There is a very widespread belief that the increasingly ubiquitous availability of mobile communication and through this, access to wireless Internet, is somehow the resolution of the “digital (and other) divide(s)”. Thus, a current news story from China: To ease people’s woes, the central government this year launched a new online “ticketing system to curb… [Read more…]
This issue of The Journal of Community Informatics (JoCI) deals with research relationships between universities and university based ICT researchers and communities. These matters are, of course of central significance to Community Informatics since much of CI is, in one form or another, linked into this type of relationship.
...in one study in rural Africa it was being found that the costs of mobile communications were absorbing up to 54% of the total net income of certain farmers
#OWS (occupy Wall Street and the “Occupy” movement) have been widely discussed but not as yet in the context of a broader understanding of an evolving Digital/Information Society.
perhaps of greatest significance from the perspective of Civil Society and of communities is the overall absence of measurement and thus inclusion in the economic accounting of the value of the contributions provided to, through and on the Internet of various voluntary and not-for-profit initiatives and activities
I am delighted and honoured as editor of the Journal of Community Informatics to publish a special double issue on The Internet and Community Informatics in Brazil. The issue itself is a very strong one and I think it both represents and solidifies the very strong Community Informatics range of activities and traditions in Brazil while pointing to certain characteristics of Community Informatics in Brazil that are potentially of interest and importance for the rest of the world.
Among other things I’m involved in a variety of discussions in several venues on Civil Society and the Internet. This below is part of my contribution to one of those discussions and specifically on how to “measure the Internet economy” in this instance from a Civil Society perspective. One of the basic understandings of the… [Read more…]
Community Informatics colleague Ajit Maru, in a posting on the Community Informatics Research elist suggests some disturbing questions concerning the relationship between “Information Access” and “effective use” and its possible links to the rising food crisis globally.
What I find so positive about this is that the DoL is taking the issue of a potential Data Divide seriously and is devoting some of its development resources to responding by providing tools that those with more limited technical experience can use to design applications for using DoL data.
The idea of a possible parallel “data divide” between those who have access and the opportunity to make effective use of data and particularly “open data” and those who do not, began to occur to me. I was attending several planning/recruitment events for the Open Data “movement” here in Vancouver and the socio-demographics and some of the underlying political assumptions seemed to be somewhat at odds with the expressed advocacy position of “data for all”.
January 16, 2012
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