e-Stas: briefings from the symposium on technologies for social action (I)

e-STAS is a Symposium about the Technologies for the Social Action, with an international and multi-stakeholder nature, where all the agents implicated in the development and implementation of the ICT (NGO’s, Local authorities, Universities, Companies and Media) are appointed in an aim to promote, foster and adapt the use of the ICT for the social action.

Here come my notes for part I.

Opening Lecture
A case of Social Enterprise: Global Giving – the power of the masses in social projects
Mari Kuraishi President of the GlobalGiving Foundation

Quickly verifiable information flowing freely to many ore outlets has lead to a behavioural change

Eric Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth: there are shifts in classical technology, accompanied by behavioral shifts, combined with a mechanism for allowing communication.

The nonprofit sector seems to be lagging 10 years behind the private sector in digital development matters. But how can/should this new technology be applied?

A couple of interesting links:

Social Businessmen and Corporate Volunteering (I)
Stuart Gannes, Digital Vision Program of the University of Stanford

Need to provide with connectivity the peri-urban environments, crowded with rural immigration that have no way back, but a strong need to remain connected to their origins (family, etc.) and also to provide with connectivity those rural areas so they don’t have to run into extreme poverty at the cities they get to.

Engines of off-grid innovation: increasing foreign investments, wireless data networks, private investing leads public sector. The drivers for innovation could be financial services, community services and e-citizenship and e-government.

One of the ways to achieve this is to teach entrepreneurship. This should be combined with ICT, the secret sauce of innovation, extending the social grid.

From prototypes to impact, some successful initiatives:

Social Businessmen and Corporate Volunteering (II)
Belén Perales, Responsible for the Corporative Social Responsibility of IBM Spain

IBM fosters volunteering among their employees and, if their commitment with a specific project reaches 40 hours in total and during 5 continuous months, then IBM supports the employee’s project by donating technology and/or some corporate time. Besides this, there’s the volunteering day (actually two or three days per year) where everyone likely to volunteer can spend a whole day doing it during worktime.

Some IBM corporate social responsibility projects, where IBM corporate staff volunteer their time to nonprofit projects:

  • Eternal Egypt, digitalizing Egypt cultural heritage
  • Proyecto Atapuerca, establishing wireless networks for archaeologists
  • Genoraphic Project, to create a DNA database to study the past (through ancient humans genomes)
  • Kidsmart, special computers to ease digital literacy for kids, also adapted for disabled kids. The corporate volunteers build the special computing desks.
  • MentorPlace, where the corporate volunteers act as experts that give advice on ICTs
  • Reading Companion, to practice English pronunciation
  • TryScience, for science diffusion
  • Web adaptation technology, to adapt web pages for visual disabled
  • World Community Grid, through grid computing, to do more and better research (there’s supposed to be 650,000,000 underused computers in the world. There’re now 270,000+ members and 550,000+ computers connected, that have achieved the equivalent computing power of a PC working nonstop during 81,000 years.
  • OnDemandCommunity, to foster IBM corporate volunteering

The Citizenship’s role in the ending of the digital divide and the promotion of the knowledge society (I)
Montserrat Mirman, Compromiso Digital, Council of Innovation, Science and Enterprise of the Andalusian Local Government

Digital Escort is a digital literacy programme based on digital volunteers (sic) [I understand she talks about online volunteers, not ICT volunteers]

The volunteer profile is somehow a digerati, prone to social action and aiming to share his time.

The Citizenship’s role in the ending of the digital divide and the promotion of the knowledge society (II)
Rocío Miranda de LarraFrance Telecom Foundation

What is the civil society? What is the Third Sector? Could be civil society = third sector + citizenship?

