Many of them are related to knowledge sustainability.
The LAKapps Project. Making localisation effective: user guides and training Sanath Jayasena, University of Moratuwa
Goal: facilitate the use of the Internet through local languages, by deploying Sinhala and Tamil email, web browsing and e-learning software and a selected set of sites (schools, Nenasalas): Firefox, Thunderbird, Joomla, Moodle, etc.
User guides and training material to run this software were also created to help users in their usage, including how to use keyboards to type Sinhala and Tamil characters.
Analysis of factors affecting the effectiveness of telecentres of Sri Lanka L N A C Jayawardena
Telecentre operators: 57% operated by aged from 27 to 35 years, majority of high performing telecentres operated by males (see later for absence of cause relationship).
School students and leavers, and job seekers and employees, most of them have ICT training as the first utility, while businessmen and monks search more office-oriented services (photocopying, faxing).
Key attribute of high performing telecentres
Social network
Managerial skills
Attitudes of operators towards business
Educational background of telecentre operator
There is also a significant relationship of growth of telecentre and relationsihp of owners/operators with mother organization. No significant relationship with gender or age. Effectiveness is related with the kind of services provided by the telecentre. Relationship between growth of telecentres and knowledge about community.
Recommendation:
Proper selection criteria for telecentres
Establishing effective communication between telecentres and mother organizations
Upgrading telecentre service is timely
A responsible authority to coordinate Nenasala centres and use them as ICT education centres, or education hubs
Rural schools, extension services, can use telecentres for profesisonal training, distance learning, farmer training
Participatory methodologies should be used to evaluate the impact of telecentres in rural stakeholders
Back to the Community: the Future of Telecentres Ismael Peña-López
Up scaling and replication? 150 experiences. Niranjan Meegammana
e-Fusion phtv Initiative in Sri Lanka. After some pilot projects in 2007, success brough a huge demand that required an important change of strategy to make it possible to be scalable and replicable.
Design vs. implementation gaps: dynamic re-design, operation flexibility, learning from grassroots.
Continued existence implies maintaining your project team, maintaining demand and increasing social acceptance. To do so, you have to identify participation benefits, innovative partnerships, local support structures, etc.
Telecentres and their role in socio-economic empowerment Chairs: Basheerhamad Shadrach, telecentre.org Academy, International Development Research Centre
If you have a telecentre you need:
A place, the centre
Devices, to connect the “tele”, and they can be computers, a ciommunity radio, mobile devices
But, over all, you need people, a community, that are entrepreneurial, with skills, with the ability to connect
Understanding the people, and bridging the gap between the government and the people is crucial to have effective policies.
To do this, you necessarily need to bring in stakeholders, and do it with a plan.
Unleashing technology to advance social and economic development Tim Dubel, Microsoft
In the next five years we foresee an even increasingly path of innovation in technology, being the role of telecentres how to wrap it in a human way. Indeed, telecentres are not interesting (only) by their mission for inclusion, but because there’s business interest in them. Thus, telecentre operators should “help” the private sector in understanding the possibilities to add value from a telecentre. Thus, both telecentres can achieve their social goal while being sustainable as thei also achieve an economic goal.
New business models:
Kiva
Hopemongers
See your impact
M-Pesa
New delivery models:
e-Health
e-Government
e-Learning
Shared resource computing
One monitor, multiple mice connected to one computer
Multiple monitors, multiple mice and keyboards, connected to one computer
The role of telecentres:
Leverage technology: not only increasing access to technology, but also showcasing specific new technologies
Support innovation: telecentres can serves as laboratories for innovation, where experimentation can be done, especially entrepreneurial innovation
Build capacity: train skills, workforce developement. According to European survey, 90% of jobs in the short run will require ICT skills
Expand networks: to share knowledge, to collaborate with other organizations and institutions
The role of telecentres in reviving a knowledge-based agrarian society Kshanika Hirimburegama, University of Colombo
65% or population in Sri Lanka in the rural sector, but leaving to urban areas because of lack of knowledge and information to stay up-to-date in agriculture techniques.
The course has increased student computer knowledge and given e-mail access to all of the participants. Internet usage has increased from 35% to 93% and most of them have a good level of awareness of online distance learning.
An example of the output is farmers sending information (text, images) to the Coconut Research Institute to find out what the diseases are, or to get advice for their crops.
Most people follow the courses from Nenasalas. Materials are adapted from the ones from the Indira Gandhi Open University, or, sometimes, created from scratch. Language is bilingual, one of them being the local language which changes according to the region where the students are. And everything is managed with Moodle.
