ICTlogy

In a seminar I imparted in January — Fostering the Information Society for Development in the Web 2.0 framework: from push to pull strategies — the case of Spain — I suggested that the most developed countries had reached sort of a threshold of installed infrastructures. Of course, this threshold could be pushed up and more infrastructures (or better and cheaper ones) could be installed, but the development of the Information Society would barely rely on that.

According to the data available, I wondered whether the solution might be shifting from push to pull strategies, parallel to the shift that we’ve been living in the web landscape towards the so-called Web 2.0.

This is the chart I then presented:

[click to enlarge]

Now, with data from the World Bank we can draw another picture that seems to back my ideas — or, at least, I’ll make it fit to them.

Finland and Ireland have usually been examples of best practices in benefiting from ICTs to foster their respective economies and welfare. Even with different cultural frameworks, development models and economic approaches, they are both doing well and are a recurrent example. Spain, on the other hand, is the typical example of the “wannabe”: is doing quite well at the economic level, but the development level of its Information Society seem never to take off.

Let’s compare their respective indicators:

ICT indicators comparison between Spain, Finland and Ireland (source The World Bank)
[click to enlarge]

The right side of the chart — including the indicators at the top and bottom — could be considered as infrastructures. All three countries do more or less equally, though Ireland performs sligtly better and the availability of bandwidth is worse in Spain. We could consider also “infrastructures” (human capital) TVs and newpapers, and I guess the inequalities and preferences of each country are quite correlated with their respective educational levels: more newpapers, better education; more TVs, worse education.

But the interesting part is the left part of the chart.

First difference is intensity of use, were Finland does better, though it has worse prices, so affordability, in these cases, does not seem to be the explanation.

What about the other three indicators? Investment (one dare think of R&D to create content and services), intensity of use at businesses (maybe related with possibilities of e-commerce, e-business, B2B, B2C, etc.) and availability of e-Government Services. In other words: demand generating initiatives.

So, it seems that with similar infrastructures, it is demand driven strategies the ones that seem to foster the development of the Information Society. The analysis is quite simple and is not flawless, but all evidences seem to be slowly converging towards the same conclusion.

For the fourth time — see here some notes about last year’s congress — at the School of Law and Political Science, Open University of Catalonia, we organize our Internet, Law and Politics Congress, this year’s tagline quite an appealing one: Social Software and Web 2.0: Legal and Political Implications.

Programme (abridged)

Monday, 2 June 2008

• Living Apart Together: Social Networking in the Free World. Eben Moglen. Professor of Law and Legal History, Columbia University Law School, and Chairman, Software Freedom Law Center, New York.
• Regulation of audiovisual content in the age of digital convergence. Mónica Ariño, Joan Barata
• Content on the internet: regulation or self-regulation?. Gonzalo Díe, Mónica Ariño, Amadeu Abril, Miguel Pérez Subías, Raquel Xalabarder.
• Electronic public services: e-government 2.0 The Regulation of E-Government 2.0. Speaker: Lorenzo Cotino, Agustí Cerrillo. Professor of Administrative Law, UOC.

Tuesday, 3 June 2008

• Government on the Web. Helen Margetts
• Public opinion and participation on the internet: blogs and political parties. Lourdes Muñoz, Carles Campuzano, Roc Fages.
• Electoral strategies on the internet The experience of the 2008 Spanish General Elections. José Rodríguez, Xavier Peytibí, Albert Padró-Solanet, Rosa Borge.
• Towards citizenship 2.0?. Helen Margetts, David Osimo, Joan Subirats, Ana Sofía Cardenal, Eduard Aibar.

More information

• 2-3 June 2008
• Venue: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Av. Tibidabo 39-43, Barcelona
• Registration is free
• Official Website

In my conference about Digital Citizens vs. Analogue Institutions I spoke — among other things — about the importance of blogging for democracy, human rights and the development of the Information Society. And I stated that, even if we could not draw a direct relationship between all these variables — which we cannot so far —, we could set up a path where all these concepts formed part of the same equation.

Now Víctor R. Ruiz asks me to elaborate this idea.

