Let’s imagine there are only two kinds of Public Internet Access Points, that is, a place, different to your house or your work where you can connect to the Internet:
A library, a civic centre, or an ad hoc place equipped with computers and connection to the Internet; access and usage is free because its supported by public funding or private not-for-profit funding. Its goal is philanthropic and aimed towards making an impact on people’s livelihoods: empower them to fully achieve their citizen rights, help them to climb up the welfare ladder, etc. Let’s call them telecentre.
The other kind is similar to the previous one but it is not free. And it is not because its aim is to return the investment the owner made — an entrepreneur — in the form of revenues that will hopefully become profits, that is, costs will be lower than revenues. Let’s call them cybercafé.
Things are quite more complex and reality constantly shows that there are not pure models. But let’s keep things simple, very simple, for the sake of the explanation.
If things were that binary, telecentres would be having an impact on people’s lives while cybercafés wouldn’t; on the other hand, cybercafés would be economically sustainable (self-sustainable) while telecentres would not.
Internet penetration: a double edged sword
Internet penetration is growing everyday, for several reasons: willingness to adopt because of increasingly perceived utility, lower costs, public policies to foster Internet access at home and work, etc. This increased penetration can have two direct consequences:
As more people are connected, the remaining unconnected people will either be too poor/difficult to connect (on a cost/benefit basis) or just absolutely refusing to connect due to personal believes (refuseniks). Thus, it is likely that both governments and nonprofits will shift away from e-inclusion projects to other areas of development that have ranked higher in priority.
On the other hand, less people will go to cybercafes, as the demand will necessarily be lower. Indeed, the more infrastructure focused are public policies to foster the Information Society (e.g. putting laptops on kids’ hands) the stronger will be this moving away from cybercafes.
So, what will the future of telecentres and cybercafés be like? More than answers, questions is what really arise:
Will telecentres fade away and end up disappearing? If they were economically not sustainable (in the sense that they depended on third parties’ funding), will they shift towards cybercafes-like models? Or will some of them just remain to try and cover the needs of the ones left behind? How is it that some voices foresee the end of telecentres while bookshops and cheap softcover pocket editions did not succeed in getting rid of costly public libraries?
Will cybercafes shift to more telecentre impact-like focus and less access-based business plans? Will they compensate their shrinking access market by expanding towards a capacitation-based market? Will they be providing more content and, especially, services? Will they create communities of people around cybercafes as it is already happening in cybercafes whose customers are e.g. mainly immigrants and gather together around the cybercafe?
Will both telecentres and cybercafes evolve into enhanced centres (e-centres), where communities will gather and benefit from several community resources, computers and Internet access among others? Or will they just disappear?
Fortunately or unfortunately, things are neither that simple nor static and are way more complex and dynamic in reality. But these are, nevertheless, questions that both decision-takers and tax-payers should be taking into account so to be prepared for what is going to be next.
As libraries have provided more than books, but a place where to learn to read and find kindred souls, it is my guess that public Internet access points will disappear as such, and will either be embedded within existing structures (libraries themselves, or civic centres, to name a few) or the existing telecentres and cybercafes will evolve into a next stage where the learning and community factors will be much more relevant. We are indeed seeing plenty of examples of this, and it is a matter of time that priorities or the focus turns upside down: instead of going to access the Internet and finding people, one will go and find people and use the Internet as an enhanced way to socialize. At its turn, this should be accompanied by the end of this false dichotomy on whether you’re a citizen or a netizen, as if the Internet had a life and a citizenry on its own. But time will tell.
NOTE: I owe some of this reflections from conversations with people I met at IDRC on my visit at their headquarters in Ottawa: Florencio Ceballos, Frank Tulus, Tricia Wind, Meddie Mayanja, Silvia Caicedo and Simon Batchelor (the latter from Gamos).
Now this book has been translated into Spanish by the Universidad de los Andes within the framework of their Acceso Abierto al Conocimiento en Latinoamérica [Open Access to Knowledge in Latin America] initiative.
Of course, my chapter has also been translated and is now entitled Web 2.0 y el Acceso Abierto al conocimiento, which I have to admit is a clearer title.