The online education programme has proven successful to bring into the educational system people traditionally excluded from it.
Common Services Centres. The Indian Experience Ashish Sanyal, Department of Information Technology, Government of India
Common Services Centre: low cost and/or cost-effective delivery of e-governance services to the rural citizens, benefiting from the increase of penetration and quality of ICTs.
Services: government certificates, licenses, grievandce redressal, law & order, governemnt welfare schemes, market prices, education, news, entertainment, communication, government & private sector mixed services, etc. Availability of government services is a must for the sustainability of Common Services Centres.
These services can be categorized as:
Savings: save you time or money, as e-Government
Buying: help you to shop more or better. Not only e-commerce, but e-learning and important part of this category
Income: help you to actively increase your earnings
Have to find the local entrepreneur, guide and counsel him to set up the Common Services Centre, but then, convince the bank to help the entrepreneur in investing on the Centre, and convince the telcos to provide connectivity services.
Building a Knowledge Society for All. Emphasizing Government’s Strategic Role Supporting ICT Innovations in EducationJyrki Pulkkinen, GeSCI
The gap between developing countries and developed or industrialized countries can be widening due to lower investments in ICT, education and innovation processes in developing countries. Knowledge is increasingly the key factor of production as well as a raw material for economic development.
We need to invest in ICTs that impact Education. But not wasting money in screens that substitute blackboards or handbooks for doing exactly the same things: this is a misinvestment.
One OLPC promoter once said that computers at the OLPC programem could substitute teachers. Then, why give them to children that already go to school instead of giving them to childrent that do not go to school?. We need to prioritizise the excluded ones, not the included ones.
ICT Innovations and educational challenges:
lack of universal inclusive access
poor quality of education
poor management on the education system
incrasing irrelevance of the current educatoin system in the knowledge society, new skills that need to be learnt (and besides e-skills)
Layers of successful ICT integration in education (much more than infrastructure):
Hardware, software: ICT
Warsmware: principal, teacher, learners, parents
Socialware: school, university, institutional development
Cultureware: strategies & policies
What can the government do?
Foster multistakeholder partnerships
Create an enabling environment for development
A blueprint and a roadmap for partners
Key resources: institutional, human and financial
J.B. Dissanayaka, Ambassador for Sri Lanka in Tahiland, Cambodia and Laos PDR
Vidatha (sanscrit): knowledge that is given, knowledge that is transferred.
[interesting speech — impossible to reproduce here — about languages and their usage in ICTs]
Digital Bangladesh: Road to Achieving ‘Sonar Bangla’ (golden Bengal) in the 21st Century Abdul Karim, Prime Minister’s Office, People’s Republic of Bangladesh
Virtual one stop shop for Government services: cost effective, quick, participative, etc.
Of course, connectivity is the issue, that’s why the cretion fo the “mobile lady” and other public access points.
Also a rise of m-Services provisioned by the privaste sector: language learning, health, agriculture information, legal advisory, court case notification, market access and trade, emergency service, etc.
ICT Act 2009 (digital certification, fight against cybercrime), Right to (Public) Information Act 2009, m-Banking.
Q&A
Q: How can ICTs or the ‘Sonar Bangla’ be used to fight government corruption? Abdul Karim: ICTs can ensure proper transactions, as getting rid of paper, and minimizing physical contact of documents, bureaucratic corruption has necessarily to decrease. Pulkkinen: corruption happens when people don’t know. Raising awareness — and knowledge — on public affairs is the best way to reduce corruption. E.g. if the citizen knows how much money should there be in a specific account and the citizen knows how much money there actually is in that account, it is very difficult to cheat and remain unnoticed.
Telecentre for a digital divergence eraFlorencio 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.
What’s “for Development”? Isn’t everything for the development of a community or the world as a whole? Is it “for Development” only what happens in developing countries?
On the other hand, development has to necessarily rely on institutional support and adoption. Though it can be initiated and even fostered bottom-up, governments have to acknowledge and, lastly, actively support any initiative that wants to last and have a long term impact.
Thus, institutional reform is necessary… though it is normally slow everywhere, specially in developing countries.
Discussion
Social sciences should be providing feedback to Computer Scientists on how things work and how they are used. This means not only providing information about the impact, but taking part in the design itself, to feed innovation back.
We could say that ICT4D is to developing countries what e-Commerce is to the developed world. But e-Commerce is a quickly changing “discipline”: if it’s in a handbook, it’s outdated. So, trying to build relevant and useful content on ICT4D is difficult, as it will soon be outdated too. That’s one of the reasons IT researchers and social scientists just seldom come together in the needs and the solutions.
