This report presents the initial lessons learned from the Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program (TIIAP) projects that were funded in 1994 and 1995. The report offers a snapshot look at the community impacts of TIIAP projects, and presents examples of how specific projects are using advanced telecommunications and information technologies to provide better services, to strengthen community ties, and to provide increased access to information for thousands of Americans. Lessons learned to date from these TIIAP projects include insights into project planning, the task of selecting the appropriate technologies in a time of rapid change, the importance of developing and maintaining productive community partnerships, and the challenge of securing long-term financial support for the projects.

Material for the report was gathered from a workshop and focus group sessions conducted with TIIAP project directors in June, 1996, and from a review of TIIAP project reports and documents. The report is intended for community-based organizations and government agencies that wish to incorporate new information technologies into the services that they provide to the community, as well as for those who seek to better understand the TIIAP program.

The TIIAP Program

The TIIAP program is administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). TIIAP is a competitive, merit-based grant program that provides seed money for innovative, practical information infrastructure projects by state and local governments, schools and school districts, non-profit health care organizations, libraries, colleges, public safety providers, and other non-profit community organizations. During the 1994 and 1995 grant rounds, TIIAP awarded 210 grants in 48 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Approximately $60 million in Federal grant funds were matched by $100 million in non-federal funds. A significant portion of the funding went to rural areas that are generally underserved by information technologies; disadvantaged urban Americans also benefited from a number of TIIAP projects.

The Impact of TIIAP Projects

Two-thirds of the TIIAP projects are still underway, but in discussions with project directors and a review of project reports, a number of significant impacts are beginning to emerge.

• Innovations in Education. Schools are using the Internet to provide teachers with new teaching tools and students with new educational opportunities. Many students in rural areas are using distance learning networks to take advanced placement courses from teachers located hundreds of miles away.

• Increased Access to Lifelong Learning Opportunities. Small rural public libraries are expanding their services, schools are using networks to open their doors to their communities, and adult learners are improving their job skills by taking courses through distance learning networks.

• More Responsive Public Institutions. A number of government agencies, schools, libraries, and other community organizations that previously had limited means of reaching their constituencies are now providing information to these groups over the Internet.

• Enhanced Economic Development in Rural and Disadvantaged Areas. TIIAP grants demonstrate that non-profit and public service organizations no longer need to be bound by geography and time. For example, several small rural businesses, many with limited resources and technical skills, have now begun to market their products over the Internet.
• Increased Access to Health Care. Many groups that previously had limited access to health care services, particularly those in rural communities, have now begun to gain greater access through telemedicine networks.

• Increased Sense of Community. Workers in government agencies, students, health care providers and others are using e-mail and other forms of electronic messaging to expand the network of people they reach, improve service delivery, and increase their communication with others.

• Replicable Models and Strategies for Introducing Information Infrastructure into the Public and Non-Profit Sectors. TIIAP projects receive frequent inquiries from all over the United States and other nations from people interested in learning how to implement similar projects in their communities.

Some case studies illustrate these impacts.

• Plugged In of East Palo Alto, California has demonstrated that young people from an urban, low-income neighborhoods can become providers of information technology, not just consumers. Plugged In operates a community access center that lets youths and community members connect to the world of information technology. Working in a state-of-the-art multi-media lab, young people create multi-media slide shows about their community, conduct videoconferences with others around the nation and world, and even operate their own computer services businesses that create and sell Internet home pages for local businesses and clients around the country.

• Technical Learning Centers and Schools. The Foundation for Educational Innovation (FEI) created a Technical Learning Center in a Washington, D.C. middle school and took students on "virtual visits" to distant museums. Over the course of the project, the project team revised its original concept for virtual visits to enable students to participate more interactively. FEI developed a three-stage model for integration of virtual visits into a science curriculum.

• The Tri-State Network Project of Jackson, Mississippi, has shown that a community-based advanced telecommunications infrastructure can help a community further its educational and economic goals. The Tri-State Project is assisting educational and economic development initiatives in rural regions of Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee.