First things first: with the data available at the moment (in this case from UNPAN — UN e-Government Survey 2008. From e-Government to Connected Governance — and Universal McCann — Wave 3 —) we cannot state that there is a close or strong relationship between blogging and the development of e-Government. In the figure that follows UNPAN’s e-Government index is compared with Universal McCann data about creation of blogs. The figure speaks (or, actually, does not speak at all) for itself:

Blog creation and e-Government Index
[click to enlarge]

So, what is the relationship then between blogs and e-Government? I’ll try and draw here two lines of thought, schematically for clarity’s sake (see below for references where to dig for some evidence about the following statements). Please keep in mind that when I say things like “there is a relationship” or “there is a correlation”, no explanation for causality is intended: variables seem to have a parallel evolution, but we (still) do not know whether one determines the other, the contrary or not at all. The argument is better followed by browsing through the slides I used at my conference:

Information Society, e-Governenment and Human Rights

• Economic development is tied to the development of the Information Society (slide 3 and references below).
• And not only economic development, but human progress at large (slide 3).
• Part of this human progress is human rights: the maturity of the Information Society seems closely related to the maturity in human rights issues in one society or region as measured, for instance, by the degree of democracy, freedom of speech or civil liberties (slide 4).
• The index of e-Government is correlated with ICT infrastructures, in particular, and with e-Readiness in general (slide 7).
• And the index of e-Government is, again, related to other human rights as gender development, which, at its turn, is related to self-expression, identity, etc. (slide 8)

Conclusion? The triangle formed by e-Readiness (development degree of the Information Society), e-Government and Human Rights (especially those about freedom of speech and thought in general) is formed by three variables that seem to evolve in parallel: when one of them scores high, so do the other two.

Information Society, e-Government and Digital Literacy

• Progress in Education is tied to the development of the Information Society (slide 5).
• We even find that there is a general acknowledgment that the presence of computers in the classroom and teaching quality are related one to the other — we can understand this as digital literacy being a critical component of a good education (slide 6).
• Digital literacy (e.g. being able to perform web searches or to chat online with other people) is quite related with the index of e-Government readiness (slides 9 & 10).
• Indeed, participation itself and e-Government depends on the online experience of the user: the more they’ve been online (which should mean a more digitally literate user), the more they participate (a key for e-Government) (slide 12).

Conclusion? The triangle formed by e-Readiness (development degree of the Information Society), e-Government and Digital Literacy is formed by three variables that seem to evolve in parallel: when one of them scores high, so do the other two.

Blogs for e-Government

So, even if the direct correlation between the e-Government readiness index and the creation of blogs brings poor results (maybe because of poor data too), I wonder if we can establish an indirect relationship.

On one hand, there is plenty of evidence (see the valuable work of the OpenNet Initiative or Reporters Without Borders) that democracy and blogs make good friends, and that authoritarianism systematically persecute bloggers or, at least, try and block the access to their sites.

On the other hand (and again, the Pew Internet & American Life Project or Digital Natives project are bringing more and more evidence about it), it is my opinion that blogging is strongly related to a higher level of digital literacy, not because of blogging itself, but because of all the accompanying activities around blogging that we usually dub as the Web 2.0: editing photos and video, podcasting, uploading and sharing multimedia files, social networking sites, etc.

Summing up. On one side, e-Readiness, e-Government, Human Rights and Digital Literacy are correlated: not a development of the Information Society and e-Government without a certain degree of Human rihts and Digital Literacy. On the other side, blogging might not be enough to foster e-Government, but blogging does need a high degree of freedom of speech and political liberties (i.e. Human Rights) and quite a degree of Digital Literacy. So, in my opinion, blogging is a good proxy for both e-Readiness and e-Government. Why necessary and not sufficient? Sufficient because the existence of blogging implies that there are no barriers to the evolution of Human Rights and Digital Literacy, conditions related to the achievevent of high levels of e-Government development and a healthy Information Society. But not necessary because there might be no barriers and, actually, people not feel the need to blog, but express their freedom of thought and digital literacy in other ways (i.e. people might be digitally literate and free, but hate blogging). This could explain while there is no correlation between e-Government and a complex thing like blogging.

Further reading

• Digital Citizens vs. Analogue Institutions
• The relationships of Freedom and the Digital Divide or the importance of (free) Blogs
• e-Readiness: how aggregates forget inequality
• Networked Readiness Index vs. Human Development Index
• A compilation of articles issued by the Pew Internet & American Life Project
• Some Reporters Without Borders’s annual reports

From 2005 to 2007, good friend Francisco Lupiáñez took part in a Manuel Castells’s project entitled Technological Modernisation, Organisational Change and Service Delivery in the Catalan Public Health System (aka PIC Salut).

His main findings in the Public Health system related with the adoption of ICTs are really similar to the ones I pointed at — there related to the Educational system — in my conference Opening Session: Digital Citizens vs. Analogue Institutions (indeed partly based on data from a brother project, L’Escola a la Societat Xarxa: Internet a l’Educació Primària i Secundària, also led by Castells and belonging both of them to a framework project about ICT adoption in Catalonia, Spain).