One of the priorities of developing countries’ governments, is how to make money out of ICTs. So we have to be aware of the priorities, which normally are not that people participate more or have better access to government services.
ICT4D is a means to understand societies and cultures and how they will be using ICTs.
There is a need to go multidisciplinary and try and understand others’ points of view and, more important, to learn something about others’ disciplines, so that mutual understanding happens in a easier way.
We should be able to make money out of some e-whatever projects, so that they are seen useful and, at the same time, to make them sustainable. On the other hand, this is usually a high priority for people in developing countries. For this to happen, some capacity building and digital capabilities development would also be a high priority goal.
Three economic approaches to ICT4D:
make money locally, enable cash sources: this is what local beneficiaries want
be cost effective, efficiency, efficacy, specially in Health, Government/Democracy and Education: this is normally the agenda of Development Studies
ICT sector for international commerce (leapfroggers): which might have or might have not an impact in the domestic economy (but only benefit the plutocracy)
The Social Construction of ICT as a Strategy for Development in Jamaica Michelle “afifa” Harris
Development challenges in Jamaica: high crime rate, unemployment, inadequate resources, etc.
According to the e-Readiness Report 2006, Jamaica has inadequate ICT infrastructure, limited contribution of ICT to GDP, unreliable electricity, limited Internet connectivity, low computer ownership, low innovation in the area of ICTs.
Why ICT policies, though? Are particula perspective shaping ICT policy? Are particular interpretations of realities shaping policy? What are these interpretations of the reality?
Research questions
How have decision makers interpreted ICT as a developemnt strategy for Jamaica?
How do these interpretations construct the need for using ICT as a development strategy? What are the discourses associated with this construction?
The national ICT strategies are being analysed to see what the backing discourses are, and which the underlying assumptions and conceptions around ICTs that policy-makers used in their discourses. The research, in the end, wants to provide a critical analysis on the process of policy creation and therefore the ideas and perceptions behind the adoption of National Strategies, deepening the discussion on the role of discourse in agenda setting.
Initial findings on the meanings and interpretations of ICT4D-Thematic areas:
Us the power of communication to make us better
About empowering people
About enabling people
Using the IT sector to generate development
But this was placed in the context of what “modern” development required particularly with definitions which seem to underscore the importance of creating a “knowledge based economy”.
Initial findings on the reasons for ICT as a tool for development
Ability to drive development
Necessary Government action
Responding to Global developments
Initial findings on the themes and areas of Discourse
Education and e-Learning Jamaica projects
Agriculture-ABIS system for Farmers
Community Development-Community Access Points
Open Educational Resources for Development. Let’s be realistic about its potential! Annika Andersson & Mathias Hatakka
Do open educational resources (OER) have any impact in education and/or developing countries? There’s a good amount of literature that state one or the other one or both, so this research pursues testing it in a real environment.
The problem is how to measure the impact of OER on development, as development itself is a complex concept. So, the research will look at its use, how are they looked at and what’s the impact on development.
ICTs regarding to use: OER are seen as a commodity, supporting development activities, as a driver of economy (increases productivity, efficiency), and directed at specific activities.
ICTs views: OER as a tool (OER as seen as a way to build your own resources), computational, ensemble, proxy (OER as an enabler for empowerment).
ICTs impact: OER as a replacement, the increase of a phenomenon, OER as a transformation.
Issues/hypotheses:
Tertiary effects are hard to measure?
OERs do not contribute to development?
OERs are not designed in a way that they can contribute to development?
OERs are not used enough to have an effect?
Re-shaping ICTs for nation building: the Ethiopian case Iginio Gagliardone
In Ethiopia there were some projects that costed a total amount of 300,000,000$, coming from the government treasury (not the donor agencies), projects that you wouldn’t find in the richest countries of the World. How did they came to think of, design and implement such projects? What was the mindset behind them? How was the political discourse embedded in technology?
In the late nineties, the minority from Tigray came to power and are since building a federalist while centralized state. There’s thus a need to decentralize to suport their ideology but also to exert a central control to make sure they can stay in power. Here is where ICTs come to the rescue.
Videoconferencing technologies for political administration, or broacasted lectures for education, are indeed being used to disseminate discourses about the nation at the grassroots level and among those in power. On the other hand, they reinforce the presence of the government around the nation (just for the record, all the web servers and their related services are hosted at the president’s seat).
This is a clear case where technology is not created to empower but to control.