• Charlotte's Web , a regional computer network spearheaded by the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County of North Carolina, has demonstrated that diverse groups such as schools, libraries, police and fire departments, and community groups can work together to create a community-wide electronic information system that residents will rely on and use. Through this network, schoolchildren and their teachers use the educational resources of the Internet and residents search through job listings, find building permit information, access a comprehensive weather service, and discuss regional issues on-line.

• The Inland Northwest Community Access Network (TINCAN),based in Cheney, Washington, has shown that residents in rural, isolated areas can get access to local information and to national computer networks without high costs. TINCAN , a community computer network, is providing six counties in rural eastern Washington state and one rural county in western Idaho with a local free-net and access to the Internet.

• The United Neighborhood Houses has demonstrated that a small social service organization with a tight budget can use the same advanced technology information tools as large corporations to improve the delivery of services and the efficiency of its workers. Through a local and wide-area network, this settlement house organization allows workers to efficiently store and share data.

• Telecommunications Uniting Native Americans to Develop Rural Alaska (TUNDRA), in Bethel, Alaska, has demonstrated that rural groups can overcome a core obstacle to the full implementation of the NII: the cost of the "last mile" in delivering services. Working with a large consortium of public and private organizations, TUNDRA has reduced the cost of reaching a telecommunications network access point in western Alaska, allowing the people of the Delta region of Alaska to access the Internet and to communicate with other native Alaskan villages.

• SmartCities, a project of the Kansas City Area Development Council, has demonstrated that a regional development group can accelerate the deployment of advanced telecommunications technologies to attract businesses and create jobs. Working with a broad coalition of public and private sector organizations, the group developed a blueprint for modernizing the information infrastructure in the greater Kansas City area, thus contributing to the region's reputation as a leading-edge area for doing business electronically.

• Coordinated Care for Tuberculosis Patients. In New York City, a project led by Columbia University has demonstrated that the information infrastructure can be used effectively to fight serious health problems, such as tuberculosis. This consortium of health care providers and private agencies has established an electronic sharing of TB case reports, automated protocols to detect new cases of TB, wireless links between visiting nurses in patient homes to health records stored at the hospital, and a touch-screen kiosk at clinics that provides health information for TB patients. As a result, patients receive better care and health agencies have greater control over the spread of infectious disease.

• Making Healthy MUSIC. In New Jersey, a coalition led by the Newark Public Schools has created an electronic community network that is helping to revitalize an inner-city community by facilitating better communication among its residents. The project is also redefining the relationship between the local school and the community in order to foster higher levels of student literacy.

Getting Started

Successful TIIAP projects are usually the result of careful planning. Planning helps to create a disciplined, business-like approach to the project and fosters communication with other groups, often leading to partnerships. TIIAP projects demonstrate how to plan the successful introduction of information technology into a public service setting.

In general, steps in the planning process include:

• Gathering Information. A first step in the planning process is gathering information about community needs, available assets and resources, existing information infrastructure, end-user training requirements, and related issues.

• Developing a Business Plan. It is important to have a plan that defines project goals, describes the specific problems or needs to be addressed, lists potential project partners and their roles, identifies staffing requirements, outlines a marketing strategy, proposes a detailed budget and timeline, and includes a transition plan that addresses how the project will be financially sustained over time.

• Developing an Evaluation Plan. It is important to have an evaluation plan that identifies project goals and desired outcomes, and provides a means of measuring the extent to which such outcomes and goals are met. Such a plan provides important feedback on key issues at periodic points in the development of the project.

• Identifying Potential Sources of Funding. TIIAP requires that projects receive financial support from multiple sources, which may include corporate and foundation funding, third party in-kind donations of goods or services, fees for services rendered, other Federal grants, or state, tribal, local and/or non-Federal grants. Financial support brings legitimacy and status to a project, often making the organization a more serious contender for additional funding.

• Soliciting Potential Project Partners. Project partners can play critical roles in providing advice, leveraging financial support, and serving as powerful community advocates for a project. The best partners are often drawn from local organizations, particularly those that complement the talents and resources of the project group. Potential partners include end-user organizations, equipment vendors, technical consulting firms, and government entities.

