Digital Divides and the 'First Mile': Framing First Nations Broadband Development in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Across Canada, rural and remote First Nations face a significant 'digital divide'. As self-determining autonomous nations in Canada, these communities are building broadband systems to deliver public services to their members and residents. To address this challenge, First Nations are working towards a variety of innovative, locally driven broadband development initiatives. This paper contributes a theoretical discussion that frames our understanding of these initiatives by drawing on the paradigm of the 'First Mile' (Paisley & Richardson, 1998). We argue that broadband development policy in Canada must be re-framed to address the specific needs of First Nations. The First Mile position foregrounds community-based involvement, control, and ownership: a consideration we suggest has particular resonance for First Nations. This is because it holds potential to move beyond the historical context of paternalistic, colonial-derived development policies, in the context of broadband systems development. We argue First Nations broadband projects offer on-the-ground examples of a First Mile approach, and call for more research in this area.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".