Broadband and community resilience : Measuring impact

1. Broadband and community resilience: Measuring impact Fiona Heesen (fiona.heesen@abdn.ac.uk) Pioneering Communities Seminar, April 24, 2013

2. Outline • Background • Resilience • Community broadband and resilience • Impact • Evaluating broadband

3. Background

4. 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

5. Community broadband • Two key stages to community-led broadband • Designing and developing the network • Implementation of technology • Relationship with resilience? • Use of Internet • Process-based capacity building

6. 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

7. Evaluation I • Understanding ‘real’ impact • Process • Developing your outcome areas • Taking control of your research agenda and your story

8. Evaluation II

9. Using secondary data, understand context (may involve surveys and so on) Research Process Background Context Setting • 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 initiative Pre-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 Post-connectivity Interviews Heesen, F. 2013

10. Community BroadbandScotland • Evaluating the CBS programme • Importance of playmakers

11. Questions?