Broadband Mapping Funding Available

The US Department of Commerce has released a Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) (PDF) for a State Broadband Data and Development Grant Program. The Notice is published in the Federal Register. There is also a Fact Sheet (PDF).

The media announcement, from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), explains that the funds are intended to support the collection of state-level broadband data, "as well as state-wide broadband mapping and planning."

The Program will provide approximately $240 million in grants to assist states or their designees to develop state-specific data on the deployment levels and adoption rates of broadband services. These data, including publicly available state-wide broadband maps, will also be used to develop the comprehensive, interactive national broadband map that NTIA is required by the Recovery Act to create and make publicly available by February 17, 2011.

This is a grant opportunity that has been expected for some time. Most states have already established teams working on possible approaches to broadband mapping. Broadband mapping is a part of the "Technology for the 21st Century" section of the NSGIC 2008-2009 Advocacy Agenda (PDF). And broadband mapping has been the subject of presentations and discussions at the most recent NSGIC Annual (September 2008) and Midyear (February 2009) conferences.

The program allows only one grant application per state. State-level grants will range from $1.9 million to $3.9 million. Applications are to be accepted via grants.gov between July 14 and August 14, 2009.

Extending NSGIC into Social Media and Stuff Like That

As a result of discussions at the recent NSGIC Conference (you may have heard about it), we have staked a NSGIC claim in a few social media spaces this fall.

A basic introduction to NSGIC has been added to Wikipedia. The material for this was mostly drawn from the About NSGIC page, with some expansion based on personal experience. We have tried to include material and references from outside of NSGIC, as a way of cementing the new article in Wikipedia. Any NSGIC folks who are Wikipedians should feel free to keep and eye on the new entry and edit or add as they see fit.

There is also now a new NSGIC Group on the business networking site LinkedIn. A number of NSGIC folk who are on LinkedIn have already linked to the new group. The rest of the NSGIC community is invited (encouraged? urged? peer-pressured?) to join as well.

Someone mentioned a NSGIC profile on MySpace or FaceBook. We'll have to think about those, though I will note that if we go that route my teen-aged daughter will be horrified.

GIS Coordination as Social Networking?

David Sacks, founder of the genealogy website Geni and a former leader at PayPal, has written a guest-post at TechCrunch in which he argues that the future of the web portal will shift from the current "search" model (Google) to the "social-web" model (FaceBook).

I think that this shift holds lessons and perhaps opportunities for GIS Coordination and creating the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI).

In his post (The New Portals: It’s the Bread, Not the Peanut Butter), Sacks notes that the earliest web portal model was "browsing," as embodied by Yahoo. He traces Yahoo's decline in market-share against Google to the changing number of web sites. Early on, a limited pool of sites could be accessed through Yahoo's browse-able catalog.

But as the number of websites became infinite, search replaced browsing as the dominant paradigm for finding new sites, and Yahoo’s failure to keep up in this area allowed Google to take the lead.

Sacks suggests that the paradigm is shifting again. Now, networks of like-minded web citizens are starting to guide each other to content through a variety of tagging and aggregation systems.

The “social graph,” or your network of relationships, will push information to you. You’ll learn from your friends.

It is his thesis that FaceBook is developing the portal platform that best embodies this new model.

That may or may not be the case, but this idea does make me think of some of the ways we try to create and maintain strong state-level GIS Communities to enable the NSDI.

Increasingly, we are bending the tools of the social web to our needs, publishing RSS feeds, starting blogs related to GIS, and using tagging sites such as del.icio.us to note and aggregate useful content.

I think we can do more. The key to the social web is wide participation. The strength of NSGIC is the breadth and depth of its membership. Our challenge now is to increase the links among that membership on this new and growing social web.