Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

How can a number of diverse stakeholders in and around the City of Baltimore come together to develop a plan for better access to high-speed Internet in low-income neighborhoods? There have been many failed prior attempts to design solutions to solve this problem. The impacts are great as the digital divide places those who are not on Last Miles with access to high-speed Internet at an exponential disadvantage. This disadvantage presents a cascading effect that limits access to vital services such as employment opportunities and healthcare. We hypothesize that what is needed is a way for stakeholders to collectively design a solution that takes full advantage of knowledge and resources distributed across the full spectrum of interested parties including academics, policymakers, ISPs, and community members.

Participatory design, our potential solution, is the process of actively involving stakeholders in the design process in order to effectively develop and create a course of action that attains a desired societal outcome. Vital to this process is the ability to show stakeholders visually how variations of policy implementation might affect the built environment as much as the policy decision-making process itself. Modeling scenarios that stakeholders can see in real-time through a simulation would help create resolution and efficiency in the deliberation process of policymaking and ultimately provide answers for how the stakeholders could move forward. By leveraging current and future technologies the stakeholders could envision a future built environment and how it might be affected by change before it is ever physically built.