Christopher Westrup: Contribution of Social Research on ICT4D
Optimism as to the scope of ICT4D:
Ending of isolation;
social and political mobilization and participation;
increased collaboration;
focus on the poorest communities;
pressure for collective global action;
Some “divisions”: scholars vs. practitioners; development experts vs. ICT tool developers. It nevertheless seems that the “social” part of technologies is increasing, as we have been witnessing since the appearance of the Web 2.0 and, most especially, since the raise of social networking sites and social media in general.
Key issues:
Understanding the link between ICTs and Development;
Understanding the social influence, crucially important to the trajectory of any technology-based project
ICT facilitated collaboration;
Local adaptation;
Focus on the plight of marginalised groups.
Perspectives of social sciences in ICT4D:
What is happening: taking a God’s eye view of the field.
What is the framework: framing social contributions, what we find and how we can intervene: transfer and diffusion discourse vs. ICT as the product of socially embedded action (micro approach).
How can an impact be made: a transformative discourse: Information Systems innovation as a product of and produces change in the social, political and economic conditions of developing countries (micro approach).
Methods
Should take both macro and micro together and focus on how both come together in the process of development.
Designing technology is also designing the social, as technologies are designed with contexts in mind.
Technologies are appropriated and used sometimes in unexpected ways, implementation can be highly innovative. We need to look very carefully at how projects are implemented. The processes are crucial.
Any action is about redistributing resources, about gainers and losers. ICT4D engages in a redistribution of resources and development can be understood as interacting processes of dependence and independence.
Successful case: M-Pesa
M-Pesa ad in Kenya about mobile banking:
Department for International Development video about M-Pesa:
M-Pesa has been hugely successful and is still growing. What has been its “process” in terms of and ICT4D (research) project?
People on the ground saw that mobile phones were being used to send credit between people, and rethought the whole concept of a mobile phone into a mobile banking service.
In Tanzania, notwithstanding, the system has not been as successful. Why? Market share of Safaricom, the operator: from 80% in Kenya to 45% in Tanzania. In Kenya, many people and well organized, which helped in training them about the new system. Not the same thing in Tanzania. In Kenya it has had very tolerant regulation from the market, as it does not operate under the assumption that it is a bank.
Macro and micro approach: to make a change, but looking at what was happening.
People where using the technology in their own way.
People appropriated the new technology producing a very innovative way of doing things.
We cannot tell exactly about the redistribution outcomes and the (new) processes of dependence and independence, but there have certainly been some as now money transactions are controlled/centralized by new actors.
Conclusions
Understanding the social implications is crucial to assess the impact of ICTs.
The social and the technical are interlinked.
Technologies are not neutral.
There always is a redistribution of resources.
Discussion
Q: Is there any tool in the social sciences toolbox to assess the “non-neutrality” of a specific technology and its implications before it being applied? A: It would be great to have it, but it most likely does not exist. Methodologies are usually used not to assess but to provide a “scientific background” that what we intended to do is backed by evidence.
Q: Would a private company have invested in a project like M-Pesa without public money behind? How can we justify public money (DFID’s) put into a private company (Safaricom/Vodafone)? A: It was believed that a way to bring change could be by changing the market, by changing commercial relationships and the market status quo. So, the outcome is also benefiting private companies, the lion’s share goes to the community at large.
Ismael Peña-López: Action is about redistributing resources or about creating more wealth by making more resources available? Why should there always be a trade-off (of resources, power, etc.) that implies redistribution? A: Agreed that it should not necessarily be a zero-sum game, and it is right to say that resources are not fix and can be increased, but it is also true that power (that controls these resources) actually is redistributed by our direct action on the resources. Thus, even if resources could be grown, power (and, hence, resources indirectly) will definitely suffer a redistribution [I really loved this answer, which I fully share].
