Lab and the Center for Future Civic Media and Comparative Media Studies, which is a lot of organizations, we want to. So there's a lot of welcome out to you. Thanks for coming. We were approached by the FCC to host this and felt it was an important part of our service to promote a public dialogue on this broadband plan because it really is a historic moment. For almost all of the whole of this nation's history, it's been considered the role of the US government to proactively ensure a free and diverse press and source of information for communities. One of the ways this occurred was through strong discounts, postage discounts for magazines and newspapers, where the postal policies gave tremendous subsidies to any newspaper, magazine, or periodical that could inform a citizen and improve a democracy. None other than George Washington worked to provide massive subsidies to mailed newspapers. Subsidies that largely benefited the smaller publications that couldn't reach economies of scales or negotiate special bargains. Washington wasn't able to give the 100% subsidies that he thought were necessary. It's really easy to be dismissive of the postal service at this point, at your own peril. But at that point, that was the medium for getting information to people. But nonetheless, newspaper shipment was so cheap that citizens would often buy a newspaper, write a letter to their mom in the margins between the headlines, then fold it back up and send it because it was so much cheaper than sending an envelope. I love that because there's this great moment in which personal and political news are traveling together in the same medium. In the second decade of the 20th century, communities in the Northern Midwest started experimenting with the process of rural electrification, developing electrical connections for moat farms. By the 1930s, the REA, the Rural Electrical Administration, was formed by an act of Congress. And within five years, they'd doubled the number of farms that had access to the point where now we're talking about 98% of rural communities and farms in the US have electricity. And if you fuse those two remarkably successful examples of smart government, you get to the point where we're at now where through electronic medium, through a wired or a fiber service, much of the news that we get and the important information and communications that we have in the United States are traveling. So today, the Pew Charitable Trust released a report titled Understanding the Participatory News Consumer, which finds that for the first time, according to their study, American consumers get more information online than they do from printed media. Now, the unfortunate problem there is that most of the news that's being generated, the kind of complex journalism, long-term investigation that we rely on for democracy, most of that is still being generated by those news organizations. So there's a little bit of a schism there and kind of a crisis brewing where the organizations that are gathering much of the important news are really hemorrhaging their sources of income. But they're still doing it, or at least last night when I checked, they were still doing it. Let's just hope they are today. So what we're witnessing is a monumental transformation and a really critical thing for communities to be part of that discourse, to be on the information matrix. But our broadband access rates are kind of closer to those of wired rural farms in the 1920s. They hover between somewhere around 60, 65%. 12% of that, the last I read was through borrowed Wi-Fi. My neighbor's in 54 Adams Street, for instance. But unfortunately, the costs and even the connection speeds are far higher than they need to be and the US is lagging many, many, many other nations in terms of speed and availability. So we're about to hear from the FCC regarding their report to Congress on how to spend the $7.2 billion set aside for ensuring that every American has access to high quality broadband. The point of this event is to hear from the FCC, which has already worked quite a bit and already taken a lot of public comment. So we're not really focusing this so much on a dialogue or public comment because they've had many, many public hearings already. But we are going to bring two panels of excellent people together afterwards to concentrate on two subject. First, interactions between citizens and government that are enabled by online access and how those interactions might be better made through ubiquitous broadband. And second, the role of public media in this changing landscape. I hope that both panels will pay special attention to issues of the digital divide as the FCC didn't its plan. This report is only the first step of the process though as community leaders, collectives, co-ops, individuals, educational institutions and businesses need to work to ensure that as we did with electricity and free press before that, we help government to help our communities to be more vital, prosperous and democratic. So let me then introduce our first speaker, Eugene Wang, who was appointed Secretary of Technology at the State of Virginia at the age of I think 14, was it? Later he became Senior Policy Advisor to Henry Paulson but he read the writing on the wall and moved to the FCC where he is Director of Government Operations for the Federal Communication Commission's National Broadband Task Force and with someone with a long last name, I really appreciate that title. So please join me in welcoming Eugene. Chris, thank you for that very kind introduction. It's wonderful to be here at MIT, MIT Deep Appreciation to MIT for serving as our host today. MIT has produced a great number of many great graduates and the not least of which is a member of my team, Vishal Doshi, who's in the second row right over here. To Vishal, thank you for your hard work on the National Broadband Plan. To MIT, thank you for letting him graduate. Now, in all seriousness, MIT and the Center for Future Civic Media is a leader in the area that my remarks will address today, the area of civic engagement. You are truly a leader in the world in innovation at the intersection of technology and civic engagement with an incredible number of groundbreaking projects going on