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
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Cualificación professional Dinamización del Espacio TIC
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Paper Session: Meaning and ICTD

Looking Beyond ‘Information Provision’: The Importance of Being a Kiosk Operator in the Sustainable Access in Rural India (SARI) Project, Tamil Nadu, India
Janaki Srinivasan

How has changed the life of the women that operate information kiosks in India?

Information kiosks provide information on agriculture, prices, government services, etc. especially to reduce information asymmetry in the population.

• Do info kiosks actually end up providing information to everybody in a community? (IIITB, 2005)
• Does provision of information naturally improved socio-economic conditions? (Gopakumar, 2004)
• Is information provision the main role player of info kiosks in practice?

This research puts the stress on the last point.

The project focuses on information asymmetry framed as the problem and information provision as the solution. In this framework, ICTs are the tools that enable the solution.

Kiosk operators have many duties and interactions that go beyond mere service provision: interact with other operators, with elected leaders, with residents, bureaucrats, domain experts, and with the Dhan for meetings and training sessions.

At the e-Government level, the kiosk has several objectives such as information provision (schemes, procedures, records) and improving state-vilage resident interactions (transparency, efficiency).

Outcomes for kiosk operators:

• Seeing the state (and other domains) differently: awareness (schemes, procedures, techniques, who’s who), interaction (frequency, diversity, learning by doing, coping, dealing, negotiating).
• Being seen by the village differently: status in the community (“girl with the computer”, “girl for certificates”).

Discussion

Q: So, the research showed that there were a lot of unpredicted consequences/outcomes for kiosk operators, but… what happened with the intended outcomes? A: We found that they were not in conflict and, actually, they were mutually reinforced.

The Social Meaning of ICTs: Patterns of Technology Adoption and Usage in Context
Cynthia Putnam, Beth Kolko

3 rounds survey (2006, 2007, 2008) in four countries in Central Asia to compare Internet users in that region with US Internet users (using for those data from the Pew Internet Life survey).

Two methodology:

• Technology acceptance model (TAM): external variables determine perceived userfulness and ease of use, that determine attitude, intentions and effective usage.
• Diffusion of Innovations (DOI): characteristic of the technology, diffusion channels of how technology is communicated, time and social assistance. These issues define 5 characteristics of an innovation: relative advantage, complexity or ease of use, compatibility with existing values, trial-ability and observability.

Data (2008) showed that for Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan most of Internet users were innovators and early adopters, while in the US, at that time (PEW data for 2007) there already were many laggards now using the Internet.

Predictors were calculated with income and other variables and the resultant statistic proved to be a good predictor on who would be online in Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan at a specific time. Internet users share demographic similarities when compared to non-users. On the other hand, usage is also pretty similar between countries and within profiles.

Discussion

Jim Murphy states that there should be much more focus (work) on the context and in the framework where all this technology adoption if framed into.

From digital inclusion to information literacy
Chair: Brasilina Passarelli, Daisy Grisolia, Fernanda Scur, Mariana Tavernari — Escola do Futuro

Senior people, though they still use the Internet very little, the fraction of users is increasing very fast in recent years (1% in 2006, 3% in 2009).

Indeed, Internet users become very intensive users and use a broad range of online tools. On the other hand, elderly people going online become more independent and, over all, become more independent when it comes to learning about the Internet.

They use more their computers at home, use the Internet to browse about citizenship and health (which makes them different from other Interent users).

Now, the telecentre has shifted from a place where to go online to a place to gather with their peers.

So, what should be the future of this infocentre/telecentre given the new data?

Discussion

Telecentres/infocentres seem to be fighting for who’s in charge of information literacy, and they should cooperate more.

Michael Downey: Should we force things like infocentres within “ancient” structures? Why not develop something new and organic to support the use of ICTs?

More info

My own opinions on this issue can be found at:

• Social networking sites: a window to the community
• Inclusion in the Network Society: the role of telecentres
• Public Internet Access Points: impact vs. sustainability

RE-ACT: Social REpresentations of Community Multimedia Centres and ACTion for Improvement
Sara Vannini

Telecentres should fulfil the communication and information needs of the communities where they are located.