Wikimedia is about the community, about volunteering. Since the project kicked off in 2001, there have been created 13 million articles in 271 languagesw, 17 million pages, 325 million edits, 330 million visits monthly, 100,000 active contributors (edit 5 times a month at least), over 50 books published on the Wikimedia phenomena, etc. All coordinated by the 27 world chapters of the Wikimedia Foundation, though with only 35 employees.
If we look not at what’s in there, but what people is looking for (visits to the website), some Wikipedias may already be shifting from encyclopedic core to more topical and current events content. On the contrary, though, 1/3 of the hits of the Spanish Wikipedia deals with science and technology content.
Besides current events or news, local content is increasingly searched for. There is also an increase of geotagged content on Wikipedia, thus the interest in local content. As anecdote, it can be said that the second Wikipedia ever created was the Catalan Viquipèdia.
Management model
Provide physical home (servers)
Basic rules
Leave the community work and grow on its own
Power shift to the citizen
Technology: insfrastructure, tools, open source
Cultural Movement: free culture (Linux, Apache), free knowledge
License structure: GNU FDL, Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA)
All in all, the question was that anyone could contribute and the result would be open to everyone.
How do we take care of the community: transparency, trust, thankfulness, respect, responsiveness.
Business Model
Servant-leaders achieve results for their organizations by giving priority attention to the needs of their colleagues and those they serve. Collaboration, communication, culture.
Create a platform, let other people build (i.e. Mediawiki). It happens everywhere: Google, Apple, Amazon, FaceBook, etc. This also applies to Education, as everyone has something to bring on the table. You have to figure out how to make people that know be involved in the process.
Small “workforce” that can adapt to market changes very quickly, plus a virtual larger “workforce”, using the community as research and development.
You have to figure out what you’re good at, and forget about controlling the whole value change. Do not try and do everything. Networks form to address needs: you have to figure out where you fill into that.
Discussion
Ismael Peña-López: would your model be different were the Wikimedia Foundation be Wikimedia “for profit” Corporation? It depends on your project, as everyone is different and there is not a unique model, but leveraging the community might still apply. You definitely have to focus in your goal and where you can contribute best to achieve it. If you’re running a talent based project, you definitely have to share some of the wealth in it. Talent goes where it is appreciated most.
Q: Is it a must to have a professional core? A: It really depends on what you want to achieve. There is definitely not “a” model.
Silvia Bravo: where do we start from? A: Figure out what your goals are and find who’s your champion. Once the project is started, things become easier, but the difficult thing is to start up the project, and the role of the champion is crucial here. Then, you need to create something that people can build things on top of. Make sure you have a clear goal, find out what tools will you be needing and get a champion to promote the project.
Q: how do you deal with security hazards/attacks? A: It is very important to have a clear and shared framework (linked to your goals) that everybody can relate to. And the system works the same way.
Q: what’s the physical structure like? A: only 20 servers [guess I got that right], as most information is only text. But the challenge is how to keep up with changes and still being able to bring the relevant information, which increasingly comes in rich media (photo, sound, video, etc.). That’s why Wikimedia Foundation engages in partnerships with the corporate sector to be ahead of the future.
Llorenç Valverde: how do we engage the community, and invite everyone to add value? A: Culture is the biggest problem. The way collaboration and sharing ideas happens varies a lot depending on the culture, understanding culture not only at the country level, but also at the company level. E.g. if you’re a newcomer to a firm, you might have brilliant ideas but you might not be (self)legitimate to share them openly. Culture is doubtless the toughest part of all.
Llorenç Valverde: so the starting point is to share information within the organization? A: Certainly. Add everybody in the process.
And I’ll begin with a strong agreement: the iPad is very likely to do more than the One-Laptop-Per-Child, just because the OLPC is doing very little for education, as I think is clearly explained in the Framing the Digital Divide in Higher Education monograph. But it is also possible that the iPad will do as little as the OLPC, just because it’s not about devices.