I want to sincerely thank — thank you, thank you very much — the team at the Universidad de los Andes in Venezuela for considering the suitability of the book and translating it, and Enrique Canessa and Marco Zennaro for the original idea and editing work.
With almost everyone certifying the death of blogs, and while witnessing a massive migration towards the fertile and prosperous lands of social networking sites, emotion tears in my eyes won’t stop me from proudly shouting out loud that this personal research portal just turned six.
What about the events ()? Well, this part is certainly under revision. On the one hand, there are increasingly more people and more ways to share agendas about congresses, conferences, workshops or any kind of meeting than when I set that section up in early 2006. On the other hand, in the last semester we have been discussing with Christian Kreutz and the ICT4D.at team the possibility to team up and create a Google Calendar on ICT4D Events, but everyone (including me) is so busy… Time will tell.
Notwithstanding, the huge discovery this year has definitely been Twitter. From the several ways to use it, my main purposes are sharing links to resources, broadcasting “headlines” when attending events, and network, which despite all criticism, works pretty well for me.
Another thing worth noticing — and I thank Michel Bauwens for the idea — was collecting all the conference reviews (liveblogging) in a common place. It now features 280 articles coming from 52 conferences, which gives an idea of one of the main uses of the blog.
All that said, probably the most important thing during this last year was that I got my PhD. My thesis, Measuring digital development for policy-making: Models, stages, characteristics and causes got an “Excellent” from an international examining committee and will, hopefully, be soon uploaded to this site and join the 98 works that it already features amongst writings and speeches.
I’m writing this sitting at IDRC headquarters in Ottawa, just before meeting about their telecentre.org project. I can hardly find a better framework for “my” anniversary.
I want to end up this personal rant by thanking all the interesting people I constantly meet both online and offline. There is no other way I could have learnt so much — at least I guess I did… — without so many people sharing their ideas, data, information, knowledge and warmth. Thank you so much.
Other applications such as Fish Detector (Kenya), developed by Pascal Katana, and which detects fishes accoustically
Creation of jobs through crowd-sourcing (e.g. txtEagle, which allows people to complete simple tasks via mobile via SMS and get compensated for it, that is, people get paid to work by SMS)
Tangaza (“broadcast” in Kiswahlili) that allows users to send voice to several receivers
M-Kulima (“farmer” in Kiswahili) allows buyers to store and retrieve information about the milk market via SMS. Of course, its application is not bound to milk, but can be applied to many other markets.
Waññigame allows children to recognize numbers and learn to count
M-guide for toursm, by Strathmore University: the user takes a photo of an animal, the photo is sent to a server that recognizes the animal and sends the information back
M-Word for learning
How to create innovative culture? Transferring skills and knowledge through mobile boot camps, sharing ideas and encouraging students to brain-storm in groups, mentoring students and liaising them with experts in this field, creating of a research and open-learning atmosphere.
Eva Domínguez: mobile phones are a revolution in fields as Education (m-learning) and Journalism, especially citizen journalism.
Jessica Colaço stresses the experience of Ushahidi regarding journalism and citizen journalism, how it is used for transparency and accountability, etc.
Luis Ángel Fernández Hermana points to the distinction between people that use technology on a compulsory basis or as a personal option. In higher income countries, technology is compulsory: you “have” to use the last gadget. This is not the case of lower income countries, where people seek benefit (or profit) in technology.
Luis Ángel Fernández Hermana: In what languages are mobile applications and services? Jessica Colaço: Normally in English, most of the times also in local languages.
Lev Gonick: the mobile platform is a much more crowdsourcing fitting platform to create educational content.
Carlos Miranda: it’s good that mobile phones are kept simple (no video, no cam, no anything). The “intel” is outside, it’s the people. [how strongly I disagree…]
Paul G. West: how to deliver mass-education via mobile phones? [unanswered question; what a pity, I would have loved to get that answer].
Marc Alier: if applications have to be developed, how are they distributed to a larger amount of users and other developers? Jessica Colaço: normally, SMSs are broadcasted with the instructions to find and/or install the application, as providing a URL is not usually a good solution (though still a possibility).
