ICTlogy

e-STAS is a Symposium about the Technologies for the Social Action, with an international and multi-stakeholder nature, where all the agents implicated in the development and implementation of the ICT (NGO’s, Local authorities, Universities, Companies and Media) are appointed in an aim to promote, foster and adapt the use of the ICT for the social action.

Here come my notes for session I.

Raul Zambrano, UNDP
ICTs, Digital Divide and Social Inclusion

Four stages of ICT Development

• connectivity, get people connected
• content and have people have capacities to deal with it
• services
• participation, Web 2.0

Digital divide

• Within countries
• Among countries
• Within and among countries

The difference between the digital divide in developed countries and developing ones is that in developing ones is but another manifestation of other divides — this is not necessarily this way in developed countries.

How can technology bride social divides, not technological divides?

Divides: differences attributed to knowledge, and differences dues to more physical and human capital.

Both the speed of adoption and the speed of diffusion of technologies are have very different paths in developed and developing countries [So, it’s not just that leapfrogging can be made possible (adoption), but it has to be actually fostered (diffusion). But, part of fostering diffusion to achieve quicker and broader adoption is about giving the population what they need and/or are asking for].

Thus, in the policy cycle (social gaps, awareness raising, citizen participation, agenda setting, policy design, development focused, implementation, evaluation/assessment, reduction of social gaps, new emerging issues), these population needs must be taken into account when designing public policies.

In this policy cycle, networking is crucial to gather all sensibilities and ensure that participation does take place. If there is not citizen participation, public policies are likely to be government’s or lobbies’ interests biased.

All in all, it’s about empowerment.

Comments, questions

I ask whether it’s better push (public led) or pull (private sector led) strategies.

Raul Zambrano answers in the framework of developing countries. In these developing countries, the Estate is to foster and create aggregated demand, it is the main purchaser, investor and installer of ICTs (infrastructures, services, etc.).

On the other hand, it is true that there is a latent demand from the citizenry, and there already is a manifested need for ICTs.

About the private sector, the problem in developing countries is that the private sector might not have resources enough to set up pull strategies. Or maybe they could, but it still makes poor sense for them when looking at the Return of Investment. This is especially true with developed countries firms trying to get established in developing countries, though local enterprises might not think (and behave) alike, and find it’s huge benefits what elsewhere might not even make it worth it trying.

So, put short, in developing countries what seems to be working is a centralized model but progressively decentralized [as the subsidiarity principle in the European Union, I’d dare add].

Do we need to keep on working on access (if everyone already has a cellular)?

Yes, definitely, but not as an independent variable but as a dependent one [this is one of the cleverest statements I’ve heard in months about the digital divide].

Paco Ortiz (AHCIET) intervenes in this issue: incumbent telecomms normally pay a ratio of their profits to governments so the latter can help solve the last mile issue. The problem being that once these governments have cash to do so, the sometimes shift the funds to other priorities — no critique intended: these priorities can be Education or Health. Thus, legitimate or not, the result is that universal access is never achieved, but not at the private sector’s fault.

One person from the audience harshly attacks governments for their corruption, which invalidates them to foster any kind of policy or to get any kind of funding from whom ever.

Raul Zambrano states that it is precisely transparency and accountability one of the main goals of ICTs in the sphere of the government.

In a research I made some years ago (see more info below) I described a taxonomy and a typology for online volunteers. The typology had four types of online volunteering:

• Type I: Online Advocacy
• Type II: Online Assessment & Consultancy
• Type III: Onlined Offline Volunteers
• Type IV: Pure Online Volunteers

These types of online volunteering where based on the kind of tasks that an online volunteer could perform, especially by looking at what made different (beyond the obvious) an online volunteer from a traditional, onsite volunteer.

These differences can be summed up like this:

• Knowledge intensive — not workload intensive
• Able to use small amount of spared times between other tasks, or in the impasse from one task to another one — e.g. at workplace, at home, on the way from workplace to home, etc.
• Can quickly perform multiple, small and short run tasks
• Can work in a decentralized way
• Can network

One of the main conclusions was that online volunteering could help nonprofits regain “lost” volunteers that could not go ahead with all of their daily duties plus onsite volunteering engagement, or just access an unexploited cluster of goodwill people that could not volunteer because they were too busy or too aged to do some tasks (e.g. build a school in an overseas country).

