Mending the Fabric: the Contentious, Collaborative Work of Repairing Broadband Maps

In 2011, the United Nations declared Internet access to be a basic human right. Achieving universal Internet access has been a longstanding goal of governments around the world. In the United States (US), provision depends primarily on decisions made by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) driven essentially by commercial market concerns. To encourage deployment in underserved regions, the US federal government has recently allocated unprecedented funding, with distributions guided by the information in broadband maps, spatial representations of current Internet access and quality published by the Federal Communication Commission. Yet, these maps are known to be inaccurate, especially for populations that are marginalized, such as tribal and rural residents. We are interested in the collaborative and contentious efforts to repair the data contained in broadband maps, and particularly by the efforts of citizen groups and local government to counter claims made by ISPs. In this paper, we study these efforts via interviews of 14 individuals involved in various local and regional roles, in policy, IT, advocacy, and research. We draw upon frameworks of repair and of data activism to ask who does this work and why; what tangible and intangible tools are brought to bear; and how the structural context simultaneously empowers and burdens repair workers. In doing so, we make three contributions: (i) we critique the process and system for broadband map repair for the burdens it places on historically marginalized groups to demonstrate how they have been left out of expansion and how their experiences are otherwise silent in official records; (ii) we bring together analytical concepts from repair and data arenas to examine repair work that is substantially shaped by socio, political, and economic context; and (iii) we illustrate how viewing broadband data workers as activists reveals the inadequacy of current tools and the opportunity for better support for their long-term, contextualized, and mediated efforts.