Telecentres should fulfil the communication and information needs of the communities where they are located.
Some research states that sometimes telecentres do not work, but there’s increasing evidence that the reason might be of a cultural or social nature, thus not directly related with the telecentre and the technology it provides, but its usage, the context.
Social representation: social psychological phenomena can only be understood if they are seen as being embedded in the socio-cultural context. The function of a social representation is to establish how people interpret their world, and to enable people to communicate with the other members of the community.
Actions for improvement:
The use of mobile phones as an instrument of empowerment.
The use of ICTs to develop cultural content that reflect the nature and the vision of local communities.
Make this content available for visitors, offering chances for cultural exchange and understanding.
Discussion
Matti Tedre raises the point of telecentre vs. Internet café, and public/universal access vs. profit and sustainability. I would like to bring back a previous writing of mine: Public Internet Access Points: impact vs. sustainability.
Citizens’ Understanding and Definitions of Democracy during Internet Campaigns Amara Thiha
Authoritarian states usually moraliza and define democracy in their own particular way. Why moralized? Intentions to practice and implement democracy collide with some interpretations of the third way of democratization / of liberal democracy. How do authoritarian states take up the web 2.0 and politics 2.0?
The research consists on the comparison of three authoritarian states: Myanmar (dictatorship), Iran (multy-party authoritarian state) and China (single party authoritarian state). A case is developed analysing the political blogosphere.
Web crawling analysis provided data to perform both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Ethnography also provided a good qualitative insight.
Discussion
Matti Tedre: is the blogging community representative of the whole population?
Mazhar Ali: how do you define an authoritarian regime? A: there are objective/established definitions that take into account the number of parties, the political freedom and citizen rights, etc.
Vanessa Frías: how are data extracted? A: some blogs are read, all of them are treated with text analysis tools. Vanessa Frías: natural language processing is a methodology.
Ismael Peña-López: did you include in your sample pro-government (i.e. hired by the government) bloggers? A: yes, definitely.
Projecthonduras.com aims at gathering Honduras available human capital by means of ICTs, aims at harnessing resources and knowledges across international boundaries.
Projecthonduras.com provides space for introductions, encouragement, coordination, sharing, teaching and learning… It is done through Yahoo! Groups, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
But online activity is clearly low. Why is it so? Difficulties of physical access, design of the website, attempted migrations to Facebook, language issues, lack of digital skills, lack of interest and/or time, organizations and individuals up skill, philosophical issues…
And nevertheless people keep saying that the site is interesting/important.
One of the reasons is that projecthonduras.com has three layers: the website, the network and the community. The last one, enhanced by the former two, is invisible, private and unmediated, so difficult to measure but where outcome happens. This layer will be the target of this research.
Discussion
Ugo Vallauri: has the analysis been done online or offline? A: both of them.
Ismael Peña-López: could it be that — like Pippa Norris or Howard Rheinghold say — that people gather around actions and not principles/projects, and that would explain the short term relationsihps or the online diaspora? A: what is really happening is that people neither gather around principles/projects nor actions: they just get in touch personally, offline, at the “invisible” level to get things done. They do not bother going online or going “visible” unless their needs require asking for collective wisdom.
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.
The Xarxa Òmnia is the largest network of telecentres in Catalonia and one of the largest in whole Spain. The network was set up in 1999 and, since its conception, it has always had a strong community-focused aim which made of their telecentres — or Punt Òmnia [Òmnia Point] — more than just public Internet access points, but more tools of (e-)inclusion and community building.
Now that Xarxa Òmnia has turned 10 years old, the yearly rendez-vous of the whole network, the Jornada Òmnia, will focus on how should the network evolve in the coming years, taking into special account the changes that have been happening in the last 10 years in matters of the Information and the Network Society, and what are the challenges that policy makers and telecentre administrators will have to face to successfully fight the digital divide and the risks of (e-)exclusion.