These findings can be summarized as follows:

• ICTs are broadly considered as a promising tool among physicists and nurses, health care professionals at large (managers, the pharmaceutical sector, etc.) and patients.
• Internet and intranets are widely used to get Health information.
• But e-health management and service delivery systems, even if in a growing trend, they are far from being mainstream and are quite often rare.
• ICT used is mainly focused to interprofessional use, while patients (or the direct use with the customer) are excluded from the equation.
• Productivity, efficiency and quality don’t seem to be affected because of lack of accompanying measures in habits, procedures, strategies, policies, etc. at all levels.

Put short: information and some professional interaction, but almost total lack of communication. e-Health 2.0? No way. Interactivity does not exist and, actually, the “reputation factor” still plays a very important role that the Internet has not solved yet (i.e. who do you trust?).

More details about the results of the project can be accessed here and here.

For those who can read Catalan, this is a very interesting presentation:

On the other hand, there’s a conference at the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park on Thursday 15th May 2008 just about this subject. Please find here more information about the programme.

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

Round Table:
Chairs: Jacinto Lajas

Jose María Olmo

Free Software penetration in the Administration still low. This also means (cause or consequence?) that bidding processes don’t usually include free software in their requirements, either as a condition or as a possibility.

Consequences of this situation:

• Lack of cooperation and collaboration between administrations
• Interoperability made more difficult
• There is a lack of communities of free software for the Administration in which developers and users can meet and exchange impressions and design common strategies

Francisco Huertas

Free Software as a strategy to develop the Information Society.

Free Software avoids:

• A unique provider
• Insecurity
• Imposed adaptability
• Provider monopolies
• R+D outshored
• Lack of local support
• Functional submission
• License costs
• Lack of standards that threat the persistence of public information
• Impossibility to publicly share common goods

The cost per computer (12,000 PCs) of the operating system and main desktop applications is 1.8 euros.Updating these computers to the last version of MS Windows + Office would have cost 6 million euros. Besides the aggregates, a important aspect that matters at the margin: while with free software adding one more computer means reducing software costs per unit (while being constant at the aggregate level), with proprietary software one more computer means more costs, at both the total and per unit levels.

Lourdes Muñoz Santamaría

Three keys: focus on the use, not the tool; the importance of broadband access; keep Net neutrality.

In political terms, it is unacceptable that public investment is not public. Hence, investment in software solutions and content has to be made in free software so that they can be put at anybody’s reach.

In the same train of though, intellectual property rights need to have recovered their original purpose: public benefit, the protection of the author so that society gets more and better culture and innovation.

Two steps in the free software debate:

• Non-discrimination because of the technological solution: neutrality, access warranties… for both the user and the provider
• Opt-in for free software because of argued and objective reasons

A cause does not win just for being fair. If free software is good, its benefits have to be made broadly known, so that the citizenry is eager to get those benefits.

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

Round Table:
Chairs: Goyo Tovar

Antonio Fumero

The Web: technologies, people and content. The Web brings potential, but using it is another issue. And in using it, context matters.

Ícaro Moyano

Age is a clear limit of Web 2.0.

Three stages of the web:

• The web as a journal: unidirectional
• The web as media: everyone’s a journalist
• The web as a sharing place

New Internet users no longer identify themselves with a nickname, but with their real names, including a snapshot of their own.

And it seems that youngsters, that are usually said not being interested in politics, do use Social Networking Sites to engage in activism and promote campaigns.

Marc Vidal

Are the limits of the Web 2.0 the limits of the Society 2.0?

Is the Web 2.0 revolution a technological one, or a social one?

Characteristics of a Technological Revolution

• New products, technologies and dynamics
• Important growth or new enterprises
• Renewing of the existing productive apparatus
• Evident generation of wealth

Has the Web 2.0 (clearly) generated this wealth? Is there a new business plan?

But, socially? Is it a Revolution?

• It’s a scholar “seppuku”
• It’s a copyright unsolved “violation”
• Has not an associated consolidated business plan
• It’s amateur information

But attracts any kind of people. Just because of this: it is a technological revolution living besides a social change.

Web 2.0 tools are an array of e-exclusion and, more generally, exclusion. People not interested or without means to catch up with the speed of change of the Web 2.0 are being put out of the system at high speed. Thus, if the Web 2.0 is said to be a democratizing driver, it’s just having the contrary effect.

Society 2.0 is not accessing info but taking part in the making of it. Society 2.0 does not debate the solutions, but the question.