here. From Newsflow, which maps real-time news reporting to Lost in Boston, a web tool that cities can use to engage citizens in improvement projects. There is tremendous innovation occurring here. For the team members who have worked on the civic engagement section of the National Broadband Plan, this has been a long journey. Many hours of work and many sleep-deprived days and nights will have been spent on the plan. A plan that, when it is released in about two weeks, will inspire a vision for broadband's future in America. The team has worked very hard to get to this point, and before I lay out our proposed recommendations, I'd like to take a minute to explain how we got here. The path to a National Broadband Plan began over a year ago with Congress. Congress tasked the FCC with developing a National Broadband Plan as part of the Recovery Act. And to quote directly from the Recovery Act, the ambitious goal of the plan is to ensure that every American has quote, access to broadband capability, unquote. Congress mandated that the plan address four questions. First, how will broadband infrastructure be deployed throughout the United States? This question is answered through an analysis of the most efficient and effective means to deploy broadband, either via wired, wireless, or satellite infrastructure, to ensure that all people of the United States have access to broadband. Second, how will we ensure adoption of broadband services in the United States? This question has led to a detailed strategy for adoption of broadband services, including achieving affordable access to broadband services, as well as maximum utilization of broadband infrastructure and service by the public. Third, what is the status of broadband deployment in the United States? And fourth, how will Americans use broadband services in the future? To address this question, we've looked at how broadband will address specific national priorities, including government performance and civic engagement, public safety and homeland security, community development, healthcare and health IT, energy independence and efficiency, education, workforce training, private sector investment, entrepreneurial activity, job creation and economic growth. So how did we develop answers to each of these four questions? Now to develop the national broadband plan, Blair Levin, our director, assembled a task force of more than 50 individuals from backgrounds, including government employees, individuals from the private sector, technologists, consultants, venture capitalists, MBAs, PhDs, and yes, even a few lawyers. But don't blame me. I'm an electrical engineer and a technologist, not a lawyer. Overall, we've described the work we've undertaken since last summer as a three act play. In June and July of last year, we began with the prologue, outlining the process and vision serving as the foundation for the plan. Act one, which started in August and went through December, represented our fact gathering stage. Act two, stretched into January and focused on analyzing the facts that had been collected. And in act three, our final act. The task force is developing our recommendations prior to the release of the plan in just a few short weeks. We're doing our best to ensure that the plan is neither a tragedy nor a comedy. But in all seriousness, during this process, the FCC has worked hard to practice what we preach in terms of civic engagement. One of the major goals for the process of developing the national broadband plan is to ensure that we are a transparent, inclusive and participatory. To that end, I'm proud to say that this has been the most open and transparent data-driven process in the FCC's history. We've attempted to practice what we preach by seeking public input in a variety of ways. We've held more than 35 public workshops with well over 350 panelists on the different topics that the plan will address. These workshops have generated tremendous interest with more than 1,000 people attending in person and more than 5,000 people participating online. Every one of the workshops we've held has been streamed online. And individuals have been able to participate as far as way as America, Samoa, and Sweden. We've also had a record number of public notices. For everyone here that isn't steeped in the minutia of how the FCC goes about its work, a public notice is the way the government formally asks for public comment or input on an issue. We released 30 public notices, and in return we amassed a significant volume of public comments that represents a public record of over 20,000 individual responses that in total exceed over 70,000 pages. The FCC has also made extensive use of social media and crowdsourcing tools during this process. The FCC launched a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. And since launching on Twitter last fall, we've amassed more than 330,000 Twitter followers, making us the third highest of any government agency behind only the White House and the CDC. If government Twitter followers were an Olympic sport, we would have been awarded a bronze medal, a significant accomplishment since the gold medal went to the president and the silver medal went to swine flu. We've also launched a blog where the chairman and members of the task force have posted updates and have asked for feedback. The blog, located at www.broadband.gov, had 40 blog posts and 340 comments in the first month after we launched it. Now our blogging has only increased since the first month of launch with 175 total posts and more than 11,000 comments. We've also used IdeaScale to crowdsource ideas for the plan. The result? More than 450 ideas, many of which are in the plan. These ideas generated more than 7,500 comments and over 37,000 votes. Now after all of this data collection, we came to what may seem like an obvious conclusion. Civic engagement is the lifeblood of our democracy. While this might sound cliched, I don't believe that it is. Democracy at its core is about self-governance. At the most basic level, this requires an informed and engaged citizenry to participate in society's institutions, engage their government and hold it accountable. Democracy requires an informed and engaged citizenry in order to validate the actions