Just for the sake of clarity let us look at some points raised by the monograph authors, Verdegem and DiMaio about access to e-Government (including the “e-” part), keeping in mind that I fully share DiMaio’s vision on what e-Government should be and the conviction that, somehow, we’ll get to that point.
Affordability
This still is a key issue for many people not to go online, hence not to use e-Government services. It is decreasing in importance and becoming almost marginal in higher income countries. But. While a desktop/laptop + broadband connectivity might be affordable, the addition of a second device + the addition of a second broadband service (3G or whatever) is definitely not affordable for many many people.
Yes, I am assuming having both devices and duplication of Internet access services. But I think this will be the scenario in the short and middle run, for the simple reason that the iPad is not a typing-aimed device or a hard-computing-power device, besides the fact that I do not believe in quantum leaps in computer adoption (i.e. in the short run, iPad users will be computer users, not late-adopters).
Skills
Claire from liberTIC recently commented about lack of skills playing havoc on e-Democracy and Democracy at large.
I think the iPad — as its i-predecessors — will make computer usage simple, much simpler than before. But e-Government is not only about computer usage, but much more. As I introduced in Towards a comprehensive definition of digital skills and Goverati: New competencies for politics, government and participation, there is much field in the area of digital competences that the iPad just won’t and cannot address. And, as time goes by, technological literacy is less of an issue, which is were the iPad could make a major contribution.
Availability
Which leads to where the Gordian knot is: existence and access to content and services. I fully agree that the iPad can contribute to ease access to online public services through its applications, and I am already looking forward this to happen. But the prerequisite is either open data or open application programming interfaces (APIs). There already exist devices and applications to access online public services. And their successes and failures have mostly depended (a) on the richness of the data they could access and (b) the degree in which they could make an impact or contribute to a change. We take for granted that iPad applications will play magic, but the magic is in the data, not the device (though magic wands always help, let’s admit it).
Awareness and peopleware
But things can exist, be accessible, be affordable and people know how to use them, and still don’t make any use of them. This is, indeed, the tragedy of e-Government (and Internet adoption at large) today in higher income countries: I either don’t know what’s out there or frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. The iPad can raise awareness, and the more friendly user interface will help, but I haven’t seen much success in iPhone educational or e-Government applications being used massively.
I honestly doubt that the problem of e-Government (lack of) pervasiveness is a matter of the device, but of peopleware. If Obama succeeded it was not because of the Internet, but because of “hope”. And the Internet was there to deliver it, of course, and to channel people’s hope back. If Ushahidi succeeded in Kenya it was not because of SMSs and mashups, but because of the basic substrate upon which these were erected. I find AppsForDemocracy not only an amazing initiative, but amazing things in themselves and I look forward the day they will be used massively. But, so far, I have the sense it’s just for us the usual e-Government suspects.
The Asian telecentre movement: the role of networks and their future Chairs: Reshan Dewapura, Information and Communication Technology Office (ICTA) of Sri Lanka
Asia and Pacific region has, out of all the UN regions of the world, been the most economically prosperous. But also the one more populated and the most disaster prone in the work, including human disasters caused by poverty.
The region has a wider disparity in the Internet usage, and the digital divide will come not from access, but from broadband or lowband access.
Why a need for community e-centres? Disconnected rural areas, population under poverty line, etc.
The Nenasala (Wisdom Outlet) project in Sri Lanka has inscreased IT literacy rate from 9.7% i 2004 to more than 20% in 2008, aiming to have 1,000 centres in 2010.
Key issues:
Leadership and organization
Financial viability
Services
Ownership and access
The Asian telecentre movement Srinivas S Tadigadapa, APAC Intel Singapore
Provide public access to information for education, personal usage, social and economic develoment… Thus, they need not being limited to just kiosks, but shared access for education, telehealth, etc.
Sustainability:
Financial sustainability
Sustaining staff capability
Sustaining community acceptance
Sustaining service delivery
Key challenges
Connectivity
Linking up to local self governing bodies to telecentres
Diversity introduces complexy: each area has its own requirements, local community involvement and content, creating value at the grass roots is a challenge, etc.
