New TIF Policy Research Project: TIPI to Evaluate 36 Community Networking Efforts in Texas

The Telecommunications and Information Policy Institute (TIPI) at the University of Texas at Austin is working with the Texas Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund Board to evaluate the first phase of its Collaborative Community Networking Grants, or "CN1." The goal of this initiative was to allow communities to define and implement computer and Internet-based systems to link individuals, groups, and institutions in efforts to enhance local education, economic development and public services. TIPI's evaluation will focus on both outcomes of these projects and the processes by which the CN1 grant recipients developed and implemented their network projects. This evaluation will determine the extent to which the funded projects achieved their goals, the nature of the practices and policies that comprise these community-led efforts, and the lessons learned.

We will use both qualitative and quantitative methods in our work. Over the next eighteen months, TIPI researchers will be conducting surveys, field visits, telephone interviews, and collecting documents needed to gauge the successes and failures associated with community networking. We will produce a documentary record of each project and determine how each community defined its objectives and the ways these would be met. We also will seek to understand how factors such as demographics, existing community resources, and community size and location, come to bear on efforts to achieve community networks.

The evaluation will differentiate between the outcomes associated with a project and the practices used by communities as they attempted to achieve these outcomes. Researchers will be attentive to the strengths as well as the shortcomings of each networking endeavor. We will build analysis from these observations to develop a set of "best practice" guidelines for other community networking projects. We also will chronicle the common problems experienced by the CN1 communities and the procedures they used to overcome these problems. We also plan to examine questions of sustainability, and to determine how projects define the financial and organizational challenges to be met in order for these networks to survive beyond their TIF grant funding.

Contacts:
Dr. Sharon Strover, Principal Investigator
Dr. Jody Waters, Project Manager
Chris Lucas, Research Associate
Carolyn Cunningham, Research Associate
Holly Custard, Research Associate
Joseph Villescas, Research Assistant