of government so that it reflects the will of the people. In short, civic engagement is a very big deal. So that's civic engagement, but what about broadband? What does broadband have to do with civic engagement? We came to the conclusion that broadband has the potential to transform civic engagement in two principal ways. First, broadband can strengthen the reach and relevance of mediated and unmediated information for our society. A healthy democracy requires an informed citizenry and broadband can change the way that people engage this information. This is true for mediated information, such as public media, and this is also true for unmediated information, such as the data the government provides citizens. Second, broadband can enable citizens to engage in their democracy through a variety of broadband-enabled tools that will make our democracy more participatory and more representative. Broadband-enabled technologies have already revolutionized the way citizens interact with each other in the private sector. Companies such as YouTube enable the distribution of user-generated content over the internet. YouTube now supports more than 120 million viewers watching more than 10 billion videos monthly. And more than 80% of U.S. adults who are online use social media at least once a month, and half of them participate in social media, social networks, such as Facebook. Today, 26% of Americans are involved in a civic or political group, and more than half of them use digital tools to communicate with other group members. Given this context, our proposed recommendations for the national broadband plan fall into five areas. First, we looked at ways to build a more open and transparent government. This principally involves increasing citizens' access to unmediated information, and we think that the federal government has made good progress in this area recently. But we believe that there is more that the government can and should do. The Executive Branch's data.gov initiative is one example. Data.gov is a web portal that offers an index of data generated by government agencies in machine-readable format. Launched last May, Data.gov has been a tremendous success, receiving more than 47 million visits in the first seven months. This initiative demonstrates that while there is great demand for government to be a wholesaler of data, it's still not enough. Data.gov includes only a small amount of federal government data, and we believe that all data and information that the government treats as public should be made available online in machine-readable formats. And although Data.gov applies to the Executive Branch, we believe that similar initiatives should also extend to both Congress and the judiciary. Moreover, for data that is actionable or otherwise time-sensitive in nature, the Executive Branch should provide individuals with a single web-based interface to manage email alerts and other electronic communications from the federal government. In addition to making more data available to the public, we believe that the primary legal documents of the federal government should be made free and publicly available online. While this might seem obvious to some, this is not current practice. For example, in the federal judicial system, the public access to court electronic record system, or PACER, still charges for access to federal district, appellate, and bankruptcy court records. The U.S. federal courts themselves pay private contractors $150 million annually for electronic access to judicial documents. We believe that these types of barriers inhibit a principle of democracy, that every person who is subject to the laws of this nation should have free access to those laws online. We also believe that the Knight Commission had it right when it expressed the principle that the public's business should be done in public. Toward that end, government meetings, public hearings, and town hall meetings should also be streamed online. These events should also offer closed captioning services to increase accessibility for persons with disabilities, and should also allow people to ask questions online where feasible. Our second area of focus has been public media. While broadband can enable the release of more unmediated information, it can also provide greater access to mediated information through media and journalism. Public media has historically provided invaluable educational, news, and other media content. Looking into the future, this could not be more important at a time when many of our journalism and media institutions are under severe stress. Today, newspapers are closing, local TV news stations are laying off reporters, and state houses and other institutions are drawing fewer and fewer journalists to cover the news. Just as communities depend on individuals to create and maintain communities, individuals need trusted intermediaries to connect them with relevant, accurate information. In response to this trend, public media must continue to play a critical role in the development of a healthy and thriving media ecosystem by providing individuals with information, developing public debate and conversations, and building cohesion and participation in our communities. But if public media's future is to be successful as it's past, it must transition from a 20th century broadcast-based model to a 21st century broadband-based model. Today, public media is at a crossroads. It is predominantly structured around broadcast-based communications, both legally and in practice. This presents a clear challenge as we enter the digital age. Public media must continue to expand beyond its original broadcast-based mission to form the core of a broader new public media network that better serves the new multi-platform information needs of the future. This is no small challenge. Yet I'm optimistic about the future of public media because it has already begun this transition and is showing great results. Let me give you a few examples. Across the Charles, right here in Boston, WGBH has developed the teacher's domain, a free collection of more than 2,000 digital resources covering diverse content for students and teachers. Last year was the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street and