Some research states that sometimes telecentres do not work, but there’s increasing evidence that the reason might be of a cultural or social nature, thus not directly related with the telecentre and the technology it provides, but its usage, the context.

Social representation: social psychological phenomena can only be understood if they are seen as being embedded in the socio-cultural context. The function of a social representation is to establish how people interpret their world, and to enable people to communicate with the other members of the community.

Actions for improvement:

• The use of mobile phones as an instrument of empowerment.
• The use of ICTs to develop cultural content that reflect the nature and the vision of local communities.
• Make this content available for visitors, offering chances for cultural exchange and understanding.

Discussion

Matti Tedre raises the point of telecentre vs. Internet café, and public/universal access vs. profit and sustainability. I would like to bring back a previous writing of mine: Public Internet Access Points: impact vs. sustainability.

Citizens’ Understanding and Definitions of Democracy during Internet Campaigns
Amara Thiha

Authoritarian states usually moraliza and define democracy in their own particular way. Why moralized? Intentions to practice and implement democracy collide with some interpretations of the third way of democratization / of liberal democracy. How do authoritarian states take up the web 2.0 and politics 2.0?

The research consists on the comparison of three authoritarian states: Myanmar (dictatorship), Iran (multy-party authoritarian state) and China (single party authoritarian state). A case is developed analysing the political blogosphere.

Web crawling analysis provided data to perform both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Ethnography also provided a good qualitative insight.

Discussion

Matti Tedre: is the blogging community representative of the whole population?

Mazhar Ali: how do you define an authoritarian regime? A: there are objective/established definitions that take into account the number of parties, the political freedom and citizen rights, etc.

Vanessa Frías: how are data extracted? A: some blogs are read, all of them are treated with text analysis tools. Vanessa Frías: natural language processing is a methodology.

Ismael Peña-López: did you include in your sample pro-government (i.e. hired by the government) bloggers? A: yes, definitely.

Online networking for Development: an exploration of Projecthonduras.com
Sharon Mc Lennan

Projecthonduras.com aims at gathering Honduras available human capital by means of ICTs, aims at harnessing resources and knowledges across international boundaries.

Notes from Asian Telecentre Forum 2009 / eAsia 2009 held in the BMICH, Colombo, Sri Lanka, on December 2-4th, 2009. More notes on this event: easia2009.

Plenary Session, Track 2 (pt.1)

Telecentre for a digital divergence era
Florencio Ceballos, telecentre.org

More and more mobiles in people’s hands, many of them in developing countries. 4.6 billion estimated by end of 2009. Thus, we might be facing not a digital divide, but a digital divergence: it’s not that people do not have access to ICTs, but that they have access to different qualities of ICTs. Difference between full access to the Knowledge Economy to restricted access to the Knowledge Economy.

Telecentres are a way to share enhanced access to the Knowledge Economy. But not only they provide access, but also skills, etc.

Why shared access? Well, not that new:

• Public transportation
• Shared bycicles in many cities in the world
• Access to water through fountains at streets
• Public libraires

Ownership, thus, is not the issue, but access to knowledge. And telecentres are the “sherpas” that facilitate this access to people.

Though sustainability is quite often raised as an issue, in fact, many times is lack of investment what strangles the viability of certain telecentres. With the appropriate investment, more (business) opportinities come at hand.

And public access is not at all a “solution for very poor countries”. Germany, Sweden, Spain, UK, etc. are amongst the countries that have a more developed (in quantity and quality) network of telecentes.

But of course, telecentres have to evolve. Some are using telecentres to access higher education courses, others to bring microcredit to rural areas…

The impact of the Cloud on Public Sector
Bash Badawi, Microsoft Public Sector APAC

The cloud:

• software as a service,
• data as a service,
• platform as a service,
• infrastructure as a service,
• everything as a service.

It lowers the entrance costs to ITs, forces integration.

On the other hand, it’s fully scalable and you don’t even have to care about predicting how much usage, computing power, storage, etc. you will be needing. It’s just a pay-as-you-go.

Building a Smarter Planet: Government
Kevin North, IBM Asia Pacific Public Sector Business

We now have the aility to measure the condition of almost anything: e.g. with RFID cards we can constantl monitor the temperature of each and every cow in our herd.