I have been invited to introduce both these aspects. And my point has been already been made in the way that I write (e-)inclusion and (e-)exclusion: in my opinion, e-inclusion or e-exclusion will increasingly be a matter of inclusion/exclusion rather than being centre on the “e-“. Obvious as this might sound (i.e. inclusion being a matter of inclusion), the devil is in the details:
Real impact of ICTs will come — I believe — by them enabling, enhancing and empowering the analogue part of our lives: e-inclusion should be about ICTs finding ways to help people be part of a community, not about pouring people in the Internet (the “e-” focus of e-inclusion), notwithstanding a recurrent strategy in many Information Society policies;
People not online are, increasingly, people actively refusing to be online. While it is still true that many people don’t go online because of impossibility to access the Internet (hardware, connectivity, affordability, skills, etc.), we also find people that being able to access it, just don’t want to or even walk out of it. Lack of awareness, belief that ICTs bring nothing good to their lives, technophobia, etc. are keeping them disconnected and in risk not of e-exclusion but exclusion at all.
Thus, here’s my presentation:
The main points and rationale of my presentation are:
The Digital Revolution puts at stake the economy of scarcity (at least at the information and knowledge levels), brings down transaction costs and introduces a new actor into the equation: machines that substitute brain work (as other machines substituted muscle work in the Industrial Revolution)
The effect of these three aspects, puts at stake institutions? Do schools, firms, governments, the media or civic organizations still have a role in mediating between citizens? Or will citizens bypass them? What if they do? What if citizens themselves are bypassed by their peers?
If hierarchies and institutions give way to — or are deeply transformed by — networks, inclusion will be a matter of staying connected and being able to re-program oneself to be kept within the network.
New (digital) competences will be crucial for that, from technological literacy to e-awareness.
Thus, we might be needing to reframe our policies and foster pull strategies instead of pull strategies; we might also reconsider the role of our (e-)inclusion tools (telecentres amongst them), that might need shifting from the “e-” to the “inclusion”, strongly focussing on community building, enhanced by technologies.
This presentation is a wonderful occasion for me to gather up things I’ve been working on and thinking about in the last two years. In some way, it collects the reflections I already made in the following speeches (in chronological order):
I want to thank Cesk Gasulla, Noemí Espinosa, Marta Jové, Sònia Castro, Dolors Pedrós and the rest of the organizing committee for the invitation and the valuable chance to organize my reflections and think aloud in public. Moltes gràcies!
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).
On November 5th, 2008, I attended the V Encuentro de e-Inclusión [V e-Inclusion Conference], a meeting of telecenter administrators from all around Spain organized by Fundación Esplai.
If last year’s edition looked at the Web 2.0 as something new — I imparted then a seminar entitled What do they say the Social Web is? —, this year’s general belief was that not only the Web 2.0 is here to stay but that it’s impact on the way the Internet is used and on how communities go online has altered the whole landscape. Thus, telecenters should reflect on their own activity and, above all, their own role in this new participatory web. The session debated around three main questions, put down below.
The paragraphs that follow freely report the opening session of the Encuentro, featuring three conferences, Q & A to the conferences, two showcases and, lastly, some personal reflections on the whole session.
Telecenters 2.0 and community building Ismael Peña-López (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)
Training in ICTs and community building Ricard Faura (Generalitat de Catalunya)
Telecenters achieving maturity: extensive geographical presence and intensively enhanced by new social technologies, the threat being long-term sustainability, both at the economical level and the conceptual (i.e. is there still a need for telecenters?).
1.- The evolution of the telecentre towards v2.0 and community building: utopy or reality?
The telecenter has to work in a network of telecenters, working and collaborating together.
The telecenter as a living lab: a place where tools are put at the citizen disposal, so that the citizenry can innovate, can take part in innovation.
The telecenter has to train and empower the citizen to benefit from social networks, by taking part in the community.
2.- How to build community through digital literacy?
Find and engage the social connector, the person that has to be activated to trigger a multiplicator effect.
