ICTlogy

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 session II. (notes at random, grouped by speaker, but not necessarily in chronological order)

Left to right: Daniel Pimienta, Stéphanie Lucien-Brun, Kafui Amenu Prebbie

Stéphanie Lucien-Brun, Handicap International

ICTs can be very strong barriers towards rights expression if are not properly made accessible for everyone.

We should not talk about access, but about uses, strictly related with capacity. How technologies are appropriated and how people and communities are empowered. And how do you make sense of these technologies for emancipatory purposes, for community building, to engage people in the conversation and in participation.

Daniel Pimienta, Funredes

Participation is the key.

He explains a couple of interesting stories about open access and open science.

We should avoid strengthening the manufacturers (de facto) monopolies by training people not in capacities but in specific applications.

Digital literacy should be given way more importance than actually is.

Intellectual Property Rights need to be reconsidered (definition, application, etc.), as they are, in their actual state, a clear barrier for both the development of the Information Society and development in general.

The role of the Third Sector should not be connectivity, but appropriation.

Kafui Amenu Prebbie, OneWillageFoundation

How can the Digital Divide can be closed by using low cost technologies? The limiting factor of access is cost.

Then comes the right use of technology, and how to teach the best use of it.

Open Hardware Initiative, Merakis.

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 session I.

Raul Zambrano, UNDP
ICTs, Digital Divide and Social Inclusion

Four stages of ICT Development

• connectivity, get people connected
• content and have people have capacities to deal with it
• services
• participation, Web 2.0

Digital divide

• Within countries
• Among countries
• Within and among countries

The difference between the digital divide in developed countries and developing ones is that in developing ones is but another manifestation of other divides — this is not necessarily this way in developed countries.

How can technology bride social divides, not technological divides?

Divides: differences attributed to knowledge, and differences dues to more physical and human capital.

Both the speed of adoption and the speed of diffusion of technologies are have very different paths in developed and developing countries [So, it’s not just that leapfrogging can be made possible (adoption), but it has to be actually fostered (diffusion). But, part of fostering diffusion to achieve quicker and broader adoption is about giving the population what they need and/or are asking for].

Thus, in the policy cycle (social gaps, awareness raising, citizen participation, agenda setting, policy design, development focused, implementation, evaluation/assessment, reduction of social gaps, new emerging issues), these population needs must be taken into account when designing public policies.

In this policy cycle, networking is crucial to gather all sensibilities and ensure that participation does take place. If there is not citizen participation, public policies are likely to be government’s or lobbies’ interests biased.

All in all, it’s about empowerment.

Comments, questions

I ask whether it’s better push (public led) or pull (private sector led) strategies.

Raul Zambrano answers in the framework of developing countries. In these developing countries, the Estate is to foster and create aggregated demand, it is the main purchaser, investor and installer of ICTs (infrastructures, services, etc.).

On the other hand, it is true that there is a latent demand from the citizenry, and there already is a manifested need for ICTs.

About the private sector, the problem in developing countries is that the private sector might not have resources enough to set up pull strategies. Or maybe they could, but it still makes poor sense for them when looking at the Return of Investment. This is especially true with developed countries firms trying to get established in developing countries, though local enterprises might not think (and behave) alike, and find it’s huge benefits what elsewhere might not even make it worth it trying.

So, put short, in developing countries what seems to be working is a centralized model but progressively decentralized [as the subsidiarity principle in the European Union, I’d dare add].

Do we need to keep on working on access (if everyone already has a cellular)?

Yes, definitely, but not as an independent variable but as a dependent one [this is one of the cleverest statements I’ve heard in months about the digital divide].

Paco Ortiz (AHCIET) intervenes in this issue: incumbent telecomms normally pay a ratio of their profits to governments so the latter can help solve the last mile issue. The problem being that once these governments have cash to do so, the sometimes shift the funds to other priorities — no critique intended: these priorities can be Education or Health. Thus, legitimate or not, the result is that universal access is never achieved, but not at the private sector’s fault.

One person from the audience harshly attacks governments for their corruption, which invalidates them to foster any kind of policy or to get any kind of funding from whom ever.

Raul Zambrano states that it is precisely transparency and accountability one of the main goals of ICTs in the sphere of the government.

Some people now and then ask how I do maintain my bibliography and how do I integrate it with the blog and the rest of the site.

My bibliography runs with BibCiter, a PHP+MySQL (like WordPress) bibliographic manager that just some weeks ago had its version 1.0 released.

The new version 1.1 now supports the use of a WordPress plugin that makes it really easy to embed citations in your WordPress blog. See, for instance, the end of this page or this other page to see an example of its applications.

The full integration of WordPress + BibCiter + Mediawiki is not difficult, but it is neither a minor issue, as it requires some coding, as each and every WordPress theme, even if similar, works in different ways.

