Pierrette Dagg on Research, Engagement, and Digital Inclusion - Building for Digital Equity Podcast Episode 17

Sean Gonsalves (00:06):
Hey, this is the Building for Digital Equity Podcast where we talk to people working to expand Internet access, address affordability, teach digital skills, or distribute affordable devices. We talk with those working on the front lines of giving everyone everywhere the opportunity to participate fully in the digital world, whether in rural areas or cities. Our guests here are doing [00:00:30] the often unglamorous jobs in places that have been left behind. This show comes to you from the Community Broadband Networks team at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, where we have long produced the Community Broadband Bits podcast and the Connect This Show Building for Digital Equity features. Short interviews from Emma Gautier, Christopher Mitchell, and me, Sean Gonsalves, talking to people at the events we are attending, to highlight the interesting work and inspirational stories to get [00:01:00] Internet access to everyone. Now, let's see who we have today.

Christopher Mitchell (01:06):
This is Chris Mitchell with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. I'm sitting here at Net Inclusion 2024 with Pierrette Dagg with MERIT. And your title is?

Pierrette Dagg (01:15):
I'm the Director of Research.

Christopher Mitchell (01:17):
The director of Research. You've been around a couple of different positions. That's the new title, right? Yes. And you're a freshly minted PhD now? I am. Congratulations. Thank

Pierrette Dagg (01:24):
You.

Christopher Mitchell (01:25):
And Fittingly, you ran a panel today focused on research.

Pierrette Dagg (01:28):
I did. Our panel [00:01:30] was called Research and Data-Driven Strategies to Build Digital Equity.

Christopher Mitchell (01:35):
And it was yesterday, but I'm still new in the day. Your panel was live streamed so people can go back and watch it after we talk about it,

Pierrette Dagg (01:42):
Right? It was, yes,

Christopher Mitchell (01:44):
Yes. Alright, so why should people go back and watch it? So

Pierrette Dagg (01:46):
Our panel approached research and data-driven strategies in three different ways. We looked at the ways that you can use research to inform how you engage in your community and build a digital equity strategy. We looked at how you can do community [00:02:00] facing research like surveys and qualitative and quantitative analysis to then go back and inform policy and resource deployment. And then we also talked about an approach called concurrent triangulation design, which is just a very fancy way of saying you have a hypothesis or research backed ideas. You go into the community, you learn and deploy some of them, and then you learn from that experience in the community to come back and then inform your theories and hypotheses, and it's just a circular motion like that.

Christopher Mitchell (02:28):
So one of the things that [00:02:30] I like about you and several other PhDs in this area that do work is that you don't get lost in the academic stuff, which I'm always afraid of with you academic people. Yes. So how does this actually make a difference for people that are trying to get people connected?

Pierrette Dagg (02:48):
So when we first started hearing about the Digital Equity Act, one of the concerns that a bunch of us academics had was how is this not going to be just another rehash of what we have seen with [00:03:00] other federal funding programs with BOP, with whatever, especially because if you're just specifically looking at that digital inclusion triangle of access devices and digital skills, when the federal funding is over, when the devices break, when the money is gone, are we just moving the goalposts? And now we also have to think about things like applications and generative ai. So as the field moves so quickly, if we are doing scaling and job training, all of those things are going to be outdated quicker than we can deploy them. [00:03:30] So in what way can we build digital equity strategies that are sustainable and holistic in a way that exists long after the federal funding?

(03:39):
So what we did is we looked at 25 years of digital equity and digital inclusion research, and then used that to identify larger systemic issues that are actually the root cause that go beyond that digital inclusion triangle, because that's really where our work starts. And now what we've done is we published a working paper that discussed those concepts, and now we have [00:04:00] created and developed a guided decision making process. That's a six month process for any aggregate. So a township, a city, a county or a state can go through to build a wider looking more holistic digital equity strategy that is sustainable and also provides local empowerment. And now we've gone through that pilot in three counties in Michigan, two single counties, and then a Tri-County area. And we're in the process now of using that data and concurrent triangulation design to [00:04:30] go back, revise our approach and our hypothesis, and now we're deploying it in 10 additional counties. And we're having some conversations about looking into other states as well.

Christopher Mitchell (04:38):
So if I'm someone sitting in Minneapolis and I'm thinking to myself, how do I make use of what you've learned? How do I make use of what you've learned?

