Welcome to ACT Broadband

Access Connectivity Toolkit

This was a great project to improve on the NTIA’s Broadband Community Assessment Tool (BCAT) We built a really open-source tool designed for broadband community action teams to use in documenting the need for broadband and the resources available to get it.

Current status: Shut Down

The Project and the app are now shut down, though they could be reactivated quickly if there were users. It has a few outdated dependencies and we could no longer maintain the code, so we shut down the app in 2021.

What it was

The system was built in Node.js using the Keystone CMS libraries. The beta testing app ran on a small cloud-based virtual machine based on Ubuntu 18.04. It relies on a separate instance of MongoDB, which can run on the same VM if you don’t have too many users. It also runs fine on a Raspberry Pi 3. Much of the work was done as a project at DemocracyLab hackathon events in 2018-2019. Thanks to a tremendous amount of great innovation and development by a very creative team, the app was successful in beta testing with communities around the US, but did not find users ready to commit when ready for production.

Want to try it?

Instructions for cloning and building are here, in the master branch of the repo. The documentation, inclusing wireframes, survey material and art are available in the design folder of the master branch. If you have questions, please contact the project owners through the github repo.