Proper power back up remains a challenge
WiMAX is certainly the solution for last mile access.
Telecentres as access to e-services, a key to service utility. Shared access is important as a bridge to economic growth, employment, training & PC ownership.
Network mid-life crisis — What it is and managment Meddie Mayanja, telecentre.org, International Development Research Centre
Signs of mid-life crisis (Richard McDermott, 2004)
Loss of momentum
Loss of attention
Localization
Avoiding mid-life crisis in networks:
Clear purpose
Active leadership
Critical members engaged
Sense of accomplishment
High expectation, not only the one who’s leading, but of all the constituents of the network
Asian Pacific TeleNetwork (APTN) Dil Piyaratna, Asia Pacific Telecentre Network, ICTA Sri Lanka
In Asia, the most affected by the digital divide are the rural poor. That’s why telecentres deliver more than ICTs: shared access at low cost, meeting place for networking, knowledge centre, access to capital assets, training centre, etc.
Operational challenges
Sustainability
Lack of IT knowlegeable staff
Community acceptance
High cost of broadband
Lack of content in local languags
Sustainability is beyond financial sustainability. Here is where networks of telecentres can enable knowledge sustainability, or help in achieving financial or self-financial sustainability.
Roger Harris explains how seeking financial sustainability leads to losing your “for development” aim, while forgetting about it turns you into an inefficient government service provider.
The Asia Pacific Telecentre Network (APTN) was launched in november 2008 by UNESCAP and forms now part of telecentre.org.
APTN’s role:
Information sharing. APTN to act as the knowledge hub in the Asia Pacific region, being a repository of knowledge.
Facilitate knowledge exchange between national telecentre networks
Facilitate study tours among networks
Consultancy assistance, facilitating consultancy work in Asia Pacific, or creating a database of experts in various areas
Funding assistance, accessing potential donors jointly with member networks and go together for greater credibility
Event coordination, coordinating events in partnership with eAsia or other larger events (resource sharing, knowledge sharing)
Resource mobilization, working together towards a common goal
Enabling policy, assisting governments to implement the telecentre component in eGovernment programmes, and including telecentres inproviding government services to citizens in the rural areas
USAID, Last Mile Initiative
Commercial approach, looking at it from a market perspective, with minimum or no subsidies, but an entrepreneur running a centre which provides services on a price-basis (not for free).
The centres run as franchises. Wireless broadband was deployed for the centres and the founding was lobbied for at two national banks.
A package of services (business-in-a-box) was provided so that to lower the barriers of entry.
Lessons learnt
The packaged model included fixed prices, but communities are different, and so ought to be prices
Services need to go beyond ICT, beyond the PC, beyond Internet access. The telecentre operator has to be free to implement whatever he foresees
The franchise itself was hard to sustain and ended up being taken up by Dialog (telecom)
The private sector has to see that these telecentres are useful to deploy their businesses
La Caixa: from e-learning to collective intelligence Gerard Vélez and Laura Rosillo
The Virtaula project was born in 1999 at La Caixa [one of the largest banks in Spain] as an e-learning platform to train the employees. But the framework has deeply changed: the Internet has moved form the Internet of enterprises to the Internet of people, becoming more social. The Internet becomes multichannel, user-generated, social networks based, etc.
The institution has also evolved and been restructured, from a hierarchic institution to a matrix-based management.
The new Virtaula implies savings in the field of collaborative work: meetings, work groups, professional development, training, etc.
Virtaula was born as an e-learning platform to reach 25,000 employees, all over Spain, without no boundaries of time or space, giving a quick response, in few time. It was intended also to transmit corporate values (especially to new employees) and to transmit corporate procedures. Training paths were followed by each and everyone, and these paths were generic and non-transversal.
