Abstract
This study addresses the role that civil society groups play in improving access to a high – profile middle mile network infrastructure project in Washington D.C, namely the District of Columbia - Community Access Network (DC-CAN). The District of Columbia (D.C.) received a grant through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program to build and operationalize the DC-CAN. The District was one of the few cities to receive federal funding for broadband infrastructure. This paper utilizes a document/textual analysis technique to study the efforts of the three main civil society groups to empower the city’s citizens to take greater agency over local broadband infrastructure. Moreover the article provides a theoretically grounded narrative that explains the role of these groups on behalf of the DC-CAN using Kingdon’s framework of multiple policy streams as a conceptual foundation.
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I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback and constructive comments on the early drafts of this paper.
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Menon, S. The role of civil society groups in improving access to the DC-CAN. Inf Syst Front 19, 361–375 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-015-9602-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-015-9602-1