• Planning for Sustainability. Planning for sustainability is an ongoing pursuit that must begin at an early stage in project development. Ideally, funding to sustain a project should come from many sources, and should be in return for a variety of services.

• Determining Which Technologies to Use. Although technology choices must be tailored to the specific needs of each project, the current pace of technological change greatly complicates the task of selecting appropriate technologies for a project. In general, project directors should carefully follow technology trends, remain flexible, and be prepared to shift or adapt to unplanned contingencies.

• Replicating Model Projects. A principal feature of the TIIAP program is to support the development of projects that can serve as models that can be adopted in other locales. A new group seeking to develop a service like the model service should learn what happened in the model project, extract the core elements that span specific social, economic, and technological contexts, and adapt the model to the new context, taking into account the unique social, economic, and technological context of the community where the application must take root and grow.

Moving Forward

TIIAP projects offer valuable and practical lessons about implementing new information infrastructure projects in a variety of settings and about transforming a plan into a working project. Among the steps identified as necessary to set a plan in motion are the following:

• Hiring and Managing Staff. Before recruiting and hiring staff, project leaders should have a clearly defined organizational structure in mind, define staff roles clearly, and know what qualities are desirable in new employees. Staff should understand and support the project mission, and be able to interact with both technical and non-technical people. TIIAP project directors recommended the hiring of local people, noting that college students and volunteers can often be valuable sources of labor.

• Working With Partners. Although developing and maintaining strong relationships with project partners requires significant time and effort, such partnerships can be mutually beneficial when expectations and responsibilities are clearly understood by each group. Working with private sector partners requires an understanding of company goals, organizational structure, and procedures. Working with non-profit partners often requires making the project's service so valuable to that organization that it is willing to adopt it and pay for it from their operational budget once initial funding has come to an end.

• Marketing the Project. It is important for non-profit organizations to think like businesses. Such thinking involves researching potential markets, targeting services and products to clearly defined groups, and following-up with strong customer service.

• Working With Equipment Vendors and Technical Consultants. Selecting equipment vendors and technical consultants requires careful research, knowledge of the equipment and services that are needed, a realistic budget, and clearly stated expectations regarding timelines and delivery schedules.

• Managing Costs. Although some project costs can be anticipated and built into a project budget, other costs are sometimes hidden or can quickly escalate well beyond the initial project budget. This latter category includes costs of training end- users, retro-fitting old equipment, internal wiring, ongoing equipment maintenance, and network connections. This report identifies strategies for dealing with and satisfactorily resolving each of these cost issues.

• Working With End-Users. A project's ultimate value to the community is based on how well it meets the needs and wants of the end-users -- the individuals that must interact directly with the new technology -- and the people that they serve. Achieving this goal can be challenging because end-users often have had limited experience with new technologies. Overcoming this obstacle requires training and time. End-users also want a service that is easy to use and that quickly displays content that is useful, timely, and well-organized.

Next Steps

Lessons learned to date from TIIAP projects suggest that TIIAP is serving important needs in the community. First, the projects are helping cities, schools, libraries, economic development groups, police and other public safety departments, and social service organizations to become anchor tenants on the National Information Infrastructure (NII) and thereby attract others to use the NII. Second, the role of many government agencies, libraries, schools, and other information agencies is changing from information repositories to customer-driven service providers. Third, it is raising the level of information technology skills in the community as TIIAP projects train people in their local communities who in turn become trainers of others.

By seeding these projects across the country, TIIAP is:

• Helping to build a critical mass of users for the NII;

• Adding discipline to the process of planning local NII applications;

• Showing the private sector the feasibility of some telecommunication applications that they might otherwise have passed over; and

• Helping to close the gap between the information "haves" and "have-nots" by extending access to the information superhighway to remote rural communities and inner-city neighborhoods.

In creating new telecommunications applications, the TIIAP projects are building and strengthening local communities and helping people to work more productively, to improve literacy and education, and to receive better medical care. In this way, TIIAP is a catalyst for economic, educational, and social development in communities through information infrastructure.

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