ICTlogy

Telecentres, cybercafes, libraries and civic centres with Internet access… Internet public access points have evolved into much more that just places where access to online content and services is provided. There has been an evolution of public access points, and most of them have taken up a role of promoting digital and social inclusion, either directly or indirectly.

Even more important, other institutions not specifically aimed at promoting ICT usage — firms, schools, universities, governments… — have set up “ICT spaces” to help with the adoption of ICTs within their walls.

Those ICT spaces are usually run by a person or a team with a singular collection of skills: they are managers, they are computer engineers, they are social workers, they are communicators, they are educators… all at the same time.

During much of year 2011 I had the luck to be working with the Catalan Government and its Institut Català de les Qualificacions Professionals (ICQP) [Catalan Institute for professional qualifications, part of the Catalan Ministry of Education] to try and define what were the competences, skills and, very important, training required to run an ICT space.

There were five of us on the team: two of us — Isidre Bermúdez Ferran, from Fundación Esplai, a major telecentre actor in Spain, and I — provided experience on the field, while three others — Xavier Delgado Alonso, from the Catalan Institute of Social Services, and Manuela Merino Alcántara and Bru Laín i Escandell, from ICQP — provided all the methodological background.

Working sessions were really intense and what was learnt from the whole process was incredible. Now, the result of our work has been made public for public scrutiny and can now be downloaded from the ICQP website, both in Catalan and Spanish. Comments are really welcome.

Qualificació professional Dinamització de l’Espai TIC
(266 KB)

Cualificación professional Dinamización del Espacio TIC
(440 KB)

Presentation: Javier Nadal, Executive Deputy Chairman of Fundación Telefónica

There are few technologies, if any, that have been so quickly adopted as Information and Communication Technologies, in general, and mobile telephony, in particular.

And it is very worth noting that this adoption has not happened in the same way around the globe. Different regions, cultures, communities have and are using mobile telephony in many and very different ways. Thus the need to do thorough research in this field, and see how mobile telephony can empower and develop communities and individuals.

Manuel Castells, sociologist, director of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and author of the book.

The three things people value the most are Health, Education and the ability to communicate. And if we consider Education as Communication, we can narrow the priorities to just Health and Communication.

That is why ICTs are such a powerful phenomenon, with pervasive and fast rates of penetration and adoption. And the more important is a phenomenon, the more the need to perform research on it, to analyse it, understand it and, if needed, affect its path.

The book is not a descriptive one, but an analytical one, taking data from Telefónica and CEPAL-ECLAC to be able to perform econometric regressions.

Main conclusions of the econometric analysis:

• There is a proven, statistically significant, systematic, positive effect of mobile phones upon economic growth, especially in poorest countries and especially in poorest regions.
• Inequality is neither increased nor decreased because of mobile technologies. Mainly because adoption rates are so high (circa 80% in general) that any strata of society does have access to mobile telephony.
• There is an impact of mobile phones decreasing poverty.

This last statement is especially proven by the qualitative analyses performed in the book (see below the case studies), which show:

• A positive impact on employment. As many people work autonomously, thanks to mobile phones they can get jobs/works done without the bounds of more rigid organizational structures.
• People find employment more quickly thanks to desintermediation of the job market.
• Increase in security — and the feeling of security — of people: distant communication reduces exposure to different kinds of violence and hazards.
• There is an increase in the autonomy of people, but at the same time increasing the connectivity amongst people and increasing the feeling of community, of a common identity. But not any autonomy, but “secure autonomy”.

If we take the context of schools, it is clear that the educational system is lagging behind the evolution of technology, and educators and policy-makers should definitely rethink their teaching strategies and leverage the power of mobile techonology and mobile (i.e. ubiquitous) access to knowledge [I personally disagree with Castells that laptops at school should be replaced with mobiles: I believe the problem is not the device, but the educational model].

Discussion

Ismael Peña-López: despite the high rates of adoption and, thus, the lack of impact in quantitative terms on inequality, what happens in qualitative terms? Are we witnessing evidence for the knowledge gap hypothesis? Castells: absolutely. What we see is that technology adoption is not affecting inequality, but social inequality does affect unequal technology adoption (e.g. poors not accessing broadband). Nevertheless, the inequality of mobile adoption, or the inequality in communications, is not as important as socio-economic inequalities, and that is a very important fact.