The Third Sector is quite young in Spain, but growing: due to good economic and social environment, law changes (including tax laws) and social demand

The Third Sector / Foundations roles should be: complement other sectors’ roles (i.e. the Government) and foster innovation. In concrete:

  • Foster innovation incorporation in NGOs and foster its use, as they can assume more risks, have more flexibility; Digital Literacy projects should be a must in this field
  • Look for new uses of ICTs
  • Diffusion of ICT use, projects…
  • Advocacy, putting the stress in accessibility
  • Canalization
  • Intermediation

The Citizenship’s role in the ending of the digital divide and the promotion of the knowledge society (III)
Jaime Estevez, Director of Europa Press.net

Join journalism, social action and new technologies, so citizens can be main characters in the society. Public debate participation and social networking among nonprofits is of highest importance. To do so, a public platform was created so candidates can interact with their voters and vice versa. The problem is that people are not eager to participate with the traditional top-down rules, so the success is not in that there are tools, but how participation is designed and expected to take place in those tools/platforms.

Europa Press has now created a blog aggregator where politicians and citizens share a meeting space on the Internet where they deal, from each one’s blog, about public interest issues:cuadernosciudadanos.net

See also:

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e-Stas 2007, Symposium on Technologies for Social Action (2007)

e-Stas: Expert group on the decalogue for ICTs for nonprofits

At Sevilla, some people attending the e-Stas conference meet just before the conference to exchange ideas and reflections on how ICTs can not just help nonprofits but build “pure” ICT driven projects for development or social action.

The scope of the working session is to reflect on social projects based on new technologies, not just use them. Thus, the goals are as follows:

  • what can new technologies bring to social projects
  • how can we design social projects to standardize ICT use, methodology
  • what is the role of each sector (universities, private sector, public sector, nonprofits, etc.)

The hand that gives is always on the hand that receives. So, we should think about grassroots activities and proposals and stop thinking top-down.

People split into groups to treat, each one, the former three questions under five different perspectives. After a first brainstorming in groups, a good bunch of ideas are put in common:

Infrastructures

What:

  • Technical issues, to design standards and the technologies themselves
  • Social issues, such as accessibility
  • Infrastructures to serve or support services

How:

  • Boost wireless connectivity
  • Local authorities to foster infrastructures and global access
  • The market should be competitive, and there’s still a long road towards it
  • Technical standardization to access the network
  • Include into the design people with disabilities, we need a broader concept of design

The who’s question is a tricky one, as everyone should contribute, gather around projects and try and reach consensus.

Participation

What:

  • Helps participation to anyone
  • Allows disemination of information and awareness
  • Spreads resources, mobilization
  • New forms of participation, mobilization

How:

  • Immediacy, things happen in real time
  • Personalization, I participate as I like to
  • Bidirectionality
  • Design for all: everyone can participate

Who:

  • University as a testing groud: research, experimenting
  • Government: funding and projects information dissemination
  • Third sector: foster and promote the Internet as a new engagement channel, and promote his own technification per management issues
  • Private sector: implant the “design for all” issue, foster corporate volunteering and fund social participation

Summarizing: technologies can promote participative democracy besides representative democracy. It gives power to nonprofits and the social actors in general.

Internet is not a channel, but an environment, a place.

The problem is: when we talk about we, this we is just 10% of the population. What about the remaining 90%? Will this 90% benefit from a better access for the connected 10%?

Development and MDG

what can new technologies bring to social projects

  • ICTs bring voice
  • teach to fish, not give a fish
  • ICTs is about skills, not about computers
  • ICTs to enhance humanitarian aid by achieving more efficiency and efficacy
  • ICTs to boost progress
  • give access to the best that we (developed countiries) have
  • ICTs as a bridge to negociate the “now” with the “future”
  • market forces are going to shape the world, thus ICTs would change/reshape the way this market forces can act: equity, social justice, education, health, power
  • introducing a network enhances development, by participating in the network
  • technology changes the cost of a network by dramatically changing its cost. there’s a practical benefit of introducing a network, introducing communities that never took place before. do people benefit from taking part of a network? the answer is yes
  • south-south collaboration, being part of a “cloud”
  • pressure from the stakeholders and pressure from the clients
  • share different points of view and catch all sensibilities to guarantee access

how can we design social projects to standardize ICT use, methodology

  • assess the ways to introduce new processes
  • introducing technology must be user driven, grassroots designed, not funders pushed
  • bottom up, let the users drive the innovation
  • technology can foster existing tensions, magnify changes, multiply problems: thus, changes based on technology should be somehow “controlled” not to get out of control
  • make shure that not empowered groups can catalyze changes appropriately
  • simplicity

what is the role of each sector (universities, private sector, public sector, nonprofits, etc.)

