About Me

Ismael Peña-López
This photo by Doc Searls at the SDP2007
Header photo by Stuart Yeates at the Bazaar Seminar

I am Ismael Peña-López, PhD in the Information and Knowledge Society and lecturer at the Open University of Catalonia, School of Law and Political Science, working in the field of Public Policies for Development, with a special focus on ICT (so, ICT4D, digital divide and so). This site, that began as a blog (now I call it personal research portal), is intended to share with all of you the knowledge I might have gathered the last years and the thoughts that might have arisen.

My research interests can be written, more or less, this way:

  • Digital Divide, e-Readiness, ICT4D
  • ICTs in development cooperation, nonprofit technology, online volunteering
  • e-Inclusion, digital capacitation
  • e-Learning, e-Portfolios
  • Open Access, Open Science, Access to Knowledge

Previous to this I was a founding member and former Director of the Cooperation for Development Programme at the University, which is how this whole thing began.

During those (almost) five years I was terribly seduced by Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) and little by little I started to shift to more academic issues: directing and giving courses, directing institutional technology transfer projects internationally, and some diffusion, innovation and research projects.

Works

Most of my work about these subjects has been uploaded onto this site (translated or in the original language). Hence, I invite you to browse the works section to see what I’ve written and said.

Other places where I usually write (frequency depending on medium):

Places I contibuted with in the past:

  • Comunicació 21 [Catalan], about the Information Society and its impact on mass media and communication in general.
  • Educación y Cultura [Spanish], about Technological Innovation and Social Transformation in e-Europe

Other

I am also the (so far) only developer of the free software project BibCiter, a PHP+MySQL based bibliographic manager. I’m not a developer, so the code is not pretty good… but, hey, it looks cute at work, doesn’t it?. I’m also part of the Wordpress in catalan team.

I live near Barcelona, but I can usually be found here. My mother tongues are Catalan and Spanish, and I also speak English, French und ein bißchen German. I took a course and a half of Arabic, but had to leave it aside (not forever, I hope). I paraglide and play tenor sax — not at the same time (yet).

Of course, the contents on this site express my own opinion and not necessary my University’s.

Feel free to contact me by using this form (I know most people don’t like forms, but I’m not succeeding on liking spam…).