A new study found that in 2017, 14.1 million people were afflicted by digital distress.
This, of course, raises a key question: what exactly is digital distress? The answer is closely tied to more commonly known concepts like digital inclusion and digital equity. Roberto Gallardo, assistant director for the Purdue Center for Regional Development, recently co-authored a piece about this topic with the center’s communications coordinator, Cheyanne Geideman. Essentially, digital distress is the condition of being left behind by rapid modernization.
Digital equity is the larger philosophical concept while digital inclusion is to work to ensure that citizens do not suffer from digital distress. Gallardo and Geideman this week go into much greater detail about digital distress with a two-part post on Medium. The posts explain what the concept is, who it is most likely to affect based on factors such as geography, and more.
The second post takes a deeper and more nuanced look at socioeconomic factors that many digitally distressed areas have in common, drawing heavily from the 2013-2017 U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (ACS) to get a read on digital distress for the more than 72,400 Census tracts in the country.
In total, roughly 4.87 million American households are located in digitally distressed areas, which as noted above adds up to 14.1 million people, or approximately 4.4 percent of the nation’s population.
In recent years, digital inclusion work has increasingly been taken on by local Government agencies, who work as facilitators for nonprofits and community groups on the front lines of ensuring that communities have equitable access to high-speed Internet, technology and the skills they need to harness them.
The city announced the new platform this week with a press release, describing it as “a quick and easy way to review progress on key city services and issues.” Honolulu has been beta testing a version of the dashboard since December, which the city noted has given its staff the opportunity to solicit and learn from user input.
In a statement, Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell noted the dashboard is part of his administration's long-standing commitment to transparency, and that it would also help local Government with community engagement. The dashboard was created as part of the city’s collaboration with What Works Cities, a Bloomberg Philanthropies program aimed at helping municipal government across the country better use data and evidence-driven decision-making to solve pressing challenges.
The ultimate goal, of course, is to improve the lives of residents. Last year, Honolulu became one of 100 cities to receive technical assistance from the program’s experts and partners. The city also worked with the Center for Government Excellence (GovEx) at Johns Hopkins University, a What Works Cities partner.
Initial efforts centered around dashboards capable of reporting key performance indicators related to homelessness and housing. This work was later expanded to also measure and include roadway and parks improvements. Now, a total of 13 dashboards have been published, all but one of which includes benchmarks to measure the city’s progress against its stated goals.
The dashboard was developed in-house by the Honolulu Department of Information Technology. The city’s press release also announced plans to add more to the dashboard, “driven primarily by community interest and the availability of accurate data.”
Earlier this month, New York City’s planning department announced a new digital zoning resolution platform, an environmentally friendly replacement for information that was previously available through a 1,570-page physical copy.
