One Economy -- joined by its Honorary Co-chairs Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama -- announced a campaign to create the nation's first Public Internet Channel. The channel will be an online network of information and resources, in both English and Spanish, designed to serve the public with a particular focus on low-income individuals. Content offerings will include safety/emergency services, education, health, economic livelihood and civic engagement. The campaign will be a 24-month drive to raise resources and awareness and will include the launch of prototypes in several cities.
"The Internet is the single most important invention of this century," said McCain. "I am pleased to support the launch of One Economy's Public Internet Channel. It will ensure that all Americans have the same easy access to information and resources they need to prosper in our global economy without getting lost in the World Wide Web."
"If we do this right," said Obama, "the Public Internet Channel can do for accessing social services what Yahoo! has done for accessing entertainment or what Craigslist has done for accessing local goods for sale. It can be a place on the Internet where people go to easily find services and opportunities in education, employment, civic engagement and health care that the physical isolation caused by being poor or living in rural communities currently make inaccessible or difficult to find."
One Economy has built an advisory committee of 20 distinguished leaders to guide this unprecedented initiative, as well as a growing list of more than 500 individual and organizational endorsers for the Public Internet Channel.
Mayor Martin O'Malley of Baltimore joined the event today to announce that the city of Baltimore will be one of the first municipalities to use the Public Internet Channel to provide information and resources to its citizens. "As Mayor of Baltimore," said O'Malley, [I think] technology has been at the heart of our strategy to make city government more responsive to its citizens and to ensure that Baltimore remains an economically competitive city."
The Public Internet Channel will build upon One Economy's five years of experience in operating the Beehive, a bilingual consumer Web site that provides resources and information for low-income Americans. To date, the Beehive has received more than 8 million visitors with 20 percent of that traffic in Spanish.