  • the best stakeholder model is the “stone soup” model
  • let’s gather every passionate group, stakeholder inside the group
  • need to explain things in a way that every other sector understands, in his own “language”, what the whole thing is about. in this sense, there’s a need for the role of a bridge to make ends and parts meet. the academics could play this part
  • what’s the role of the government? there’s a problem on keeping the monopoly on telcos

Digital Literacy

Technology can do nothing to bridge the digital divide: it’s just technology, it’s just means, it’s just tools to set up projects.

How:

  • by doing projects, lots of them
  • taking into account the environment
  • population
  • evolving
  • engaging

Who:

  • administration: foster and boost the participation of agents, including bringing resources to projects
  • university: advocacy, research
  • businesses: working together with NGOs by bringing resources such as know how, funding, capital
  • nonprofits: engagement with the end users, dynamize the projects
  • citizenship: diffuse knowledge

one PC does not constitute a digital literacy project

Social groups, social innovation, social intervention

What’s the definition of innovation? Too much a complex society…

What:

  • promote relationship sharing
  • promote integration by other means, specially through anonymous channels

How:

  • Share
  • Debate
  • Special training for workers in social fields
  • Social entrepreneurship

Who:

  • add as much actors as possible
  • relationship fostering
  • somebody has to take risks: the Administration? businesses? There’s a need to fund social innovation projects

See also:

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e-Stas 2007, Symposium on Technologies for Social Action (2007)

III Congress on Internet, Law and Political Science

Just like last year, at the Faculty of Law and Political Science of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya we are organising the III Congress on Internet, Law and Political Science that will be held in Barcelona (Spain) on May, 7th and 8th, 2007.

I honestly think the program is getting better each year, being one of the strong assets for this edition the effort to make it more international than ever, and having Jonathan Zittrain as keynote speaker.

The main subjects for 2007 are:

  • Responsibility for content on the internet: state of the situation and new perspectives
  • The fundamental right to data protection: perspectives
  • Internet security
  • The new frontiers of copyright
  • Electronic voting
  • The Law on e-Administration
  • Use of technology among law professionals

Call for papers is open until April 25th, 2007.

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UOC Doctoral Workshop: thesis projects presentations

On Saturday March 17th, 2007, some doctorate students at UOC‘s PhD on the Information and Knowledge Society met to present — expose, I’d dare say — our thesis projects, talk about them and, most of all, learn from each other on concepts, methodology, etc. The idea came to me at the First Annual ICT4D Postgraduate Symposium and tried to replicate it here, in a more closed environment and, evidently, at a minor scope and scale.

Though only three projects were presented, the session was richest and worth repeating it in forthcoming editions. As usual, here come my notes:

Las nuevas tecnologías como agente social de transformación de la masculinidad hegemónica
[New technologies as social agent of transformation of hegemonic masculinity
Paco Abril Morales

After introducing FreeMind software — which I didn’t know — Paco explained that he wanted to know whether ICTs could change or reflect another kind of masculinity besides the hegemonic one — white, occidental, heterosexual… and sports and beer driven, I would add ;)

His speech was full of references and concepts, too many to note them on time and be replicated here. Nevertheless, I catched the two groups — and five subcategories — he spoke about and that he took as main research/methodological framework:

  • First thing to study was technology, from several points of view such as constructivism, Latour and his actor-network theory,
    Winner and the concept of technological somnambulism, postestructuralism, Pinchand Bijker, social shaping of technology, technology and social classes, etc.
  • He then spoke about new technologies: sociotechnological changes, alternative technologies and alternative collectives
  • Last (for part one) about technology and gender: sexual division of work, reproductive technology, heterosexuality, technological artifacts, co production among gender and technology, the masculinity-gender equation, gender identities, power relationships and technology
  • Part II began talking about the hegemonic masculinity and Connell(1995) concept of breadwinner
  • He then gave some explanations (and enormous listing) about non hegemonic masculinities: caring masculinities (work changes gender), gays/queers/by/heteros/trans, race/etnia/social class

The debate was highly interesting and I have to specially note some references to Andrew Feenberg.