just a few months ago, PBS launched the PBS Kids Preschool Video Player with more than 87 million streams of educational content being delivered in just the first month. We also have great examples in public radio. NPR launched a tremendously successful API and apps using this API, our content, to access content, have been developed for the iPhone and Android. And NPR podcasts are being downloaded more than 15 million times a month. So we believe that the future of public media is bright but it also faces challenges. To the extent that government can help to facilitate a digital transition and mitigate these challenges, we believe it should do so. One of these challenges is the Copyright Act. Congress passed special copyright exemptions for public broadcasting in the 20th century but these provisions no longer fulfill their original purpose. For example, current licensing practices inhibit public broadcasters from producing and distributing the highest quality digital programming. These exemptions should be updated to facilitate the distribution of the highest quality programming on 21st century digital platforms. Finally, during this process, we began to ask ourselves what a national digital archive for the 21st century must look like. Broadband holds great potential for increasing people's access to historical materials. And we believe that the government should get the ball rolling in this area by creating video.gov, a new video platform for the federal government's digital public video content. Video.gov should be modeled after data.gov and the federal government should convene a group comprised of federal agencies, the National Archives and the Library of Congress to develop this platform. We believe that video.gov has the potential to be a huge success but we think it should be only one part of a larger national federated archive that would include public media and maybe even commercial media as well. Today, these institutions sit on a wealth of America's civic DNA in the form of historic TV news content that goes back more than 50 years. Millions of hours of historic news content that represents America's daily life. This archival content could provide tremendous educational opportunities for generations of students and could revolutionize how we access our own history. We believe that this is a tremendous opportunity but we realize that this is not without its challenges. For example, public television has attempted to launch such digital video archive but has run into difficulties obtaining the rights and clearances that it needs. To mitigate this issue, Congress should consider amending the Copyright Act to enable public and broadcast media to more easily contribute their archival content to a digital national archive to help turn this vision into a reality. Digital archives hold tremendous potential to transform the way the American people learn about themselves, their communities and their history. We can enable this transformation by removing the barriers that inhibit the development of a new ecosystem surrounding public media. Now, in addition to increasing the Americans' people access to mediated and unmediated information in digital formats, broadband can also improve the quality and number of points at which the American people can access their government. We've been focusing on three specific areas to this effect, social media, innovation in government and digital democracy. Social media has been our third area of focus. By most standards, social media is not new. Many Americans use tools such as Facebook and Twitter in their daily lives on a regular basis. The FCC recently released a study of broadband adoption and use in America showing that 55% of broadband users also use social networking sites. Focusing on individuals aged 18 to 29, much like individuals here at MIT, this number skyrockets to 85%. And these numbers are likely to grow even further in the coming years. Unfortunately, government has not integrated these tools across the board in the same way that the private sector has. We believe that government must adopt these tools to provide opportunities for citizens to engage using the same communications mechanisms that they use in their daily lives. Furthermore, we believe that government should view social media technologies not as pilot projects or add-ons, but as core to its mission. Government should use a variety of new media tools from those primarily used to communicate to those that enable more intensive participation and that specialize in co-production and co-governance. While the success of these integrating these tools in the government has been uneven, we believe that there is reason for optimism. As I mentioned earlier, the FCC has integrated the use of Twitter, Facebook, Ideas Scale, and other tools into the fabric of the agency. In addition, the CDC has had great success in this area using social media platforms to provide access to credible, science-based health information. The CDC's use of social media has been instrumental in enabling them to get reliable information about the H1N1 virus to the public quickly. Between April and December of last year, the CDC had more than 2.6 million downloads of H1N1 podcasts, more than 3 million views of H1N1 related YouTube videos, and more than 37 million views of H1N1 related media feeds. Social media is also giving rise to citizen-to-citizen diplomacy. These tools are connecting individuals across nations and regions. As one example, the State Department recently launched its virtual student foreign service, enabling college students to become quote-unquote dorm room diplomats. These students are then matched with embassies and students in other countries to build transnational relationships and cultural understanding through digital citizen-to-citizen diplomacy. In short, government is certainly making progress, but these examples are the exception rather than the rule. Recognizing the promise that social media holds, our federal government should accelerate the adoption of social media technologies across all agencies. The fourth area that we've been focused on in civic engagement involves the innovation that occurs at the nexus of broadband and civic engagement. Beyond communicating