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  2. October 2015

October 2015

MacArthur Spins Off Digital Media & Learning Work with $25 Million Seed Investment

MacArthur announced the launch of Collective Shift, a new nonprofit whose mission is to redesign social systems for the connected age. With $25 million in seed funding, Collective Shift’s first project is LRNG, which is creating a 21st century ecosystem of learning that combines in-school, out-of-school, work-based, and online learning opportunities that are visible and accessible to all.

With LRNG, Collective Shift builds on more than $200 million in research, design experiments, and demonstrations that MacArthur supported over the past decade. The goal of that work was to understand how young people are learning with digital media and what the implications are for how learning is designed and supported to ensure more equitable access to opportunity for success. The new organization will expand a MacArthur-supported, city-based demonstration project designed to align city resources, connect in- and out-of-school learning, and advance workforce development to help prepare young people for college, career, and engaged citizenship.

More Colorado Communities Will Ask Voters To Reclaim Local Authority

This November 3rd, more than ten communities in Colorado will attempt to escape the local-authority-revoking effects of a Colorado General Assembly bill (SB 152) by overriding its restrictions at the polls: Archuleta County, Bayfield, Boulder Valley School District, Durango, Fort Collins, Ignacio, La Plata County, Loveland, Moffat County, Pitkin County, San Juan County, and Silverton. Many of these communities participated in a $4.1 million fiber infrastructure project which currently provides public entities (municipal buildings, libraries, and schools) with cheap, plentiful Internet access.

The 10 year old law in question, SB 152, prevents local governments from taking full advantage of local fiber assets by removing local authority to offer any services that compete with incumbents; voters must reclaim that authority through a referendum. Under the restrictions, localities cannot partner with local Internet service providers to provide high-speed Internet to community members via publicly owned infrastructure or create municipal fiber-to-the-home networks.

This might just be why progress on board diversity is so slow

Many reasons have been given for why only 19 percent of corporate board directors are women -- a number that has barely budged over the last decade. There aren't enough directors retiring to make room for new ones. There aren't enough outside pressures to prompt real change. Boards can't find enough women to take new seats. But a new survey offers a potentially simpler explanation. Male directors, who occupy the vast majority of board seats, apparently don't think it's very important.

PricewaterhouseCoopers released its annual directors report, which surveyed nearly 800 corporate board members. It reveals a sharp and unsettling divide between the way the male and female directors who were queried view the issue of diversity. The numbers are striking. Just 35 percent of the male directors said diversity on the board is "very important," compared with 63 percent of the women. Eighty percent of the women surveyed said they "very much" agree that diversity leads to more effective boards, compared with just 40 percent of the men. The male directors were also less likely than women to view racial diversity as very important, and less likely to believe there were enough qualified diverse candidates for board seats.

Black engineers join forces to boost diversity

Makinde Adeagbo knows how isolating it can be to live and work in Silicon Valley's tech industry as an African American. He says it's even more isolating to be a software engineer here.

Adeagbo, who is an engineer at the San Francisco (CA) company Pinterest, says he can go weeks without spotting another black engineer in America's tech hub. Over the summer Adeagbo founded /dev/color, a nonprofit group for African-American engineers that officially launched on Oct 7. The group brings together engineers from top companies such as Facebook, Uber and Airbnb to provide support and a voice to African Americans and give them the opportunity to raise up the next generation, Adeagbo says. Adeagbo says he hit on the idea while volunteering as a mentor to a couple of computer science students. "These students knew they had someone who had their backs, whom they could look up to and reach out to when they needed help. I thought to myself: Every black software engineer could accomplish a lot if they had someone like this," says Adeagbo. .

Why inflexible budget rules are keeping lawmakers from selling billions of dollars worth of government airwaves

The federal government could earn tens of billions of dollars by selling a stockpile of unneeded but highly coveted airwaves, but Congress' own inflexible budgeting rules are depriving taxpayers of a potential windfall, say regulators and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Under the rule set in place after the sequester negotiations of 2011, Congress won't approve any new spending without an equal amount of increased revenue. And the Congressional Budget Office is charged with coming up with that final price tag.