I’m happy to see that this is exactly what Fundación Bip-Bip has done with their new project Microvoluntarios.org.

The site is a network where nonprofits can upload requirements for help that enrolled volunteers can help achieving. The difference is that the focus is put in microtasks. Microtasks are:

* The ones that do not need more than 120 minutes to be achieved
* Can be fully performed online
* Can be done by people not necessarily connected in a formal way to one organization, be it staff or volunteer
Some examples can be: looking for information on the Internet, translating some pages, transcripting some short documents, brainstorming for the creation of a logo, writing a short story, designing a campaign, recommending some bibliography, doing surveys, photo editing, viral marketing, recruiting members, etc.

The site, really at a beta stage, does need some tweaking — like how being noticed of new microtasks in your area of expertise — but the idea is excellent. Kudos to Fundación Bip-Bip!

More info

• microvoluntarios.org
• 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
• Peña-López, I. (2005). e-Learning for Development: a model. ICTlogy Working Paper Series #1. Barcelona: ICTlogy

Two years ago we here spoke about e-Readiness and the Human Development Index. The chart we then plotted was similar to this one:

[click to enlarge]

This chart now adds two tendency curves: one (exponential) for countries with a Human Development Index (HDI) over 7.00, and another one (linear, though absolutely irrelevant, on the other hand) for countries under 7.00 — though there are lots of countries missing: too poor to appear on the charts…).

Even if the regression is not really accurate (not at all) we can more or less see a relationship between e-Readiness and Development (as measured as HDI).

One of the main criticisms I have against how the digital divide, the Information Society or e-Readiness is measured (see below “More info” for a couple of references) is that it either takes one of the following paths:

• Focus almost exclusive on infrastructures
• A too broad approach thus including “analogue noise” (i.e. non-digital indicators or analogue economy indicators — provided such a thing makes sense, which I believe it does in the field of development)

In any case, huge voids appear: digital literacy levels, the regulation framework and richness of content and e-services.

Are these lacks relevant?

Let’s take a look at the measurement of Inequality (from the HDI database, calculated after the World Bank’s World Development Indicators), comparing the ratio of 20% richest ones to 20% poorest ones, and ratio of 10% richest ones to 10% poorest ones. And we chart it against the year 2007 World Economic Forum’s Networked Readiness Index (we plot the second one logarithmically, just for a change):

[click to enlarge]

[click to enlarge]

As can be easily seen in both comparisons — linear for the 20% to 20% inequality; logarithmically for the 10% to 10% inequality — there does not seem to be any kind of relationship between e-Readiness and Inequality. But whose problem is this? the reality’s or our models’? Does it really make sense that a country with highest inequalities can be as e-ready as another one with a more balanced income/wealth distribution?

It is no news that income inequalities carry on associated inequalities in education, in political stability, social and community engagement, security and crime, etc. So, can a society with low/uneven human capital, political instability, poor community engagement, high crime rates… be as e-ready as another one with better scores in these indicators? Intuition clearly and loudly shouts no, not at all, by any means.

Then, where’s the problem? In my opinion, it undoubtedly is in how we measure how good our degree of Information Society development is.

And, if so, where are we failing? I guess here are some places to look at:

• We pay too much attention to infrastructures. They are needed, of course, but they are means, not ends. ICT infrastructures should be seen as a necessary condition for ICT development, but not as a sufficient condition.
• We quite always forget about digital literacy, getting rid of it with a simple “number of Internet/PC/mobile phone users” indicator, an indicator which does not measure how different uses can leverage ICTs for development.
• Even if we approach digital literacy, aggregate measures do not discriminate between different users and the individual benefits they get, or how their different levels of skills impact on their productivity or their employability.
• At the aggregate level, it is easy that big firms’ ICT achievements and Governments’ big investments overshadow poor ICT adoption and performance by SMEs, thus provoking a paradox: at the aggregate level, ICT investment and consumption is great, but “no one” is using them (a reframing of Solow paradox?).
• Our knowledge on how ICTs affect social parameters — out of the Economy arena — is way too poor. So, we are having tough times to incorporate such parameters in our e-Readiness models and indices. Does e-Administration, e-Government and e-Democracy matter? At what level? Does ICT skills matter in multi-factor productivity? At what level? Can this be included in our models?

