SAI: Creating Infrastructure to Support Digital Capacity Building for Under-resourced Microbusinesses

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership.

To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.

Microbusinesses, those with less than 10 employees, make up 92% of U.S. businesses and are an economic lifeline, particularly for people of color. Microbusinesses generate 41.3 million jobs and $5 trillion in economic impact. Yet, learning to use digital technologies, such as online ads and point-of-sale systems, is one of their top challenges.

The widening gap in digital engagement between under-resourced microbusinesses and higher-resourced larger businesses has long-term implications for profitability and community development. Despite the nation's major investments in broadband development, building digital capacity among microbusinesses will require more than just providing broadband access -- it will also involve additional infrastructure to facilitate adoption and sustained use.

This project brings together a diverse team of researchers from Human-Computer Interaction, Social Work, and Computer Science to propose the Community Tech Workers model as a form of infrastructure for supporting under-resourced microbusinesses' digital capacity.

The Community Tech Workers (CTW) model is inspired by the validated Community Health Worker model. It employs and trains local residents to provide 1:1 support for increasing community members' confidence and autonomy with using digital technologies. The goals of this project are three-fold: (1) Create a taxonomy of barriers and supports to equitable participation in using digital technologies among under-resourced microbusiness owners; (2) Develop culturally relevant workforce training for cultural competency skills in technology jobs; and (3) Produce a conceptual model outlining factors that might impact a community's potential to adopt the CTW program.

Traditional technology adoption models often use a deficiency-based approach by highlighting the problems of those receiving services, thus setting up communities to rely on long-term external help. CTWs promote a more sustainable model of digital capacity building that leverages community assets. Outcomes of this research include a more scalable and cost-effective CTW model for under-resourced communities to adopt and implement on their own.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.