Pierrette Dagg (04:46):
So the first thing that I would do is I would take a look at the digital opportunities Compass working paper, which is going to be very academic, but it does give you the base to try to understand how things like context and local [00:05:00] cultural preservation and social justice and governance and broader outcomes are all just as important in digital equity and digital inclusion as connectivity and devices, just to kind of get your brain thinking. The second thing that the research demonstrates is that when we are building governance structures for these things, primarily the United Nations Scientific and Cultural Organization has been saying this for years. If we're building strategies and programs or laws or anything that impact people, [00:05:30] the people who are going to be impacted need to have an equal voice of the table. So this would extend as far as students, participants in the prison population, all sorts of a wide range. So when you're building these digital equity task forces, not only do they need to have actual authority and decision-making power, you also need to broaden widely how you view that governance group. And then the third thing to take advantage of it is as I we're just now completing the pilots in the three counties, [00:06:00] we're going to revise the framework and the guided decision making process, and we're going to publish a lot of those research findings. So those will be coming soon.

Christopher Mitchell (06:08):
Will those be coming to a lay audience?

Pierrette Dagg (06:10):
Absolutely. The goal with all of this is we see it as we're kind of using the word research practitioner. So I'm fortunate enough to now have the research and academic background so we can take science and peer reviewed information that we know has worked and been tested, and then use that to [00:06:30] bridge the gap between academia and practical application to actually impact lives on the ground.

Christopher Mitchell (06:36):
And you've seen that happening already with your work?

Pierrette Dagg (06:38):
We absolutely have. So as we have been going through just the singular process of going through the pilots with the digital opportunities Compass, we are revising as we go. We are learning. The thing that has been the most fantastically interesting is that we have essentially the same input. So we've got everybody's going through the same process, backed by the same research, [00:07:00] it's the same guided decision making. It is the same workshop setups. It's all of the same information and education. And all of these three counties have such disparate different approaches to building their governance groups, to how they define, create shared definitions of digital equity that makes sense for their communities, and then how they're building these strategies and these plans. So we've got three different communities with three different types and flavors of local politics, three different levels of [00:07:30] socioeconomics, three different regional backgrounds, and with the same process, they're coming back with things that are so different. And the things that I thought as just an outsider would be important in digital equity and that a local community would want to do and would be important are quite often very different than what the people who are living in these situations actually want and or need. So it's been personally very informative, but then also as I'm learning how essentially I'm seeing all these [00:08:00] case studies unfold, it's a natural experiment and that's really informing how we are revising the process as we go.

Christopher Mitchell (08:08):
Are there any other insights from the panel that you want to spoil for anyone that might be going to watch it?

Pierrette Dagg (08:14):
Yes. So I was also joined by David Keys and Sean Glaze and Chelsea Benning from, they all worked in the city of Seattle for their access and adoption survey.

Christopher Mitchell (08:25):
And that was a city that really was quite aggressive before many other cities were for trying [00:08:30] to get the communities involved.

Pierrette Dagg (08:32):
Absolutely. I think the things that were the highlights of their presentation. So they really looked at how they can extract data from the community and then use that to inform resource deployment and program deployment. And in this, what would be particularly interesting to go back and look at is they focus theirs on someone who is completely new to digital inclusion or someone who's perhaps in a municipal role who [00:09:00] may just not be familiar with it. A lot of the highlights they had were providing ways to collect the data, ensuring that you have a broad representation from all the different samples. Seattle was really kind of a leader in the space where they did not consider that anybody that is going to give your time for feedback should be compensated. So they really push the audience to think about the importance of compensating people for their time when they do participate. [00:09:30] And I think it would be interesting to hear theirs because it just talks about how someone with no research background at all can go and effectively start to consider community research.

Christopher Mitchell (09:41):
Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing that with us today.

Pierrette Dagg (09:44):
Yeah, thank you.

Sean Gonsalves (09:46):
We thank you for listening. You can find a bunch of our other podcast at ilsr.org/podcast. Since this is a new show, I'd like to ask a favor, please give us a rating wherever you found [00:10:00] it, especially at Apple Podcasts. Share it with friends. You can even embed episodes on your own site. Please let us know what you think by writing us at podcast@communitynets.org. Finally, we'd like to thank joseph mccade.com for the song on the Verge.