The new focus is to give answers and solve problems that the needs of the business, of every day work, require. The idea now is to reinvent e-learning based on internal bi-directional communication. The new training design it not generic but segmented, needs-focused, applied, practical.
There’s been a shift from 100% employees following formal training courses to 40% employees following formal training courses. But employees keep on logging onto Virtaula looking for informal learning and knowledge sharing among peers. These open spaces are built on demand: besides formal training, the rest of the platform and the rest of training initiatives work on demand and to answer the needs and requirements stated by the employees.
Of course, a minimum of commitment is asked for: behind any demand made to Virtaula some requisites need to be matched: fora responsibles, online mentors, etc. that usually come from the same group of people that asked for a new virtual space.
The organization of virtual groups replicates the natural organization of groups within the firm, as it has been proved that it is also the natural unit of knowledge sharing. These units work as a top-down channel for information diffusion, and also as a bottom-up and peer-to-peer platform for knowledge sharing. In these units, the blog has been acknowledged to be the king tool.
Virtaula is full of “solutions” uploaded by the employees to give answer to the situations they find in their daily work, and everyone benefits from contributing to the knowledge platform, being trust in their peers the main value.
What has changed is not (only) the platform, but what people do in it. In Virtaula 1.0 people enrolled in a course, followed training paths, took part in fora by formal (organization- and hierarchy-based collectives), accessed materials and asked a tutor. In Virtaula 2.0, everyone manages their own training, generates content, write blogs and upload videos, lead and mentor virtual spaces, gather around interests (not organization charts), manage information and build their own networks.
Main changes from Virtaula 1.0 to Virtaula 2.0
Spectators became the starring characters. Knowledge shifted from being shared to being built;
And learning moves from autonomous learning to collaborative learning;
From consumers to prosumers;
Expanded authority: it’s better a shared collaborative document, than copies from the original; we have to compete outside, not inside (the firm)
In Virtaula 1.0 trainers were “real” trainers and were asked to answer the students back, mark them and lead a specific group. The new paradigm is that everyone can be a trainer provided they’re willing to lead a topic. People are now agitators, ambassadors, producers, turn tacit into explicit knowledge, share and collaborate, etc. And they are all volunteering to do it.
Main digital skills worked with the employees
Know how to search (e.g. Google)
Know how to read (e.g. Google Reader)
Know how to store (e.g. Delicious)
That should lead the employees to be able to publish whatever on Virtaula
Q&A
Mercè Guillén: why is it that the Virtaula platform has so little corporate imaging? Laura Rosillo: It’s made on purpose. The idea was that Virtaula were not an intranet but the Internet. On the other hand, the purpose was that it should not be a corporate space, but a place for the employees, for the people. La Caixa already has an intranet, and Virtaula should be detached form it.
Q: Have you thought about using already existing social networking sites for other purposes? Gerard Vélez: yes, and the work done in Virtaula should empower the employees to “colonize” other parts of the Internet.
Q: What’s the participation level? Is people aware that this way of working will have any impact on profits? Gerard Vélez: out of 25,000 employees, 15,000 have accessed the platform, 6,000 are in work groups and 1,000 are highly active users. And people do it because it has a positive impact on their daily work.
Because we are Internet users, or intensive SNS users, we can put interesting and critical questions. Would it make any difference wouldn’t we be such kind of users?
Article 29 Working Party: how to find a data controller, how to define the default settings, what should be the usage of nicknames and pseudonyms, how should we treat peole under 18 (or under 14, as it also is the case of Spain), what happens to non-members of SNS, or what exactly is the domestic exemption?
Users create cognitive shortcuts that create some harms on our society that we do not fully understand. And solutions to these shortcuts are not that simple, because it attempts against the very nature of SNS and what their users are actually looking into them.
Sunday Express publishing “dirty” stories and being violently “punished” by it
We are reaching a breaking point regarding the Terms of Service and conditions of SNS: either we will give up the fight, or we will ignore them or fight them until the end.