Q: how is it that people spend relatively so much in communications instead of “food”? Castells: the main reason is because it is worth it: mobile phones have an impact on employability, for instance, and very important too, on socialization, which, at its turn, has an impact on employability and inclusion in general. That’s why: communications are of crucial importance nowadays and do have an impact on each and every aspect of our lives.

Q: is there a different impact depending on e.g. gender? Castells: there is, but not because of the gender factor, but because the gender factor already made a difference in the “real” world. For instance, in the Peruvian Andes markets are set up by women. Thus, the impact of mobiles on those women was higher than on men, but not because of their gender, but because of their important role on the local economies.

Book Review

The book performs a thorough and deep analysis on how mobile technologies have had an impact on Latin America, both at the economic and social levels. After two initial chapters depicting the framework and context, the book goes on estimating the quantitative impact of mobile telephony on economic growth and poverty alleviation, then moving onto mobile usage in rural areas, social businesses for e-inclusion, technology appropriation and usage among youth.

The table of contents is as follows:

1. Introduction: Mobile communication and development in Latin America in the XXIst century; Roxana Barrantes Cáceres, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Sebastián Ureta.
2. Socio-economic context and ICT diffusion in Latin America; Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Andrea Molinari, Javier Vázquez Grenno.
3. Estimation of the contribution of mobile telephony to growth and poverty alleviation; Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Javier Vázquez Grenno
4. Mobile telephony in rural areas: case study in Puno, Peru; Roxana Barrantes Cáceres, Aileen Agüero, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol.
5. Mobile telephony and inclusive businesses: Proyecto SUMA in Argentina; Hernán Galperin, Andrea Molinari.
6. Appropriation and usage: case study in Brasil; François Bar, Francis Pisani, Carlos Seabra.
7. Mobile youth culture in an urban environmetn: case study in Santiago de Chile; Sebastián Ureta, Alejandro Artopoulos, Wilson Muñoz, Pamela Jorquera.
8. Synthesis of results and conclusions; Manuel Castells, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Hernán Galperin.

More information

• El móvil ayuda a crecer en América
• La telefonía móvil contribuye más al desarrollo económico en América Latina que en los países de mayor PIB

On July 14th, 2011, I was at the University of Málaga (Spain) where I spoke at the summer course Acción ciudadana y voluntariado en la nueva sociedad global: voluntariado y universidad (Citizen action and volunteering in the new global society: volunteering and university).

My session was called Volunteering from home, the office or the train: online volunteering, social networking sites and smartphones and was preceded by an excellent conference by Luis Arancibia Tapia, where he described how society is changing and how this crisis we are suffering since 2008 is not your usual crisis, but most likely a point of no-return.

That very same point — change and dire transformation of the society — is the one I used to base my speech on. Instead of providing zillions of examples of online volunteering, I tried to explain why is now possible to volunteer online, how are people behaving on the Net and what is the (different) nature of online volunteering and online citizen action.

My conference had four parts:

1. The change of framework: what has been the impact from an industrial to a digital society.
2. The direct macro-impact of that change: how have some concepts and practices in development cooperation been radically transformed due to the digitization of information and communications.
3. The indirect micro-impact of that change: how have some personal practices in development cooperation, volunteering and citizen activism changed, especially in the nature of their contribution to charities and non-profit initiatives.
4. Some examples, a suggestion for a categorization and a comment on the Arab Spring.

Please see below my presentation. You can also visit my bibliographic file for Volunteering from home, the office or the train: online volunteering, social networking sites and smartphones (the original title) for downloads both in English and Spanish.

On April 12th, 2011, I was in Belgrade take part in the Quality standards in ICT education workshop, belonging to the Click to Europe, aimed at promoting and contributing to e-inclusion of people, businesses and communities in Serbia, thus improving quality of life, employability and social inclusion of citizens.

Knowing myself very little about quality standards, I was asked to provide the participants — mainly telecentre administrators and other related profiles — with a general framework where they could situate their own e-inclusion projects and, most especially, what was the importance and role of ICT skills in the whole scenario.

Keeping that in mind, and for something more than three hours, I began explaining what the digital revolution was about, that is, what was the outer framework, and went on zeroing in until I ended up talking about digital competence, e-portfolios and personal learning environments. The underlying idea — which almost became a mantra — was that it was not about e-inclusion, but about inclusion, inclusion in an always changing world that required the most valuable skill: being able to learn, to take control of one’s own learning process. And digital skills were there to help people in that.

