Smart Chicago Collaborative Executive Director Dan O’Neil served on the Eliminate the Digital Divide Advisory Committee of the State of Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Development Eliminate the Digital Divide Grant Program from March 2013 to March 2015, serving as Chair beginning in February 2014.
The DCEO webpage is the place for authoritative information about this program.
This page serves as an informal collection of data, meeting notes, and relevant documents.
If you have a Google account, you can view this folder of documents relating to our current work. An advantage of using Google docs is that we can create fusion tables that allow us to do relatively sophisticated analyses of the grants in short order. Here’s the fusion tables we’re currently working with as a committee:
- DCEO Government grants
- DCEO Eliminate The Digital Divide grants
- DCE Community grants
- DCEO Job training grants
You don’t need a Google account to access this data— it was pulled directly from the DCEO Grant Tracker.
We’ve been working as a Committee on analyzing all grants made by the Department so that we can do three things:
- Committee will be more knowledgeable so that we can advise the Department in establishing criteria and procedures for identifying recipients of grants under the Digital Divide Elimination Act.
- Needs: formulate some advice and formally transmit the Department in accordance with http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs5.asp?ActID=574&ChapterID=7
- Use additional data (free lunch, poverty, etc.) to help in formulating this advice
- Committee will be able to zero in on a specific subset of grant opportunities so that we can work with grant managers to see what opportunities there are for more coordination and amplification of funding. DCEO has a list of organizations along with the types of funding they are currently receiving– it is a part of the grant decision-making process
- Needs: more insight into the software / process of DCEO in determining grants
- How does the existing software account for the provisions re: free lunch
- Committee will be able know more about the work of individual grantees so that we can be in better contact with them and increase their effectiveness with aligned funding, shared programs. This requires more analysis of locations. We’d perhaps take a look at the metrics they use to determine effectiveness, which is currently “price per person” to deliver this type of training. Overall goal is to form/ support a community of practice/ ecosystem
- Needs: more information about the grantees (contact info, program types, program outcomes, etc.)