3.- Challenges of community building from social initiatives?
Once the first milestones of an inclusion project have been reached, the public sector has to step aside and let the civil society lead. Community leaders – “shakers” – have to be the ones that drive inclusion projects.
1.- The evolution of the telecentre towards v2.0 and community building: utopy or reality?
Reality, not utopy: the Tec de Monterrey has 33 campuses, 37 campuses + 25 corporate universities in the Universidad TecMilenio framework, a virtual university present in 17 countries and the Instituto para el desarrollo sostenible with 26 social incubators and 1709 Learning Community Centers. Comunity building can thus be understood at many and different levels, the important thing being to act at al levels and in a networked way, sharing principles and resources, and adapting the procedures to the target population.
2.- How to build community through digital literacy?
Engagement is the answer. Let people take part into the whole deployment of projects, from design to evaluation.
Planting solid roots and setting a slow (but steady) path, with easy to reach milestones that report small successes.
3.- Challenges of community building from social initiatives?
Impact in the civil society:
infrastructures are a must, but not enough
open software and content are the next required step, but not enough
empowerment: the telecenter as a window to generate identity and build community
Impact in public policies: try and keep long run strategies (despite of political changes) and try and bring grassroots initiatives into macro policies.
Centros comunitarios de aprendizaje:
cut down poverty and marginalization throug social inclusion
bring alternatives of access to education, information and communication
promote productive projects for a sustainable community development
Q & A
Cesk Gasulla: Facebook is really successful, but is it useful for community building?
Ismael Peña-López: Facebook has been perfect to get people together, and there are plenty of interesting uses of Facebook, but it lacks the possibility (or makes it really difficult) to draw guidelines, schedules, milestones and goals or, in other words, to design, manage and implement a project, as it is difficult to separate one community from another, or different interests, as they live together under the same roof. There is too much “noise” in Facebook to engage in a quiet conversation led by an engaged coordinator without the danger of passerbys peeping inside the project. Probably, Ning is the answer to this need of a closed room for community building. Indeed, as Ning requires more effort to be set up and customized than i.e. an event or group on Facebook, it might probably be taken more seriously by their own promoters, that will commit more as they’d be expecting a return of their higher investment (of time, resources, etc.)
Ricard Faura: while agreeing with the former, we should not forget that Facebook’s main success has been popularizing and making easy to understand what social networking sites are, how do they work, etc. And this is something that other platforms have been having toughest and longest time to achieve.
In Bolivia telcenters are (often) located inside schools so that they can supply the techonolgycal training that schools do (or can) not. Telecenters are also place in rural areas in order to provide access to these remote areas.
Two main areas of speciality of telecenters in Bolivia:
education: digital literacy, formal and long-life learning. Portals, community wikis where to upload any kind of content.
agriculture: e-commerce, etc.
How can web 2.0 contribute to telecenter development and community development? What’s the utility of social networking sites?
How to find the usefulness of ICTs, as a means, not as a goal?
Work with the youth, that have found clear uses of ICTs, in community building though these ICTs in the way they use them. By attracting youngsters with ICT applications that they are asking for (e.g. music sharing, video editing and publishing, etc.), next step (inclusion) comes naturally (or, at least, easily).
Work with immigrants, that again have mastered some ICT applications (e.g. radioweb) for their own benefit. But this has provided free information and in plural ways and approaches. Telecenters promote these actions to foster democracy, information, etc.
One of the most urgent needs for a telecenter is to identify who the dinamizator will be… and engage them in doing it.
Some reflections
I pick one of Cesk Gasulla’s quotes as the summary of the whole session: We should quit dynamizing technology, and dynamize people instead.
The reflections telecenters are making these days — and the Encuentro not only featured direct representatives form circa 200 telecenters in Spain, but somehow reflected also the philosophy of the whole Telecenter.org network, which gathers thousands of them — are not about setting up some guidelines for the nearest future to come, but reflecting on the essence itself of the role and even need of the telecenter. This reflection is threefold:
Is there still a need for such a thing as a telecenter, when technology is made more affordable every day, and access is being incorporated in public policies at all political levels?