The speech, Citizens in a Knowledge Society: rethinking education from scratch was structured as follows:

1. In The digital revolution: citizenship and inclusion in a post-industrial society I explained how digitization implied the shift from an industrial to an informational, knowledge-based, network society, and how in such a society institutions (and intermediators in general) have seen their roles and sheer nature radically transformed.
2. Policies for (e-)inclusion: from physical access to meaningful use depicted a comprehensive model of the digital economy and how each and every category of digital development was strongly related with other ones or with some indicators we generally use to measure development.
3. In Netizens: towards a set of digital competences I tried to exemplify how ICTs have become general purpose technologies and are now embedded in the core of our daily lives. Thus, e-inclusion is definitely about inclusion in a very much broader sense.
4. Lastly, New assessment frameworks for new skills provided a comprehensive definition of digital skills which I related, again, with daily experiences and, most especially, with the new ways of learning that Information and Communication Technologies have enabled.

The workshop provided me with two positive feelings.

The first one is that I got the sensation that there was an overall coherence and consistence in the work that I have been pursuing in the last years (I revisited and reused material of my own from, at least, the last four years). Thus, realizing that somehow you’ve been adding up or building around a core idea (and not just producing splattered thoughts) is pleasantly comforting.

The second one is that, at least, most of the theory I handle (of my own and, most of it, by third parties) seems to be having strong strings attached to reality and being ready to provide advice for policy making and project designing. The more feedback I get from people from the terrain, the more I think we’re going parallel (or converging) paths, which, again, is absolutely a good thing to be aware of.

Please see below the slides that I used.

Slides:
Citizens in a Knowledge Society:
rethinking education from scratch.
Part 1: The digital revolution:
citizenship and inclusion in a post-industrial society

Slides:
Citizens in a Knowledge Society:
rethinking education from scratch.
Part 2: Policies for (e-)inclusion:
from physical access to meaningful use

Slides:
Citizens in a Knowledge Society:
rethinking education from scratch.
Part 3: Netizens:
towards a set of digital competences

Slides:
Citizens in a Knowledge Society:
rethinking education from scratch.
Part 4:
New assessment frameworks for new skills

I was invited to present a keynote during the VII General Assembly of the Spanish Red Cross, on 26 March 2011. I was asked to talk about what should nonprofits do in view of the proliferation of social networking sites, online participation, cyber-activism and so.

In such cases, I generally try to avoid the usual showcase of “best practices” and go instead to what causes made possible those “best practices”. It’s a tougher option, as it often implies a trade-off from the “wow factor” towards the “what-is-this-guy-talking-about factor”. On the positive side, I pursue the trade-off from the “let’s-copy-these-actions” towards “I-know-why-they-worked-and-I-understand-how-to-design-them-myself”.

On the other hand, the representatives of the Spanish Red Cross were choosing their President and the members of the boards of directors of different regional levels. That was a very strong reason to shift towards more strategic issues instead of strictly practical and punctual applications of social media and nonprofit technology.

Thus, the structure of my presentation was explaining:

1. What caused the transition from an Industrial Society to an Information Society;
2. how people were leveraging their access to information and communication technologies for activism and self-organization;
3. what was being the impact like for institutions, especially those that represented people’s interests: governments, political parties and non-governmental organizations.

In a nutshell, the main message was that the Internet, cellphones, social networking sites, etc. are not a matter of how you inform your stakeholders, how you communicate with your volunteers or how you convince your donors, but a dire change of the game-board that requires serious strategic reflections and decisions in the very short term. Evidence shows that many institutions will either go through a deep process of transformation or will simply disappear, and NGOs are included in the set.

More information and downloads

• Browse the slides in Spanish.
• Download the slides in Spanish (, 20MB).
• Browse the slides in English.
• Download the slides in English (, 20MB).
• Bibliographic reference.

In Empowerment and Governance in the Information Society (I): the hourglass of information power we described a way to look at power, empowerment and governance, and ended up facing an odd distribution of power in the Information Society. A close up to that distribution may look like the following image:

Distribution of power in the Information Society [click to enlarge]

This image aims at visualizing how power is distributed along all the strata of nowadays structure of society.