with individuals, broadband provides an opportunity to engage citizens in more direct collaboration with their government in ways that lead to greater innovation. We all know that many of the best ideas come from outside of government. To take advantage of these ideas, we should create avenues for more citizens to help spur innovation within the government. Government is just beginning to think about these types of issues. As one example, the White House has used participatory tools in the Open Government Initiative to begin changing the nature of participatory governance. Specifically, the White House has engaged citizens in development of this initiative through public brainstorming blogs, a Wiki, and a collaborative drafting tool. But we believe that government can and should do more in this area. An Open Platforms Initiative throughout our government has the potential to leverage digital platforms to engage and draw on the expertise of citizens in the private sector. From peer review and open problem-solving platforms to open grant-making platforms, we believe that these platforms can both engage citizen experts and improve government performance. Bringing individuals with a proven record of innovation into government service has the ability to bring new ideas and perspectives to some of the challenges that government faces. An innovation fellows program can place private sector experts and innovators throughout the federal government on one-year fellowships. And an innovation core could serve as a think tank for technologists from inside and outside government to help design digital platforms and applications for all levels of government. Last, but certainly not least, you can't talk about the future of civic engagement without talking about the future of our democratic processes. More Americans engage in democratic elections than just about any other civic act. By bringing the elections process into the digital age, government can promote greater civic participation and increase the efficiency of the process. Providing broadband to more Americans provides an important opportunity to fix the problems in the existing process, starting with voter registration. The current paper-based system for registration of voters can include multiple cumbersome steps, from collecting information on paper forms to manually entering handwritten data onto voter lists. One recent study estimates that voter registration problems resulted in more than 2 million voters being unable to vote in the 2008 general election. The challenges are even more difficult for members of the military serving overseas. These individuals are more than twice as likely to face registration problems as the general public. While these challenges are great, several states have already taken steps to modernize the voter registration process. As examples, Arizona, Kansas, and Washington state already permit citizens to complete and submit voter registration applications online. In addition to allowing for online voter registration, common standards would assist in making voter records portable to increase accuracy, improve efficiency in the process, and decrease cost. Several states have already begun moving forward with standards to facilitate data exchange across state borders. While this process is encouraging, we need a more comprehensive effort to modernize the process across all 50 states for elections at all levels. We believe that federal, state, and local stakeholders should work together to modernize the elections process by addressing these and other concerns. Finally, as mentioned earlier, our military men and women serving overseas face very real challenges when they are trying to vote. One survey showed that more than half of the military serving overseas who tried to vote weren't able to do so because their ballots were late or didn't arrive at all. And a survey of seven states showed that an average of more than 25% of military and overseas ballots were returned as undeliverable, lost, or rejected in the 2008 election. We all agree that the government has a moral obligation to ensure that those military men and women protecting us from harm's way are able to vote, because no one should have to give up the right to vote as a condition of serving their country. The federal government has recently taken steps to begin addressing this problem. The Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act, recently passed by Congress, requires that starting with the 2010 elections, states must establish procedures to allow military and overseas voters to request absentee ballot applications electronically for federal elections. This is an important step in the right direction. States are making some progress on this issue as well. In 2008, Arizona launched a web-based voting system that allows the military and overseas citizens to vote online with completed ballots uploaded directly to the Secretary of State's website. There are exciting initiatives happening at the intersection of broadband and democratic processes, and we need to ensure that this progress continues. To this end, the Department of Defense should be tasked with the development of a secure internet-based pilot project that enables members of the military serving overseas to vote online. DoD has looked into this in the past, and there are clearly security and privacy concerns that must be addressed. But we believe that as long as our military men and women are serving overseas and unable to vote, we must continue working to do everything we can to address this serious problem. The proposed recommendations that I've presented to you today represent not an end, but a beginning. A beginning of a new era in civic engagement in America. In five distinct areas, open and transparent government, public media, social media, engaging citizens in government innovation, and modernizing our democratic processes, we believe that broadband has the potential to transform civic engagement. But this transformation will not occur on its own. It will take a commitment from all of us, our government, our elected leaders, and the public at large to renew our democracy in a broadband-enabled 21st century. We look forward to this challenge. Thank you very much.