ICTlogy

Andalucía Compromiso Digital is a volunteering project to foster the use of Information and Communication technologies amongst the Andalusian citizenship, hence, an ICT volunteering project.

On March 27 to 29, 2009, the first Encuentro Andaluz de Voluntariado Digital (Andalusian Conference on ICT Volunteering) will take place in Jaén (Spain) to reflect about the past and draw applied strategies for the future.

I have been asked to make a speech about the impact of the Network Society in our daily lives, especially in everything related to access to knowledge and how this fact determines participation and engagement. I am to frame two following speeches by Juan Sebastián Fernández Prados on volunteering in the Network Society, and Pilar Jericó on personal skills for volunteers to network with people in risk of e-exclusion, thus why I’m standing on a quite theoretical level.

My speech has two main parts:

1. A first part on development, network society and the different natures of the digital divide.
2. And a second part on the role of knowledge and digital literacy in determining e-inclusion and, most important, social exclusion.

More information

• Citation and downloads: Access to knowledge and digital divide.
• Citation and downloads: Acceso al conocimiento y la brecha digital.
• For a totally practical level, please see Telecenter 2.0 and Community Building

Acknowledgements:

I want to thank Isabel Díaz for her kind invitation and Antonio “Nono” Pérez for just making it possible.

Slides and references for my conference at the 6º Congreso Andaluz de Voluntariado (6th Andalousian Volunteering Congress) in Sevilla (Spain). I thank the invitation of Fran Santolaya, who is, with Isidro Maya, coordinator of e-Voluntas, a referent blog and discussion list about ICTs in nonprofits: online volunteering, ICT4D, etc.

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References:

Slides and references for my seminar at the PhD programme of the Social Psychology Department at the University of Sevilla (Spain). I thank the invitation of Isidro Maya Jariego, who is, by the way, doing a terrific work on personal and community networks.

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iCities is a Conference about Blogs, e-Government and Digital Participation.
Here come my notes for session V.

Round Table: Connected Citizens. Cyberactivism.
Chairs: Rosa Jiménez Cano

Alana Moceri, president Democrats Abroad Spain

First time that primary elections can be done on-line. This means increasing the number of countries where voting is possible from 34 up to 161.

Online, everyone can contribute: absolutely everyone can upload videos to YouTube, photos to Flickr or text to any blog. Pro: democratization. Con: loss of control over your campaing.

Fundrising is key and is a good proxy to test the health of a political campaign.

Obama’s discourse is really 2.0: you can, empowerment, engagement. MyBarackObama.com is a good example of it, where you can even earn points as a reward for your implication and helping recruit other people. This really builds up a formidable base of activists.

Marshall Ganz: It’s values, not only interests, what drives people to take part in civic movements.

Sebastián Lorenzo

Fundación Generación Libre: how voters connect to social networks in Argentina. Not centralized, not decentralized, not distributed, but complex networks. They best way to boost complex networks is to build software that enhances the connection between peripheral nodes to the central ones (leaders).

Cyberactivism: activities to help bridge the digital world with the off-line world, with impact in the “real” world.

Cybermilitant: someone commited in the long-run with “someting beyond” cyberactivism. We’ve yet to find out what this really means.

Noticias LA: a distributed network of volunteers, living in all coutries of Latin America and Spain, selecting local news and feeding them to the site, acting as a news agency 2.0.

César Calderón

Social mediators are no more the protagonists in the Administration-Citizenry interaction: it’s the citizen the one that has to lead the approach towards their Government.

We are used to long run political campaigns, this is why, how and what for political parties were created for. But now people gather around more ephemeral and ad hoc actions. And, indeed, the top-down way of designing engagement has given place to a more bottom-up way of participating. Horizontal replaces vertical.

Antoni Gutierrez-Rubi

Goals of activism: have to be possible to reach and well planned. Assessment is a must and often overridden because of the speed of times and lack of time to reflect.

Proposals: agitation is good, but also reflection. A choral voice (i.e. making the same proposal from different places and points of view, but the same one) might be desirable now and then. Continuity and orientation of the discourse would help in the long-run engagement of our target.

Arguments: less opinion, more arguments. Ideas are good as long as they are “well packed” and backed with arguments.

Leadership: hyperleadership is good to avoid fragmentation, but has to leave room for shared leadership. Of course, leadership to achieve changes and goals. The ROI on leadership has to be positive and as big as possible. What matters is not getting there alone and early, but with everyone and on time (León Felipe).

Activists: they have to feel comfortable working without parties and organizations. But linked to the causes by following some basic rules. ARTivists: someone to be taken into account to help in the “packaging” of our ideas and arguments.

Plurality: are we in a networked world without boundaries… or sheltered in our trenches? Open minds.

Influences: credible, proximate, creating opinion. We have to impact “reality 1.0″, not think from and for the minority.

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.

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