The lower part is a hat tip to cyberutopianism, at least on what concerns individual empowerment: I believe there is enough evidence to strongly state that Information and Communication Technologies (the Internet and mobile phones and all the applications and appliances were unimaginable without them) have radically changed the degree up to which a human being can (potentially) manage their own life. Getting their own information (much more information, and on a very wide array of quality sources) and communicating with others at lowest costs and with no barriers of time and space have changed the way we can socialize and become more empowered citizens; and being able to access very low cost production tools and being able to create from scratch is an empowerment leap compared to an industrial society where capital (as a production factor) was out of reach for most people.

The upper part, though, is a frontal opposition to the “now people rule the world” thesis. While people are absolutely more free/empowered to act within the system, the strings that manage and can actually change that system are way beyond the control of the e-empowered crowds. Indeed — and as recent economic and political events have proven — the ability to manage and change the system of the world is even beyond the control of the representatives of those crowds, that is, national governments and parliaments.

I believe that there is a deep democratic gap between the increasingly empowered citizens and the increasingly independent, non-transparent and non-accountable forces that rule the economic and political systems from the top. Traditional institutions — parties, governments, elected representatives — fail both in upwards transmitting the citizens’ claims to shape a system according to their needs and wills, and both in top-down transmitting the need for some transformations that this system requires after the world has been made totally global, spaceless, timeless.

The good goverati, the bad digerati and the ugly outcome

Taking the place of those weakened democratic institutions, two new agents arise.

On the one hand we have bad digerati (bad not necessarily meaning evil, though their actions — consciously or unconsciously — do harm democracy as it is now designed), digitally literate elites that leverage their knowledge and the power provided by ICTs to reshape the state of things in their own benefit. These bad digerati understand the changes in society due to ICTs, the huge lag in Law to catch up with the pace of change, the digital illiteracy of governments, politicians and citizens, and succeed in circumventing democratic institutions. Incumbent telecom operators, digital media corporations, news conglomerates, a-legal or plainly i(l)-legal businesses operating in the very verge of written law (some P2P network facilitators, some piracy-related firms, etc.), banks and financial services, etc. Many of them are but the local/national branch of supra-national institutions and organizations that fully scape the reach of governments jurisdictions and, thus, act totally out of control.

Good goverati aim just precisely at the opposite of bad digerati: correct and fix the democratic misadjustments that the Information Society brought with it. Knowledgeable and savvy both in digital and political matters, they leverage the power ICTs granted the citizenry to promote a more direct and committed involvement in public affairs: e-democracy and direct democracy, open government and open data, e-government and government 2.0, e-participation and hacktivism, etc. are some of the many initiatives that non-governmental organizations, government institutions, citizen collectives and individuals are fostering. In my opinion, though, they are quite often too helping to circumvent democratic institutions and contributing in their weakening. But the upper levels of power may actually be far too high.

Thus, the ugly outcome is a complete wreckage of the democratic transmission chain, a democratic gap that both (bad) digerati and (good) goverati are but widening. Hence, the distance between the freely empowered citizen is also increasing, resulting in a democratic paradox: empowerment is not accompanied with better governance, but just the opposite. And in absence of a legitimate transmission chain, representative, plurally elected, we find different individuals and organizations (sometimes anonymous) that no one chose and that many times no one deeply knows their interests or their backing powers.

The role Goverati and the role of Information and Communication Technologies for (democratic) Development (ICT4D)

When talking about the intersection of Information and Communication Technologies and Development (see, for instance ICTs, Development, disciplines and acronyms) it is very common to focus on empowerment or the empowering factor of ICTs.

Indeed, after years of cultural imperialism through development cooperation policies, development agents (especially development policies’ beneficiaries or “developees”) have developed certain allergies against anything that might sound as imposing a certain political system.

But if our approach proves to be right, empowerment is nowadays becoming but the XXIst century version of bread and circus: let the hamster spin the wheel at will, but don’t it dare to open the cage.

ICTs focused only in empowerment are beginning to look like development policies focused only in humanitarian aid and relief, but with no sight on the far horizon: effective in the short term, a vicious spiral towards black hole in the long run.

In my opinion, ICT4D have also and always include a governance factor in their design, as development policies have to focus on sustainable development.

At their turn, goverati should refrain from weakening or even attacking their democratic institutions. We have seen some of these, and this does not mean that institutions and their people should not be totally transformed, but I think the only way to leverage empowerment for governance is, precisely, through democratic institutions, because I think they are, most times, the only legitimate bridge towards real change, towards real power.