In 2012, when Congress passed a bill authorizing the Federal Communications Commission to auction off airwaves, or spectrum, to fuel the country's ever-expanding cellphone networks, the CBO was uncertain how intense the demand would be weighed against the cost of relocating users to other airwaves. The CBO pegged the potential profit to the government at $15 billion over the next decade. That proved to be a massive underestimate, as the first auction earlier this year brought in close to double that for the government. A second auction, scheduled for 2016, of valuable frequencies to be relinquished by TV stations is likely to bring in another $30 billion to $40 billion in revenue. Now, with companies like AT&T and T-Mobile desperate to get their hands on more of these airwaves, lawmakers want to capitalize on demand and sell off frequencies that the Department of Defense and Department of Transportation no longer need. But despite recent evidence of red-hot sale prices, the CBO won't reconsider its 10-year estimate, frustrating lawmakers, lobbyists and FCC commissioners alike.

FCC: Auction Bidders Can Reveal Their Participation

As the Federal Communications Commission prepares to set final opening bid prices and start accepting broadcaster applications for participating in the incentive auction, it has released its guidance on prohibited communications during the auction process. That will include a prohibition on communicating how a licensee will participate in the auction -- bids and bidding strategies -- but not include communicating "whether" a licensee has or hasn't applied to participate.

That and other advice came in an 18-page public notice issued Oct. 6 by the FCC. The FCC is nixing certain communications between and among participants in both the reverse (broadcaster) auction and forward (wireless) auction. It also clarified some of the rules and provided guidance on antitrust laws and administration of the auction. But it said in releasing the guidance that it also recognized that companies need to keep conducting their businesses. The prohibitions do not include necessary communication of bidding or strategy information to third parties including legal counsel, lenders or consultants, so long as the licensee takes steps to insure that third party does not share it with other auction participants. But violators of the rules will be prosecuted, the FCC signaled. Penalties could include "forfeiture of reverse auction winning bid incentive payments" and license revocation.

FTC Chairwoman Ramirez Testifies Before Congress on Legislation That Would Alter the FTC’s Role in Adjudicating Merger Cases

Testifying on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission before the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez described the FTC's work to promote competition, and its concerns about proposed federal legislation would eliminate the FTC’s role in adjudicating some merger cases. Chairwoman Edith Ramirez described the proposed legislation -- known as the Standard Merger and Acquisition Reviews Through Equal Rules Act (SMARTER Act) -- as an unnecessary step that would remove a key tool the FTC has used successfully for many decades to promote competition and advance consumer welfare.

“The current system has worked well for over one hundred years, and all indications are that it will continue to do so to the benefit of competition and consumers,” the testimony states. Describing the FTC’s creation by Congress in 1914 as an independent, bipartisan agency, Chairwoman Ramirez noted its ability to consider and decide cases as an expert tribunal, subject to review by a federal court of appeals. The testimony concludes that the proposed SMARTER Act legislation could undermine the beneficial role the FTC plays in merger enforcement, and cites several reasons why the legislation is unnecessary, including because there is no evidence of a difference in outcomes between merger cases handled by the FTC and those handled by the Department of Justice.

Sens Markey, Franken Seek To Head Off Net Neutrality-Blocker

Sens Ed Markey (D-MA) and Al Franken (D-MN) are urging Republican members of Congress not to try and block the Federal Communications Commission's new network neutrality rules via a final budget agreement. There was no such rider on the stop-gap appropriations bill that pushed off a final bill until at least Dec 11, but it could return on a longer-term bill.

Some Republican members of Congress have been trying to use defunding rules implementation via the budget or other legislative maneuvers to block Title II reclassification. "Without this critical consumer protection, Republicans would give an unprecedented amount of power and influence to Internet Service Providers, allowing them to discriminate against their users and choose the kinds of the content they provide," said Sen Franken's office. "This dangerous rider and push by Congressional Republicans undermines the right of Americans to have access to a free and open internet."

White House Plans to Grow US Digital Services, 18F in 2016

Despite talk of potential funding cuts at the federal level in 2016, White House Senior Adviser and former US Chief Technology Officer Todd Park confirmed that plans are on track to staff the federal government’s US Digital Services (USDS) and 18F with 500 employees by the end of 2016. Park said hiring remains on schedule and that both groups are expected to be long-term fixtures available to assist federal agencies.

During summer 2014, tech advocates feared for the two organizations after appropriators in the House of Representatives approved only one-third of the Obama Administration’s requested $105 million in IT expenditures. The funds were intended to launch individual USDS teams in 25 agencies. Such worries continued to circulate in July when a Senate appropriations committee cut roughly three-fourths of the administration’s requested $20.2 million to fund 2016 White House IT work conducted by USDS. Park said the 2016 congressional funding issues -- still to be finalized in Congress -- have not impacted the White House’s goal to install the new tech recruits in agencies.

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