Broadband and community resilience: Measuring impact

Fiona Heesen (fiona.heesen@abdn.ac.uk)

Pioneering Communities Seminar, April 24, 2013

Outline

Background

Resilience

Community broadband and resilience

Impact

Evaluating broadband

Background

Present Future

Rural resilience

Digital services

Economics

Geography

Rural Planning

Community led

broadband research

Past

Resilience

What is resilience? The ability for a community, group or individual to adapt to

change

Fig 1: Transitional ruptures, readjustment and recovery

From Wilson, 2012, p. 57

Community broadband

Two key stages to community-led broadband

1. Designing and developing the network2. Implementation of technology

Relationship with resilience?

1. Use of Internet2. Process-based capacity building

What is ‘impact’ and how do we measure it?

Impact can be broadly defined as: ‘the demonstrable contribution that a process or innovation

makes to society and the economy’

Measuring? Understanding impact metrics

Evaluation I

Understanding ‘real’ impact

Process Developing your outcome areas

Taking control of your research agenda and your story

Evaluation II

Community Scale

Social Economic

Individual Scale

Social Economic

Research Process

• Users• Identify a community’s expectations of both the organisation and the inclusion of superfast broadband

infrastructure• Governance

• Identify skills needed, used, gained throughout the pre-connectivity process as a broadband initiativePre-connectivity

Interviews

Post-connectivity Interviews

• Users• Analyse the potential resilience attributed to the inclusion of superfast broadband

• Governance• Identify characteristics from the process of implementing superfast services that influence resilience of that

community

Background Context Setting

• Using secondary data, understand context (may involve surveys and so on)

Heesen, F. 2013

Community BroadbandScotland

Evaluating the CBS programme

Importance of playmakers

Questions?