In a research I made some years ago (see more info below) I described a taxonomy and a typology for online volunteers. The typology had four types of online volunteering:

• Type I: Online Advocacy
• Type II: Online Assessment & Consultancy
• Type III: Onlined Offline Volunteers
• Type IV: Pure Online Volunteers

These types of online volunteering where based on the kind of tasks that an online volunteer could perform, especially by looking at what made different (beyond the obvious) an online volunteer from a traditional, onsite volunteer.

These differences can be summed up like this:

• Knowledge intensive — not workload intensive
• Able to use small amount of spared times between other tasks, or in the impasse from one task to another one — e.g. at workplace, at home, on the way from workplace to home, etc.
• Can quickly perform multiple, small and short run tasks
• Can work in a decentralized way
• Can network

One of the main conclusions was that online volunteering could help nonprofits regain “lost” volunteers that could not go ahead with all of their daily duties plus onsite volunteering engagement, or just access an unexploited cluster of goodwill people that could not volunteer because they were too busy or too aged to do some tasks (e.g. build a school in an overseas country).

I’m happy to see that this is exactly what Fundación Bip-Bip has done with their new project Microvoluntarios.org.

The site is a network where nonprofits can upload requirements for help that enrolled volunteers can help achieving. The difference is that the focus is put in microtasks. Microtasks are:

* The ones that do not need more than 120 minutes to be achieved
* Can be fully performed online
* Can be done by people not necessarily connected in a formal way to one organization, be it staff or volunteer
Some examples can be: looking for information on the Internet, translating some pages, transcripting some short documents, brainstorming for the creation of a logo, writing a short story, designing a campaign, recommending some bibliography, doing surveys, photo editing, viral marketing, recruiting members, etc.

The site, really at a beta stage, does need some tweaking — like how being noticed of new microtasks in your area of expertise — but the idea is excellent. Kudos to Fundación Bip-Bip!

More info

• microvoluntarios.org
• Peña-López, I. (2007). “Online Volunteers: Knowledge Managers in Nonprofits”. In The Journal of Information Technology in Social Change, Spring Edition – April 2007, (1), 136-152. Vashon: The Gilbert Center
• Peña-López, I. (2005). e-Learning for Development: a model. ICTlogy Working Paper Series #1. Barcelona: ICTlogy

[continued from e-Readiness in post-conflict and developing countries: a reflection (part I)].

Second question relates to what methodology would be more applicable in post-conflict countries, being the issue whether it should be better to apply an existing one (for the sake of comparability) or design and implement a customized one that would better fit our purposes / the country’s framework and needs.

Fostering the Information Society in post-conflict and developing countries.

I don’t really think, as I said, that there is just one solution or a common road-map to foster the Information Society. Without hesitation, each country, each region, each community could set their own successful strategy and have but just some things in common with another community… or with themselves in another moment of time.

But I can see three main trends or aspects to take into account.

ICTs and immediate relief

As it happens with the distinction between humanitarian action (or humanitarian aid) and development cooperation, I believe that in the first stages after an armed conflict or a natural disaster urgent measures of efficacy and efficiency apply. ICTs should be planned to mainly benefit logistics: not development, not empowerment, not higher goals. Basic infrastructures should be a priority to help national and foreign aid agencies to do their best.

A second step (can go in parallel with the former), and easily brought by Web 2.0 applications, could consist on some empowerment on the population to connect with their peers and kin: think of refugees or victims of natural disasters. But this is just a corollary of the efficacy and efficiency goals of the institutions: they do not only have to provide material relief, but psychological and social. It’s just efficient to set up a website where people can find and be found, by themselves, and not by centralizing everything at the headquarters.

In this train of thought, e-commerce or business e-readiness models and micro level measurements of ICT impact should prevail. We do not want to focus on the population appropriation of technology, but on the institutions’. Connectivity, networks, productivity (to better achieve their humanitarian goals). Thus, we should design our own methodologies (while inspired in others’) and own set of indicators, at the very micro level.

Development of institutions

It is way beyond doubt that development can only come in a proper framework. And this framework is called government (let’s include in this term both governance and government). Actually, this is but the second part of the former point: enforcement of institutions, now not ad hoc institutions (like foreign humanitarian aid agencies) but structural institutions.

My opinion is that the focus in this phase should be e-Government, which, at least, means thee things:

• ICT empowered institutions, measuring their access to technology, to capacity building, their supply of digital content and public services, etc.
• ICT empowered citizens, at least above a lower threshold so they can interact with their governments
• The sufficient infrastructures so governments and citizens can easily work with each other

Sectoral, government-focused indicators and assessment guides should be the ones used in this phase. Already established indicators and methodologies should be customized according to one country’s reality and specific needs and goals: e-Justice might not be a priority, but e-Administration; direct democracy (through electronic devices) might not be a priority, and strong engagement (e-participation) from the civil society might be very important.

e-Readiness for Development

Third phase is but the (only) phase that e-Readiness indices and rankings usually explain: how to benefit from ICTs to progress and achieve more welfare, by means of increased productivity, competitiveness, etc.

