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 long lines at stations and prevent scalpers from selling them in the black market.

To incentivize online buyers, the railway ministry increased the number of train seats available through the Internet and ticket hotlines.

However, …the new system has caused more grief than relief. Not only does the site crash on a regular basis, but most elderly and migrant workers — those who often struggle to buy tickets to begin with — find the system discriminatory, according to travelers at the Beijing station. “It’s not really fair. Most migrant workers don’t know how to go online and the ticket hotline is always busy. So all we can do is come here and wait in line,” said Qin, who works as a laborer in Beijing.

“Maybe the railway ministry can find an easier way or a solution for migrant workers to get tickets during the New Year.”

The new digitally-enabled system (presumably oriented toward mobile access as is much of the Internet in China) appears to be aggravating existing divisions between social and economic “have’s” and “have not’s” that is between those who have ready and usable access to the Internet and those who do not.

Thus, while I generally agree with Vint Cert’s argument that the Internet is simply a tool, it should I think, be seen rather more in the manner of the opposable thumb as a tool rather than as a 3d replicator or whatever. I also agree with his point that the Internet is an enabler of rights. However, the question I think, is not whether the Internet is a right (or a tool) or simply an enabler of rights but rather whether the Internet as a fundamental platform (and “opposable thumb”) for ensuring economic, social and even political participation in the 21st century is accessible to, and usable, by all.

After writing an open letter to complain that the online system gave the poor less of a chance to buy tickets because they were Internet-illiterate and didn’t have access to computers, Huang was given free airline tickets for his Spring festival journey to his hometown of Chonqging.

Others like Qin, who only holds a primary school education, haven’t been so lucky. “Sometimes, wealthier people have connections who can buy them tickets or computers at home, so they can go online,” said Qin.

“We could always buy plane tickets, but it’s a financial sacrifice for migrant workers and not so realistic.”

After more than a week of visiting the train station to wait in line for tickets and leaving empty-handed, Qin Yun has given up. He and his wife, both migrant workers in Beijing, hoped to buy tickets that would take them more than 2,000 km (1,242 miles) home to the southwestern province of Sichuan to spend the annual Spring Festival with their parents and teenage kids. On Monday, Qin managed to buy a train ticket for himself — a standing-only ticket on a cramped train for more than 40 hours. It’s been a year since the two of them have gone home.

“Standing is better than nothing,” said Qin. “My wife isn’t strong enough to stand for so long, so she’ll stay behind and spend the holiday alone.”

Among the possible “divides” suggested by this article there is that between those who have access and can pay for the physical devices delivering the Internet including in-home computers or mobiles; those who can afford to pay for the digital data/Internet service which in many locations is quite expensive relative to local incomes; those who have the literacy, numeracy and conceptual training and manual dexterity to master the use of the devices, the software and the applications (such as this one); the elderly and women who in many environments lack access to education and technical skills development; and those who do not.

I really have no idea what the end number would be if one cascaded all of the “divides” indicated in the above to find what overall proportion in a country or globally was in fact, able to make use of the various “opportunities” and benefits being offered by mobile and digital technologies. However, in the absence of winning the lottery (or being such a visible embarrassment that someone has to buy you off), or having a rich friend or relative, the reality of the online world (as with the world of the 99%) is that a very few will travel by plane or bullet train (or high speed Internet); rather more will find themselves standing for 40 hours waiting for their access; while many, even most others will not be “strong enough to stand for so long, so (they) will stay behind and spend the holiday (and the digitally enabled economy/society/polity) alone…”

There has been a justifiable celebration of the remarkable advance in communications and digital “access” via mobiles. Unfortunately this has been accompanied by a profound diversion of attention/interest and ultimately financial and programmatic support away from responding to the various divides of the digital era. While these divides have shifted with mobiles, it should be clear from the above example and many others that these have not disappeared.