If yes, what is the role of the telecenter: does it still has to supply access to infrastructures? should it shift towards digital literacy and capacity building? should it instead switch towards community building and focus on the personal and social networks?
If yes, how should this be done? and what’s the role of technology in the whole (new) landscape?
There was quite a consensus that access is no more the primary goal of telecenters (though it still is a very important goal in many and many places around the globe).
And there was quite an acknowledgement that capacity building is neither the primary goal. Firstly, because the new 2.0 tools have made things easier to learn and build things on the Internet. Secondly, because there are several examples where newly digitally literate people saw no changes at all in their lives. What’s the purpose, then, in being digitally literate?
So it seems that, besides access and capacity building (remember: no one said it was not a need), telecenters should now focus on community building. There’s increasing evidence that after a first geeky wave of early adopters, the Internet is empowering already settled communities, strengthening their ties and broadening their scope and reach. The Internet has become a catalyst and multiplier of the social inclusion goodnesses of the community, the social and “real” network.
But, being a network as it is (made out of connected individual nodes), the only way to help the individual to weave their own network (offline and online… and back offline again) is being a part of the network too. No hierarchies, no top-down approaches will work for the telecenters to approach the community networks, but their own and sheer participation in them.
This is were the Telecenter 2.0 comes to place: how to be part of the network, speaking their own language, engaging in a conversation; how to find and trigger the community leaders; how to approach the excluded and get them inside the conversation, the network, the community. This is the real challenge of the Telecenter (2.0): the switch from a public service to being another citizen, another neighbour.
Challenging the digital divide: the role of telecenters in e-inclusion practices.
First, Daniela brings a short introduction to the concept of the Digital Divide as lack of access to ICTs.
Digital Inclusion is then the effort to guarantee everyone has access to the Information Society.
The problem is that there is not only one digital divide, but many: geographical, etc.
These efforts have, hence, many designs, from fiscal incentives to direct provision of Internet access from physical places: telecenters, places people can go to use telecommunication services. The main difference with a cyber cafe is profit — in the latter case — or bridging the digital divide — in the fomer case —.
Three moments of digital inclusion (according to Warschauer):
Device model: physical access
Connexion model: access to the Network
Literacy model: uses and contexts
A shift is now taking place towards a more social-aspects focused strategy:
What are the main competences to use the computer: digital literacy
What are the uses that certain communities can give to computers and the Internet: technology appropriation
But it seems that this shift has gone from “technological determinism” to “social determinism”, from an approach where technology would solve each and every problem (cyberoptimism) where just everything can be solved inside the “black box” of the community.
But, technologies are not neutral and the actor-network theory (ANT) can bring some light to the issue.
What do we have so far?
Official reports about telecenter use and users
Scientific studies, both qualitative and quantitative
“Community Informatics” is a field whose goal is to analyze the uses of ICTs in communities.
Research Questions / Hypotheses
Technology plays an important role. This role is usually neglected at higher levels.
There is a big differnetce between practice and goals in telecenters as stated in their official discourses
Following the ANT, there’s an interaction — chains of association — between users and technologies so, after passing through a “black box”, become from digital illiterate to literate, and from technologies to properly appropriated technologies.
The methodology to be used in this research will be, based on the ANT, do an ethnography in a telecenter to disclose the relationships of technology appropriation by users.
Comments
Several persons in the audience state that ANT might not be the best approach, as it takes for granted that there is a role performed by technologies, and a relationship technology-user, which is exactly what the research wants to find.
I state that this could be balanced (theory vs. practice, positivism vs. normativism) by balancing ANT with a participatory action research instead of performing an ethnography.
Somebody also points that it would be interesting to see how digital literacy (strictly personal) can be complemented with technology socialization, so a social framework is created through technology, so the digital literate can then interact “technologically” with others, and socialize.
