Category: deb socia

Policies for Better Broadband – Community Broadband Bits Podcast Episode 165

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Back in July, Next Century Cities released a short report, Connecting 21st Century Communities: A Policy Agenda for Broadband Stakeholders, exploring various policies and approaches that will improve Internet access. The brief is organized into sections on local government, state government, federal government, philanthropy, and community.

For this week on Community Broadband [no-glossary]Bits[/no-glossary], Lisa Gonzalez takes the mic to interview Deb Socia, Executive Director of Next Century Cities, and me, the Policy Director for Next Century Cities (which I do within my capacity at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance).

We talk about the report, why we picked the policies we did, why we stuffed it full of examples, and as a bonus, Deb gives us an update of Next Century Cities and upcoming events.

Read the transcript from this episode here.

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show – please e-mail us or leave a comment below.

This show is 20 minutes long and can be played below on this page or via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed.

Listen to other episodes here or view all episodes in our index. You can can download this Mp3 file directly from here.

Thanks to bkfm-b-side for the music, licensed using Creative Commons. The song is “Raise Your Hands.”

Next Century Cities – Community Broadband Bits Podcast Episode 121

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

This week, we helped to launch Next Century Cities, a collaborative effort of local governments that are making smart investments and partnerships to ensure their communities have fast, affordable, and reliable Internet access.

Deb Socia is the Executive Director of Next Century Cities, coming to it from a nonprofit organization she developed in Boston called Tech Goes Home that works to increase digital inclusion. Via my capacity at ILSR, I am the policy director for NCC, so I have been working with Deb behind the scenes to launch Next Century Cities. This week, we spend a few minutes talking about this new organization.

Next Century Cities is an exciting collection of 32 founding community partners with incredible diversity. From large cities to small, right-leaning to left-leaning. Some are municipal networks and some have partnered with private companies. If you think your community would like to join, have the Mayor or a public official contact NCC.

See the member cities here and watch the full launch event here. Follow Next Century Cities on Twitter – @nextcentcit.

Read the transcript here.

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show – please e-mail us or leave a comment below. Also, feel free to suggest other guests, topics, or questions you want us to address.

This show is 10 minutes long and can be played below on this page or via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed.

Listen to previous episodes here. You can can download this Mp3 file directly from here.

Find more episodes in our podcast index.

Thanks to Jessie Evans for the music, licensed using Creative Commons. The song is “Is it Fire?”