Crecimiento inicial de Wikipedia: una aproximación comparativa entre etapas, temas y versiones
[The initial growth of Wikipedia: a comparative approach among stages, subjects and versions]

Enric Senabre Hidalgo

Enric presents his research (hypotheses) according to the following equality:

Vandalism menace + meritocracy/recognition + hacker ethics = initial growth of wikipedia?

To assert this, he needs/wants to know the answer to some other questions:

  • What was the role of the hybrid users (admin + contributors)? How many crated brand new entries?
  • Have there been any points of inflection in exponential growth?
  • Did original users created any sort of style? Examples/models?
  • When and how were the five pillars set and when “good faith“?
  • When the own jargon?
  • What kind of user pages were there initially?
  • How the first conflicts were solved?
  • How did exposure to media contributed to wikipedia’s growth?

To answer these questions he proposes some different approaches/concepts:

  • the concept of complex systems and emergency
  • the fact that it is a self organized system
  • negentropy (negative entropy)
  • stigmergy as performing tasks without a central planification (i.e. ants and pheromone tracks)

And a couple of very interesting links the provided us with:

Pelando las capas de la brecha digital: umbrales y relaciones entre categorías en índices compuestos
[Unpeeling the layers of the digital divide: category thresholds and relationships within composite indices]
Ismael Peña-López

I imparted the same presentation I did for the Annual ICT4D Symposium, but somehow updated — the material support being the same one, though in Spanish, but the speech a little bit different one. The new version can be downloaded here.

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Benjamin M. Compaine: declare the war on the digital divide won… or just don’t!

Back in 2001, Benjamin M. Compaine edited a book entitled The Digital Divide: Facing a Crisis or Creating a Myth?, composed by previously published articles — including the difficult to find Forrester report The Truth about the Digital Divide by Walsh, Gazala & Ham — and a brand new concluding chapter on his own: Declare the war won.

The whole book combines good research results with an almost global and non hidden aim to advocate for non State intervention, in other words, that there is no need for the Government to foster any Information Society at all because things are just doing their own evolution. In some articles this advice for non intervention comes clear from the facts and figures presented. In some other articles is more a matter of taste and how do you read the stats. In most of the remaining cases, and specially in the closing chapter, in my opinion there is absolutely no close relationship among what’s presented and what is deduced, with existing concept leaps that, again in my opinion, are not logic compliant.

Compaine’s objections to any kind of expenditure to i.e. subsidize computers relies on the true facts that personal computers have cut down costs while increasing power in a much shorter path than, say, the television evolution. Thus, computer and Internet adoption or penetration has increased quite quickly and will keep on doing it at the same rate because of two main reasons: the already said decrease in costs and the increasing ease of use of computers (due to better graphic user interfaces, etc.). In his own words:

  • The United States has seen an unprecedented rapid adoption of the Internet and email between 1994 and 2000 among all strata of the population.
  • Many other similar technology-inspired products achieved near universal adoption without massive government or even private programs: radio, television sets, and VCRs among them.
  • Prices for computers and similar devices have been falling constantly and substantially, to levels equal to a decent color television set.
  • Though services such as telephony and cable have tended to lag behind in adoption rates due to ongoing fees, free Internet access is available using a broadcast TV and radio model in territories that include most of the population.
  • Current rates of adoption for those groups variously included on the unwired side of the early divide are greater than for the population as a whole.
  • As a result, some gaps have already disappeared. For example, from 1994 to 1998 there was high visibility of the gender gap: Initially more than two-thirds of Internet users were male. By 1999 that was history. It simply reflected that early users carne from computer science and engineering disciplines that were more heavily male.
  • Among those who do have access to computers and the Internet, patterns of use are similar across income, gender, and ethnic lines.

