overview

Gates /IDRC 5 year project on public access to ICTs

Bangladesh, Chile, and Lithuania

'public' means public spaces rather than private

Project will look at a variety of methods. Quantitative, qualitative,

experimental, everything is open and on the table.

-Understanding why and under which conditions public access makes a

different (health, employment, etc)

-develop methodology

-international advisory board

-7 person research working group (RWG) will be meeting in one month in

Seattle with the research teams.

-This is a time for broad ranging input

people in the room

Jackson Demass from annenberg public affairs

Laurent Elder - IDRC

Frank Tulus - IDRC

Vicki - UW

Beck sears - UW

JA - USC

Amy Mahan - IDRC (uruguay) member of research working group

Charlotte

Michael Best - georgia IT

Mike Crandall - UW info school. community technology centers in

washington state. study of library access in US

Elvis Fraser - Gates Foundation. impact planning and improvement

George Sciadas

Ricardo Ramirez - U. Guelph

Peter Monge - comm networks. HIV / NGO network evolution. How they

evolve, what kind of network configuration has more effects. Childrens'

rights NGOs. 'Carrying capacity' - in any given social network, what

level of connectivity can the community sustain without collapse and

overload.

Sandra Ball-Rokeach - ASC and sociology. Metamorphasis. New Media &

Society article on what makes for a successful community technology

center. Centers that embed themselves in indigenous storytelling

networks are most successful. metamorph.org

Sandra Fried - global libraries team of Gates

Jeff Cole - CDF. 8 years into the World Internet Project. a long term

study of people getting online. Now in 30 countries. Have info on where

people access: home school work cafe library and mobile. Interested in

preferred location.

sasha c - ctcs as production training hubs.

melissa brough

balaji - bangalore school of IT. political economy of info economy.

e-governance.

what is the demand side? what do people want to do with their lives?

- one way to think about libraries and telecentres: people go there b/c

they can't get online at home.

- methods?

- social activities? uploading and creating?

- it's a mistake to assume you know what people want to 'consume' or do

with computers. talk to everyday people.

-separate technology evolution from community. technology will go

through an evolution cycle. incremental change. then new discontinuity.

community is also evolving in various ways.

Araba Sey - the types of people who are in charge of the systems? Who

owns them? microentrepreneurs. ICT industry changes so rapidly, what

does this mean for the sustainability for the livelihood of MEs? They

are the most vulnerable. As industry changes, the microentrepreneurs are

the most vulnerable and can lose their livelihood.

--

Impact indicators?

Technology change?

What about the distinction between free public access and paid public

access?

level of analysis?

organizational impacts?

what variations within the community get generated by the new technology?

what selection mechanisms re: technology adoption and use?

'variation, selection, retention'

policy relevant research

- but individual stories can also be key

- tracking the 'never users' is part of world internet project. in US

that's 25 percent. In many countries it's a vast majority.

--

typologies & classification (always difficult from a social /

evolutionary point of view).

- public places: libraries, telecenters, net cafes.

- actors:

- gated access and impacts. is there filtering software on the public

computers? can people download and install software, and how easy or

hard is it? can they access any content, or is it filtered? can they

upload content, and how easy?

- types of use (what do people do there?)

- cost (how much do people pay to do it?)

- geolocation (where are they, and how far do people go to get there?

density of access?)

- language (what do people call them?)

- gendered use?

- assembly process: early social movement formation. random walk is not

necessarily a random walk. where are the sites that people are

assembling? for example, if a bunch of people on net enabled mobile

devices gather in a park, is that public access?

- role of intermediaries? for example, in a library, the librarian

showing people how to use the net. or a more freeform example where a

network of people might show folks how to use the net.

- jeff cole: looks at how comfortable people are, but don't directly ask

them about how they learn.

- araba: knowledge mapping? ricardo says no, they haven't. 'we've been

trying to jump on a moving train, but we didn't realize how many

different trains are moving?'

sandra: need for longitudinal method. have a good internet access index.

disparity in skill level remains. For example, some of the latino

parents didn't want computers in the home, b/c it would disrupt parental

authority. Similarly, it disrupts professor/student relations. General

question: when you need to know how to do something, do you have

resources to figure it out?

peter: interviewing the EDs of the NGOs. Part of the interview asks them

who they connect with in the network. Also they ask: is there anyone you

want to connect with but you can't, and you're trying to through someone

else? Lots of people say they are trying to do this.

sandra: interview and go on site to the local organizations that people

point them to. The general sense is that the IT situation of grassroots

orgs is abysmal. Leaves them out of network loops.

core features approach: if an institution has x set of core features, we

include it.

identity approach: what organizations and people around them think they are.

'If you had 7 million and 5 years, what you be sure not to miss?'

peter: take 1 million and invest it in analysis technology. You're gonna

have a mountain of data and no clue how to analyze it, for example the

lazar study with thousands and thousands of data points, but they end up

collapsing it to standard regression. Geodata also takes special skills.

Get the capacity within the group to do this.

- also layering data, and interface. Think about it as you start

collecting data.

sandra: make sure that the people in the communities are part of the

process, or you'll end up with araba's useless phone.

--

Note taking by:

Sasha Costanza-Chock

PhD Candidate

Annenberg School for Communication

University of Southern California

costanza AT usc.edu