Millions promised for community-based 'universal access'

UPDATED: This story replaces a previous version that was based on a press release that misrepresented the initial investment made by The Knight Center of Digital Excellence toward a proposed Akron, Ohio wireless network.

A new nonprofit group will invest millions in supporting community-based "universal access" to the Internet and digital services.

The Knight Center of Digital Excellence was unveiled this week, with an initial, first-year funding of $4.5 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which will invest a total of $25 million over the next 5 years for the Center’s work.

The Center’s goal is to actively support the deployment of neworking technology for community-based, so-called digital access projects, to extend broadband Internet connections for community residents and businesses.

The new project comes as many municipal wireless and broadband projects are faltering, for a wide variety of reasons.

But the center is not just a kind of nonprofit public venture fund. It will also act as an online clearinghouse to collect and share best practices for community-based universal digital access – the technology, business, political and community organizing strategies and tactics for bringing high-speed network access to municipalities.

Those goals will be achieved by making use of the resources of OneCommunity, formerly known as OneCleveland, a Cleveland-based nonprofit group that applies network technology in support of economic and civic development projects. OneCommunity currently connects about 1,000 community and nonprofit organizations over a regional fiber-optic backbone. The nonprofit will staff and operate the new Knight Center.

Such a structured, centralized repository of extensive ‘how-to’ information is vitally needed, says Craig Settles, an industry analyst and author who focused on municipal broadband issues. Today, communities exchange information informally at conferences and online sites, he says.

Even more importantly, according to Settles, is the fact the OneCommunity has staff and consultants who can actually talk and work with community project leaders on practical issues like preparing requests-for-proposals, evaluating technology options and so on. “I’m expecting this to be a huge boon, particularly to midsize and smaller municipalities that don’t have a lot of technology expertise on staff,” says Settles.

The Knight Center is being launched with a first-year gift of $4.5 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, from the brothers who founded the Knight newspaper empire, to OneCommunity. The foundation has promised up to $25 million over the next five years for the center’s work. Of that amount, $10 million will be designated a “Digital Opportunity” fund, intended as a source of challenge grants to the 26 U.S. communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. 

Settles approves of the approach OneCommunity takes to community involvement. Many grass-roots wireless projects focus almost entirely on neighborhoods. Meraki’s San Francisco experiment supports a neighborhood focus with its own network operations center.