to which I add a couple of quotations of his, which summarize his conclusions from the preceding assertions:

  • But surveys have found that services such as chat rooms (sex is popular), sports, and game playing top the list of activities, from where he infers that i.e. there is no more democracy with the Internet (more information, more participation) because people just use it for entertainment
  • A society that has more important issues, such as feeding and housing its people, providing for safety and security, and creating general well-being would place access to entertainment and information well down on the list of priorities

My criticism to these two statement is radical:

  • Comparing the evolution of TV with computer science is shocking to me: while TV sets have only had two main improvements for decades (color and the remote control) until the 20th century eighties or nineties, the personal computer (let aside big computing monsters) has changed his own definition from one year to the next one: there’s more difference among two computers in 2 years lapse, than among two TV sets among 20 years lapse.
  • One important conclusion from the preceding statement is that obsolescence of old equipments makes expenditure on computers much higher compared to television: a family would buy one TV set each i.e. 10 years vs. several PCs for the same period.
  • The second important conclusion is that new personal computer features — including power, but also the kind of software you run it with and the increasing networking issues — make of the machine not an entertainment device, but capital in the economic sense of the word: the PC is a productive machine, not a stupid box.
  • Taking ICTs not as media or entertainment, but as capital, the next statement is evident: capital requires human capital, capacity building, training. Even if the machine itself penetrates with ease, is its use that we must measure, specially its intelligent and productive use.
  • And, indeed, computers are not just machines: technological literacy, related to the “ease of use” and the nice “graphic user interfaces” is just a part — and a small one — of digital literacy, which has the biggest barrier in informational literacy: the concept of digital immigrants is absolutely not related to having a machine at home, but to digital behaviour and understanding
  • Thus, when people choose not to buy a computer or go online, it is highly likely not to be a matter of choice — as Compaine states, hence we can forget about this rational decision takers — but a matter of ignorance: I might never ever admit negative taxes on my enrollment fees, but I wouldn’t reject a grant to pay my degree.
  • And yes, feeding is far more important than entertainment. But if ICTs are not entertainment but a means to get food in a more effective and efficient way, it might well be worth giving them a chance. Actually, all you cannot eat can be interpreted as a barrier to food: roads, schools and governments included.
  • Last, but not least: even if some technology adoption is fast, it could be highly desirable to make it even faster, specially under the capacity building perspective and the fastest path of change of ICTs we started with some lines ago. You can either buy a TV set this year or let the decision be taken the next one. Would you not invest — in your country, in your enterprise, in your own education — this year and let it (or not) for another day?

By the way: the framework of both Compaine and my criticism is based on the digital divide inside the United States of America. If this debate is placed in any developing country, the scope and scale change dramatically… to worse, of course.

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e-Stas 2007 and the experts group on ICTs for nonprofits

Next March 21st, 22nd and 23rd I’m at Sevilla (Spain) to attend to e-STAS 2007: Symposium de las Tecnologías para la Acción Social [Symposium on Technologies for Social Action]

Besides just attending — the programme is worth the trip — I’ve been asked by the organization to take part in an expert group on ICTs for nonprofits:

The expert group is a multidisciplinary panel of professionals coming from the private sector, the public sector, the university, the media and the third sector, invited by Fundación Cibervoluntarios with the goal of generating discussion groups aimed to obtaining a multisectorial Decalogue for the building of social projects by means of the New Technologies, as well as generating social networking among the attendants.

Please, feel free to suggest any points that this Decalogue should include. Some days ago, Jaume Albaigès published in his excellent blog, tecnolONGgia, the report Las políticas públicas en materia de nuevas tecnologías, las ONG de acción social y los colectivos desfavorecidos (PDF file, 171 Kb) [Public policies about new technologies, social action nonprofits and underserved communities] and, in my opinion, it makes a perfect starting point.

Here come other resources about ICTs and nonprofits that I also wrote in Jaume Albaigès’s post comments:

Update:
See a live list about nonprofits and ICTs/technology in
ICT4D Bibliography » Categories » NPTech

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