The imperative for government today:

• Deliver value
• Exploit opportunities
• Act with speed

The road to outsourcing:

• Staff augmentation
• Out-tasking
• Co-sourcing
• Portfolio outsourcing
• Outsourcing

Q&A

Comment by attendant: India is increasing the number of mobile phones by 18,000,000 monthly, thrice the population of Finland.

The Xarxa Òmnia is the largest network of telecentres in Catalonia and one of the largest in whole Spain. The network was set up in 1999 and, since its conception, it has always had a strong community-focused aim which made of their telecentres — or Punt Òmnia [Òmnia Point] — more than just public Internet access points, but more tools of (e-)inclusion and community building.

Now that Xarxa Òmnia has turned 10 years old, the yearly rendez-vous of the whole network, the Jornada Òmnia, will focus on how should the network evolve in the coming years, taking into special account the changes that have been happening in the last 10 years in matters of the Information and the Network Society, and what are the challenges that policy makers and telecentre administrators will have to face to successfully fight the digital divide and the risks of (e-)exclusion.

I have been invited to introduce both these aspects. And my point has been already been made in the way that I write (e-)inclusion and (e-)exclusion: in my opinion, e-inclusion or e-exclusion will increasingly be a matter of inclusion/exclusion rather than being centre on the “e-”. Obvious as this might sound (i.e. inclusion being a matter of inclusion), the devil is in the details:

• Real impact of ICTs will come — I believe — by them enabling, enhancing and empowering the analogue part of our lives: e-inclusion should be about ICTs finding ways to help people be part of a community, not about pouring people in the Internet (the “e-” focus of e-inclusion), notwithstanding a recurrent strategy in many Information Society policies;
• People not online are, increasingly, people actively refusing to be online. While it is still true that many people don’t go online because of impossibility to access the Internet (hardware, connectivity, affordability, skills, etc.), we also find people that being able to access it, just don’t want to or even walk out of it. Lack of awareness, belief that ICTs bring nothing good to their lives, technophobia, etc. are keeping them disconnected and in risk not of e-exclusion but exclusion at all.

Thus, here’s my presentation:

The main points and rationale of my presentation are:

• The Digital Revolution puts at stake the economy of scarcity (at least at the information and knowledge levels), brings down transaction costs and introduces a new actor into the equation: machines that substitute brain work (as other machines substituted muscle work in the Industrial Revolution)
• The effect of these three aspects, puts at stake institutions? Do schools, firms, governments, the media or civic organizations still have a role in mediating between citizens? Or will citizens bypass them? What if they do? What if citizens themselves are bypassed by their peers?
• If hierarchies and institutions give way to — or are deeply transformed by — networks, inclusion will be a matter of staying connected and being able to re-program oneself to be kept within the network.
• New (digital) competences will be crucial for that, from technological literacy to e-awareness.
• Thus, we might be needing to reframe our policies and foster pull strategies instead of pull strategies; we might also reconsider the role of our (e-)inclusion tools (telecentres amongst them), that might need shifting from the “e-” to the “inclusion”, strongly focussing on community building, enhanced by technologies.

This presentation is a wonderful occasion for me to gather up things I’ve been working on and thinking about in the last two years. In some way, it collects the reflections I already made in the following speeches (in chronological order):

• The role of ICTs and the Web 2.0 for development: from push to pull strategies, about inclusion and exclusion in the Network Society and how the digital divide should be reframed as a network or community divide
• Telecenter 2.0 and Community Building, about how telecentres should evolve according to the new Web 2.0
• Towards a comprehensive definition of digital skills , about what I think a comprehensive set of digital competences is, and their importance for living in the Network Society
• Darwin at the Information Society: adaptation (and benefits) or extinction, on the end of institutions as we know it, and how telecentres should empower individuals to create networks and emancipate from the (ancient) vertical institutions
• Public Internet Access Points: impact vs. sustainability, on the challenges facing telecentres as Internet access becomes more pervasive and being part of a community increasingly important

I want to thank Cesk Gasulla, Noemí Espinosa, Marta Jové, Sònia Castro, Dolors Pedrós and the rest of the organizing committee for the invitation and the valuable chance to organize my reflections and think aloud in public. Moltes gràcies!