Put short: I guess we are missing people in our models. I am not saying it is easy to do, but we are actually missing the key.

More info

• Peña-López, I. (2007). ICTs for development: from e-Readiness to e-Awareness. Seminar imparted in Barcelona, November 20th, 2007 at the Executive Master in e-Governance, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Barcelona: ICTlogy.
• Peña-López, I. (2007). Unpeeling the layers of the digital divide: category thresholds and relationships within composite indices. ICTlogy Working Paper Series #2. Karlstad: ICTlogy.

The problem of writing in several places and doing it in different languages is that, after all, it is quite difficult to establish or draw a consistent thread of your own thinking. If you, indeed, do need this verbalized/explicitly-written summary of your ideas for other purposes, tracking it down is, more than interesting, a must. Here comes, hence, some things I’ve said somewhere else in the past days, just slightly elaborated:

The myth of the digital natives (source)

When talking about the digital natives, it is common to listen to people talk from radical, opposed approaches: the digital native is an axiom vs. the digital native is an absurd nonsense. Just few try and stay in a middle point.

I believe — I really mean it — that it makes no sense talking about digital natives in a generational sense. I’d rather call it a “syndrome”, a syndrome that younger generations (due to their capacity of aprenticeship, because of their major contact with new technologies, etc.) could be more prone to show (and this should be tested, of course) in comparison with older ones but, indeed, not exclusively.

In my opinion, “native” and “immigrant” are just ways of naming things, situations, nor theorems neither faithful descriptions of the reality. It’s just for us to quickly understand each other. Maybe Expert 2.0 does not carry so much determinism in the concept. But again: to me, the concept — ambiguous, equivocal, informal — is useful to describe the symptomatic chart, characterized by the different features drawn by Prensky, Palfrey/Gasser and others.

The “digital native/immigrant” construct should help us as a “proxy” of that difficult to measure variable that is “how much have we changed?”, by bringing a series of explicit characteristics to test.

Thus, we could analyze the way digital capacities and competences are acquired but also what is the final result, how these digital competences have transformed the individual, his habits… In this train of thought, the “how” would be the independent variable and the final result the dependent. For instance: using a mobile phone 24h a day, does it change my life? or, going further, using a mobile phone 24h a day does it give me some (digital) aptitudes that evolve into a (psychological, social, economical) change?

Then, the most interesting part in Prensky’s concept is the debate that it generates, the question thrown to the arena, more than the details — probably most of them arguable.

Should we all be digital natives/settlers?

Maybe not, maybe digital tools are neither the only ones nor the best ones, for all or for everyone. But, on the other hand, we are in a society that more and more gets demonstrated that:

• productivity will depend on the management of information and knowledge
• to keep one’s job will depend on the digital competences in a very broad sense
• business, production and cultural models are changing drastically and very quick
• law, rights, duties, values, identity, socialization… are being subverted from head to toes
• etc.

In front of this, it is in no way trivial or marginal to analyze the technologies that are provoking all these changes — and the adoption that specific social sectors make of them.

As the Industry changed the world since the XVIII^th century, there is pretty much evidence — and growing — that Information and Communication Technologies are reshaping the world, and to the point that we might be living a Third Industrial Revolution. Some even talk about a Digital Revolution, at the same level of the Agricultural Revolution or the Industrial Revolution.

So, digitize yourself or disappear. All society should enter this digital revolution — and the start is skills — to transform itself: not doing it might involve walking the same path developing countries took when the Industrial Revolution took place (for several and very different reasons, of course). Because the digital revolution, as the industrial revolution did, will affect both the ones that can access it and the ones that cannot. You just cannot switch the computer off and forget about the Information Revolution.

Web 2.0 and the role of the user (source)

So, is the Web 2.0 the solution to empowerment, to digital literacy, to democracy and so? Criticism states that surveys show that the concept of the prosumer is a fallacy and that almost everyone is a lurker, a voyeur 2.0.