As the landscape has now become global (after the emergencies of the directly post-conflict issues, and after the main national institutions have been built), it is advisable to follow and use international data (i.e. rankings) to get an idea of a country’s overall performance, especially in relationship with their neighbors.

This does not mean that these should be the only tools to use, but only that some harmonization between a country’s customized tools and the global standards should be achieved, the reason being simple: not only e-readiness, but the whole economy is now competing at the global economy level, so just one set of rules applies: the international one.

Some conclusions

In my opinion, at early stages of development (such as post-conflict scenarios) only ad hoc initiatives should apply. A participatory (action) research approach can be absolutely useful. And afterwards trying to infer general conclusions to improve the model and make it valuable in broader contexts.

At stages where development (endogenous, self-centered) is not the issue, but competitiveness (exogenous, third-parties-dependent), the more globally agreed measurements, the better, with one caveat: these measurements should be improved to collect all aspects relevant to most countries.

Unfortunately, I think that we have neither one nor the other.

That someone with Marc Lepage‘s profile and experience asks for my opinion on several subjects related to e-Readiness is, to say the least, quite a compliment.

Questions are many but can be grouped in two:

• Are there any e-readiness models to be followed to draw Information Society strategies?
• What methodology would be more applicable in post-conflict countries: an existing one (for the sake of comparability) or a customized one?

These issues are really broad and I don’t think there is one solution but many, so I decided to write my thoughts here so other people can join and bring their insights.

e-Readiness models and Information Society strategies

Let’s put this really short. Nowadays, there are:

• e-readiness indices, collections of indicators and rankings, to measure the state of development (as defined by the authors of such measuring tools) of the Information Society, normally at the country level
• e-readiness guides or assessment methodologies to help, on a check-list basis, to determine the strengths and weaknesses in Information Society matters and, hence, serve as an inspiration to design your own strategy.

The main problem is that indices and guides do not go hand in hand. On one hand, indices are really global, mainly designed for developed countries, with a strong bias towards infrastructures and, most important, present a snapshot of isolated indicators, not providing the relationship — and causability — among them. On the other hand, guides are (usually) old (came up with the digital divide fever from the first years of the XXIst century), focused in just one aspect (usually e-commerce) and do not provide measuring tools (i.e. they are not necessarily using the same concepts as e-readiness indices.)

Concerning e-readiness models and assessment guides, there are many, but here comes a short selection:

Some indices

• ITU Digital Opportunity Index
• United Nations ICT Opportunity Index (ITU and UNCTAD, after George Sciadas‘s work
• The World Economic Forum Networked Readiness Index
• The Economist Intelligence Unit e-Readiness Rankings
• OECD Key ICT Indicators (not an index)
• UNPAN E-government Readiness Index
• Find more here: ICT Data sources.

Some guides

• Center for International Development at Harvard University (2000) Readiness for the Networked World. A Guide for Developing Countries
• CSPP (2000) Readiness Guide for Living in the Networked World
• Adamal, A., Lanvin, B. & Schware,R. (2005) E-strategies Monitoring and Evaluation Toolkit
• APEC (2000) E-Commerce Readiness Assessment Guide
• McConnell International (2001) Ready? Net. Go! Partnerships Leading The Global Economy. See also other works by McConnell International and Peppers & Rogers Group
• Find more here: Readings on e-Readiness.

So, trying to have a comprehensive tool would require to choose one guide and see how to use the several existing indices and indicators to measure the variables appearing in your guide. Or, instead, you can go your own way and try to obtain your own data, either because it is published by national statistics agencies or because you can collect them on your own. In the first case, it is likely that national agencies already provide all relevant data to e.g. ITU or OECD or they are not collecting it. In the second case, surveys are really expensive. If you do it just once, you won’t be able to analyze trends and impact of your strategies. If you do it several times, highest costs might make preferable to adapt your analysis to existing data than try and collect them without help. A mid-way solution is, of course, engage the national statistics agency and help them in their work (e.g. in the design).

Nevertheless, as said there are limitations in both measuring tools and assessment and strategy guides, namely

• Bias towards infrastructures.
• Sectoral focus, normally in e-Commerce or e-Government.
• Lack of focus in digital content and services.
• Poor data in digital literacy.
• Poor data in regulation and the legal framework.
• Lack of cross-data analysis (e.g. to see what’s the relationship between existence of installed capacity and digital literacy, or digital literacy and intensity of use of digital public services) necessary to establish priorities and road-maps.
• Bias towards developed countries’ focused strategies: context is usually provided from a western/developed point of view
• Bias towards state-of-the-art technology: goals and optimums are usually set on a basis of best-technology-available, not most-suitable-technology

[continues in e-Readiness in post-conflict and developing countries: a reflection (part II)].