ICTlogy

Amy Mahan points me to A word to the G8, an article at regulateonline.org about the recent meeting of the UK high level policy forum Africa after the African Commission: What priorities for the German G8.

Richard Heeks took part of the forum and wrote a paper suggesting five ways to get ICTs back on the agenda [of the G8]:

1. Put ICTs back on the G8 agenda, as part of a recognition of science and technology’s role in African development.

Heeks asks for openness at all levels. I fully agree: free software, open science, open access journals, open educational resources, etc. seem to me an optimum way to foster endogenous development and south-south cooperation. Indeed, I think this is actually a good way to revert old cooperation trends and strategies (more charity-like) and enter a new path towards empowerment through capacity building.

2. Commit to support at global and national levels for Open Digital Economies that remove the legal and infrastructural barriers to African participation in the digital economy.

And, in my opinion, those barriers will be easier to remove if we shifted from “push” to “pull” strategies, by trying to activate the demand for digital content and services. Sustainability (and the entrepreneurs’ interest) is based on this.

3. Initiate a MOT Force – a global collaborative Mobile Opportunities Task Force to harness the development potential of mobile devices.

4. Support a Digital Enterprise Initiative for Africa that would incubate new enterprises, and kickstart the developmental use of outsourcing.

Richard Heeks has already written about offshoring to developing countries. Even if I understand his points, I really doubt any politician would even consider his approach: intellectual property — and programming has plenty of it — is a tricky issue, and even if offshoring just coding (not design) would lock inside one’s country the added value part, reverse engineering and, thus, a shift in the added value part would immediately follow. I think that international collaboration/cooperation is a must, but I still do not know if offshoring is the way. On the other hand, foreign investment, i.e. in the shape of microloans, is more appealing to me: there’s a direct return for the investor, and a benefit (and profit) for the developing country, both as gaining access to seed capital and, why not, also to knowledge tied to some procedures to be followed in order to be eligible in the call for projects.

5. Support capacity-building for African ICT-based innovation.

I believe that Heeks puts little stress on this point and, to me, is the most important one. He actually states African nations will not become world leaders in fundamental computer
and telecommunications science R&D. But, with G8 support, they can become leaders in the
development of innovative business and social applications. Well, if projects such as One Laptop Per Child — or the like of it — really succeed, and ICTs are effectively included in everyone’s curriculum in developing countries, new born digital natives can quickly catch up with old-way-of-thinking digital immigrants. And R&D, in intellectual property, is mostly a matter of thinking. I know this is just a guess and quite a simple, frivolous one, but the idea is launched: if globalization and the knowledge society have something good, it might well be something like this.

More info

• Richard Heeks: e-Africa and m-Africa. How can ICTs deliver?
• Richard Heeks: Offshoring to Africa
• Richard Heeks selected bibliography

The 5th and 6th of September 2007 takes place the conference Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0, organized by the Information, Communication and Society Journal. The conference will be hold at the National Science Learning Centre, York, UK.

This event focuses on some significant developments in Internet culture that have emerged in the last few years. Although these developments have received widespread media coverage they have so far received little in the way of sustained investigation by the social sciences in the UK. This event is intended to work toward the development of a social science of what has come to be known as Web 2.0 – a much heralded transition in Web media characterised by social practices of ‘generating’ and ‘browsing’, ‘tagging’ and ‘feeds’, ‘commenting’ and ‘noting’,‘reviewing’ and ‘rating’, ‘blogging’, ‘mashing-up’ and making ‘friends’ .
[…]
The aim of the event will be to develop critical, theoretical and empirically informed accounts of Web 2.0 not just as a business model but as a complex, ambivalent and dynamic phenomena laden with tensions and of increasing social and cultural significance. The event is intended to provide opportunities for those working on a social science of Web 2.0 to discuss their ideas and to begin to work through the processes and possible consequences of its rhetoric of ‘social participation’, ‘communal intelligence’, and ‘collaborative cultures’.

I have been accepted a communication, so I’ll be there along with Francisco Lupiáñez and Enric Senabre, who have also had their communications accepted.

I here copy the abstract to my communication. Please, do feel free to comment or make any kind of suggestion.

The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with research diffusion

There is unchallenged evidence that both researchers’ and research funders’ needs usually collide with scientific publishers’. Even if there might be a common mission or interest in making research diffusion as broad as possible, while the former ones would promote diffusion at any cost, it is precisely cost – and sometimes profit – the main issue on the publisher’s side. The consequences are many, but to name a few: (a) loss of control (intellectual property rights) over his work by the author, (b) slow publishing processes, (c) underrepresentation in mainstream academic publishing systems of marginal academic subjects (i.e. related to or produced in developing countries), and (d) researcher invisibility. Efforts have been made to mitigate this situation, being open access to scholarly literature – open access journals, self-archiving in institutional repositories – an increasingly common and successful approach.

It is our opinion that focus has been put on institutional initiatives, but the concept and tools around the web 2.0 seem to bring clear opportunities so that researchers, acting as individuals, can also contribute, to build a broader personal presence on the Internet and a better diffusion for their work, interests and publications.

By using a mesh of social software applications, we here propose the concept of the Personal Research Portal as a means to create a digital identity for the researcher – tied to his digital public notebook and personal repository – and a virtual network of colleagues working in the same field. Complementary to formal publishing or taking part in congresses, the Personal Research Portal would be a knowledge management system that would enhance reading, storing and creating at both the private and public levels, helping to bridge the academic divide among those who publish and those who don’t.

The new International Journal of Information Communication Technologies and Human Development will see the light the first trimestre of 2009.

The journal is aimed at understanding how ICTs can contribute to human development in several areas. herefore its overall objectives are:

* To describe the link between ICTs and human development (which includes economic, social and political development).