Susan Metros: what is the power of mobile operators? do they listen to their customers? Jessica Colaço: increasingly, customers “come in” the design of applications and services.
Sílvia Bravo: are mobile phones helping Africa to “emancipate” and “be Africa”, or just leading the path towards a copycat of richer countries? Jessica Colaço: the good thing of mobile phones is that they have been adopted at a so-grassroots level that there is no aim to copy, but to be.
The Congress has since the first edition become a virtual agora to debate about how Information and Communications Technologies are transforming the Society as we know it, making it become a CyberSociety, an Information Society, a Knowledge Based Society, a Network Society… whatever!
The Fundació Observatori per a la Societat de la Informació de Catalunya (Catalan Foundation Observatory for the Information Society — FOBSIC) has put up a work group about digital indicators and has kindly invited me to be part of the coordinating committee. Despite what is stated in the schedule, the call for papers is still open, as the work group was created past the deadline. Here comes more information about the work group:
digital divide, information society, ICT, e-government, e-administration, technological convergence, inclusion, new economy
Initial questions:
Are current indicators useful for measuring the Information Society?
How do we measure the social networking sites usage level?
What are the best indicators to measure the effective usage of Web 2.0 tools like youtube, myspace, facebook, twitter, flicker, eyeos, etc.?
How do we analyze early adopters and advanced users in matters of ICTs?
What are the attitudes that motivate intensive ICT usage for leisure purposes?
Should the focus be put on data provision, or on building websites to enable access to data?
How is it that statistics from reference international institutions, like Eurostat, do not measure data from microenterprises?
What is the optimal periodicity to generate ICT stats?
What are the parameters that should be taken into account so that comparisons can be made possible?
What sort of diffusion should statistical data and indicators on the Information Society have?
Work Group description:
Reflecting about the indicators that measure the degree of development of the Information Society is a most interesting exercise indeed.
Nowadays, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are a crucial part of our daily lives and talking about the “Information Society” really means talking about the “Society”, as almost everyone has access to digitally generated content that they get and visualize by means of mobile phones, TV sets or the Internet. Thus, issues related with measuring the degree of access and usage of ICTs by the society have a larger relevance than often goes unnoticed.
Useful indicators, new Internet tools at people and organization’s reach, effective usage of ICTs, the bridging of the digital divide in some aspects vs. its increase in other ones, or the possibility to compare indicators are issues that well deserve talking, reflection, contrasting and sharing different opinions and points of view.
Netmap is a very interesting tool to trace power and influence in networks. The idea is identifying the main authors in a network (e.g. the actors in an ICT4D project: NGOs involved, donors, government, local leaders, beneficiaries, etc.) and see how each actor is linked to the other ones and what’s their respective relationship in terms of influence. A last step in Netmap’s methodology implies identifying also each actor’s goals and then be able to figure out the reachability of such goals considering the influence relationships in the network.
The procedure is as follows: in a big sheet of paper, actors are pictured and then influence arrows are drawn between actors. There are several ways to understand influence. Paolo Brunello proposes the following, adapting the methodology to development projects:
Money: who’s giving funds to who. E.g. national aid agency to NGO;
Command: to is in a position to command over other people (and who are these people, of course). E.g. the Ministry of Education to the school directors;
Information: who is feeding others with information they need. E.g. the health care centre about the number of patients per person and year;
Influence: understood here as who has ascendant over others or has an acknowledged authority in a field. E.g. a reputed colleague in the field of ICT4D over you.
Once the several arrows are drawn, influence-towers are built with the help of actor figurines and flat round stackable discs (see the references below). Thus, it is easier to identify who has more influence and, most important, how the differences in influence can ease or play havoc on achieving the final goals of a project developed by that network.
Netmap rules are understood at a glance but it’s apparent simplicity does not subtract from its huge explanatory power. Being very visual, the outcome of the exercise is not only a most interesting map of the relationships of influence, but also a roadmap you should follow (or struggle to redefine, whatever you’re able to…) to increase the chances of success to achieve some specific goals.
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