By developing and providing free access to a large local website constructed by, with and consciously for members of the low-income community, ICON seeks to alter the very infrastructure of that community while insuring that its members are not left in the breakdown lane of the information superhighway. Using the same video computers that provide Internet access, ICON also allows rural clients of FRLS to receive full legal representation, complete with file and document transfers, without ever traveling farther than their local library. ICON has been funded as a national demonstration project by the Telecommunications Infrastructure and Information Assistance Program of the U.S. Department of Commerce, and by the Open Society Institute , an international foundation that supports the development of participatory societal structures. In addition, the substantial costs of the telephone lines necessary for the ICON project have been greatly reduced through the participation of the Polk County and Heartland Library Cooperatives , both of which receive large discounts as a result of the federal universal access program, known as the E-rate. Finally, Florida Rural Legal Services has made a substantial contribution of resources to the project in the form of allocated staff time.
ICON is designed to address two overarching problems of life in rural America.
The first is the absence of many services taken for granted by urban dwellers, because those services cannot be supported by small population pockets separated by vast distances. In addition, services that do exist are often not utilized effectively because the far-flung population either does not know they exist or cannot get to them. There is no intercity public transportation in the area to be served. ICON is an effective electronic means of providing both information and services to the population of this large, isolated area. The advent of videoconferencing, in which a person at one location can see and communicate with someone anywhere else, has made the concept of remote legal representation possible.