* To identify the potential applications of ICTs in several areas.

* To provide insightful analysis about those factors (also contextual and institutional ones) that affect ICTs for development initiatives success or failure.

* To propose strategies (to both governments and international cooperation organizations) to move forward and to address future challenges.

The journal will be edited by Mila Gascó (Editor-in-Chief) and Manuel Acevedo and Barbara Fillip, among others, as associate editors.

I have (proudly) accepted to be on the editorial review board, that features people like David Keogh, Robin Mansell, Alemayehu Molla or Pippa Norris, to mention a few most familiar to me.

Reviewing articles or communications has always been one of the best experiences I’ve ever had: it’s difficult to quantify how much you’ll learn by reading other’s ideas and finding out their good points and their errors. Simply enlightening.

On December 5 and 6, 2006, the W3C Workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries took place in Bangalore, India. Half a year has passed, but the conclusions still apply.

It is very important not to forget the real goal of providing ICT in developing countries. The point is not at all to connect people to the Web but to provide services (health, banking, government service, education, business,…) […] the most appropriate way to provide such e-services on mobile phones is with SMS-based applications. The reasons for that are numerous:

* Easy to use (everybody knows how to send an SMS)
* Low and predictable cost (no cost for receiving a message, low and known cost for sending a message)
* Availability on all phones

Of course, there is a general agreement on the limitations of such applications :
* Low capabilities (text-only, limited size, basic services like single query – answer, …)
* Interoperability problems between operators

Adopting the Web as the platform for developing future services requires work on these blocking factors which have been identified:
* Problems of availability of Web browser
* Problems of configuration
* User Interface
* Cost

That said, there is a general agreement that the Web is providing unique opportunities which may facilitate the bridging of the digital divide:
* a standardized platform to ease service development
* cheap service development and hosting
* large scope and wide audience
* easy reachability and “discoverability” of existing services (search engines, portals, …)

More info

• Worshop home page
• Executive Summary
• Agenda, with full papers and presentations
• The Mobile Web in Developing Countries: Next Steps, by Stéphane Boyera
• Mobile Web in Developing Countries (MWI-DC) Wiki

The second edition of the World Information Society Report is out, bringing us a new calculation for the Digital Opportunity Index.

It’s a pity that the graphical representation of the Digital Opportunity Map has changed colors, as it makes it more difficult to compare among years. Nevertheless, here come both maps for 2006 and 2005 (remember that the report shows the DOI for the preceding year):

Digital Opportunity Index 2006. Source: World Information Society Report 2007
[click to enlarge]

Digital Opportunity Index 2005. Source: World Information Society Report 2006
[click to enlarge]

Major improvements — DOI increases above 20%, World Rank increases above 5 places (most of them are two digits increases) — are those of Antigua & Barbuda, Bangladesh, Barbados, Cambodia, Fiji, Guatemala, Lao P.D.R., Nicaragua, Palestine, Rwanda, St. Kitts & Nevis and Tanzania, reinforcing the trend of some Central America, Africa and Asia countries taking off and showing the path to other countries of the region with poor e-readiness results.

Getting worse — DOI decreases and loss of World Rank places —: Central African Republic, D.R. Congo, Madagascar, Turkmenistan and Zimbabwe, which as happened with the climbers, I think, sadly, does not surprise anyone.

Some other main conclusions are the huge strength of mobile telephony adoption in developing countries — in particular — and in the whole World — in general —, that makes coverage be almost universal and, thus, make the digital divide […] shrinking. We’ve talked about this statement several times here, and luckily, this time the report warns about the danger that those infrastructures make broadband adoption more difficult than fixed lines, hence the availability and affordability of broadband remain a cause for concern.

Actually, even if decreasing, inequality in digital development in the World (measured, for instance, through Internet usage) is still a major problem far to be solved and, if worst scenarios about broadband penetration come true, eager to get worse.

• World Information Society Report (main site)
• Full Report (13.4 Mb)
• Executive Summary (8.43 Kb)
• Map of Digital Opportunity Worldwide, 2005 (6.35 Mb)
• World Information Society Report 2006 and Digital Opportunity Index 2006

As already advanced, my paper Online Volunteers: Knowledge Managers in Nonprofits has been already published in the first issue of the new Journal of Information Technology in Social Change.

Abstract

Online volunteering is as old as the World Wide Web… or as the Internet itself. It is, notwithstanding, with the growing use of the WWW circa end of 1994 that it starts to become popular. Nevertheless, we believe that neither the concept nor the tasks that can be carried along by online volunteers are clear at all or, in any case, are the result of a wide consensus.

The research we here present analyzed 17 websites devoted to fostering volunteering to find out (a) if there was a broadly accepted definition of the concept of online volunteering and (b) if there was a list of tasks thus designed as the core or ideal competences of online volunteers. According to our findings, in this paper we will, first of all, describe all the different denominations for online volunteers and, closely related to them, try and see what are the profiles and tasks that, tied to these denominations, are usually performed or asked for in those main 17 volunteering websites.

To end, we will take some distance from the object of research and, in a more theoretical level, we will then suggest what the online volunteer profile could be and the main tasks he or she could really carry on related to this profile, the nature of the Information Society and the possibilities of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs).

In this aspect, our thesis will be that, just like distance and/or online education changed formal education, ICTs are opening volunteering to some people usually excluded from nonprofits because of personal and professional obligations. On the other hand, it seems that these newcoming people enrolled through and thanks to ICTs do come with a brand new profile, a profile whose main added value is knowledge. It will be stated, then, that the online volunteer is a perfect knowledge management actor and that knowledge transmission seems to be is his or her main role in solidarity.

Citation and postprint download

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.