My opinon is that, besides comparing horizontally (i.e. how many contribute to Web 2.0 sites and how many don’t), we should also compare vertically: how many now and how many before, just when there was no Web 2.0 or, even more, when there was no Internet at all.

The simile of democracy is perfect: better a dictatorship, a non-universal suffrage, or a democracy, even if statistics show that just half of the population actually votes while the rest does not even care standing out of the couch?

I guess that, being the subject so recent, it is no frivolity to speak of the potential and not only facts. Yes, facts are great, and facts — not suppositions — is what gives bread to our tables and pays our mortgages, so we cannot go on talking about the potential benefits of the Web 2.0 eternally and nothing else changes. But, that this potential exists — and let’s hope it sooner or later materializes — is a way good interesting change.

Michael Saunby
Climate Change Mashups

Climate change: not a change in the climate but (also) a change in the variability of the climate.

By looking at the map applications, it is easier to see where e.g. there’ll be water stress in the (nearest) future, or human health crisis due to high ozone levels.

Mashups are about e.g. enough people collecting, reusing and distributing public sector information on already existing (commercial) online applications — e.g. Google Earth — so anyone can contribute again and close the loop — and make the scope of diffusion way wider.

It’s possible to mashup news RSS feeds with Google Earth so you can geolocate where the news took place.

To my (provoking) “concern” that you might be putting all your eggs in one basket, and relying too much on third parties’ applications to publish your content, Michael Saunby answers that it is just about tracking those applications as they appear and evolve, and go along with them, not that you invest on them, but just use them — use them for your own purposes and with all the benefits they have.

More info:

• WeMapr
• Lat Long Blog
• Google Code, to find out about the mashup editor (and other Google open API related things)

Patrizia Monteduro
GeoNetwork OpenSource: Geographic data sharing for everyone

Provide a common platform and standards to (online) manage geographic data, improving accessibility while monitoring quality.

Features

• Metadata and data publication and distribution
• Metadata and data search
• Interactive access to maps
• Metadata editing and management
• Different metadata standards
• Different sharing levels

Metadata harvesting and synchronization allows the system to gather metadata from distributed information hosted in other services/servers, done by the user himself.

More info:

• GeoNetwork Community Website

Luz Marina Alvaré, Nancy Walczak
Web 2.0 and IFPRI: Looking out and Looking in

Reach Internet users potentially interested in IFPRI‘s work and engage them in a dialog.

• Goal: extend web presence beyond institutional website
• Goal: establish dialogue on food policy issues: Blog World Hunger
• Goal: help dispersed teams work more effectively: CGVlibrary
• Goal: Quickly and collaboratively crate a list of best resources, e.g. by using del.icio.us

But also looking inside

• Goal: increase participation, open communication, and create community: Let’s blog IFPRI, a blog on IFPRI’s intranet
• Goal: to simplify the entry of content into IFPRI’s Intranet: using wikis as a content management system, avoiding bottlenecks, fostering initiative on the content creator/responsible
• Goal: IFPRI staff participate in external research-related dialogues, to increase participation

Legitimating tools: “wikis are anarchic”, “blogs are just buzz”

As a transition: enable e-mail compatibilities, so people can choose while getting used to the new tools

Content matters, not its look. The user normally evaluates the quality of the content and understands that nice looks can wait for later. No need to have a sensation of “finished work” or a “finished app”, as long as content is OK.

Damir Simunic
Collaboration on the Edge of Network

Keys to success on collaboration

• Ownership, in the sense of personalization/customization of look and feel, literals, etc.
• Bringing “outsiders” inside, so people “inside” can freely interact with people “outside” (the department, the organization, etc.)
• Simplicity, less is more: do not put features people don’t use or don’t understand at first sight.

Simunic states that e-mail is the only way to engage two-way communication and to have a digital identity. I couldn’t disagree more: latest social networking sites such a MySpace and FaceBook can perfectly work without any e-mail address at all. And, definitely, what positions yourself on the web — on search engines’ results — is not e-mail, that runs privately, but a website — yours, an account on any social networking site, or even a user on Wikipedia.