Some ten years ago I argued the need for giving policy and programmatic attention to what I called “effective use” beyond the Digital Divide (DD). Regrettably the profound technology advances of these ten years, and the accompanying attention being given to the social, political and cultural significance of these technologies has not to my mind changed the conclusion that I drew at the time:

What is needed is both access (bridging the DD) but also the means for using technology in an effective way to respond to real crises in health care, education, economic development, and resource degradation. For these issues to be successfully addressed through the use of ICTs, attention will need to be paid not simply to “access” but also to an entire range of supports for “effective use”.

These papers, however interesting and valuable they are in giving us insight and direction into how these relationships can be undertaken in ways which are respectful, productive and mutually advantageous; perhaps raise as many questions as they resolve. And here I point to these questions not to be critical of the individual papers or the issue overall, but rather to indicate how complex and challenging this area can be for those concerned and how this complexity has broader significance for the overall nature of CI both in the academic world and as a practice in the field.

The first question to ask is how have university community relations evolved in the context of the broad evolution of universities and particularly the current widely observed trend toward corporatization of universities, university research and even university teaching. The rise of “user pays” approaches to universities as in other spheres  (in most of the OECD countries among others) has meant that the financing of universities increasingly relies on tuition, overhead from research funds, corporate (and other, including alumni) donations, and endowments where available, for funding.  This has lead to very significant increases in the cost of tuition (and the related student loan crises particularly in the US) as well as a more “business-like” (corporate) approach to university management.

In the context of the relationship with communities one effect of this evolution is to bring increasing attention to the need for broader political support for universities including among key local and regional stakeholders which in turn has in some instances led universities to enhance their relationships with local communities (in the spirit of “Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)” if nothing else). From a CI perspective this probably presents opportunities for extending existing relationships and establishing new ones under the overall rubric (in the largely US terminology) of “service learning”. The challenge here of course, is to have these relationships be anything other than another form of paternalism — spreading the intellectual largesse of the university into the hinterland whether the hinterland has an interest or not.

Using university based resources to support community empowerment through ICTs should in principle fit within this framework but one expects that university administrations with a focus on CSR may find projects or programs tackling issues of direct concern to communities rather riskier in a variety of directions than they may wish to tackle. They would prefer I would expect to rather focus on how to link communities into broader corporate or government agendas as for example, through training or job readiness programs, support for centralized service delivery programs and so on.  Of course, these agendas may be quite consistent with self-developed community agendas but the option for pursuing other objectives may not be made available.

Another effect of the changing funding environment is to have universities and higher education overall focus on job readiness, skills and “entrepreneurship” training to the degree possible.  Here as well, one would think that there may be additional opportunities for university based teaching and research to enable students with an interest in working with communities and ICTs as a longer term career but in practice CI and the “community” sector in general is seen as being on the wrong side of an “employment divide” where attention is paid and resources provided to train for employment in the private sector while much less attention is paid to those with an interest in and willingness to work in the public and not for profit sectors where much of CI employment would be found. Thus, as I’ve noted a number of times in the past, while no self-respecting university in the world would not have a program in Management Information Systems (MIS) designed to support the development and use of systems to enable and empower primarily corporate management in the pursuit of their goals, one looks in vain for equivalent programs in Community Information Systems whose objectives would be the development and use of Information Systems in support of enabling and empowering communities to pursue community derived goals.

While a hierarchy of relationships between university researchers and communities isn’t directly referred to in the papers in this special issue perhaps it would be useful to point to what one might look like:

Research on Communities–this is the traditional relationship between researchers/academics and communities where communities are seen and treated as passive objects in or on which the research process is undertaken

Research for Communities–this is a common terminology particularly in a bureaucratic or “developmental” context which refers to research that is done by outsiders but which (nominally or otherwise) is presented as under the control of or in the interests of the local community

Research with Communities–this is the circumstance, covering most of the cases described in this special issue, where communities are engaged with as research “partners” with the researcher.  A close examination of the papers in this issue will provide a good understanding and introduction to many of the issues and dilemmas which arise in the course of attempting such relationships.

Research by Communities–this is often the desired goal for those concerned with community-based research, that is where the community itself undertakes the research (or at least significant elements of it)  with the researcher providing assistance and support as and where this may be required by the community.

In this overall context and in light of some of the issues emerging from the current escalating economic crises and the “occupy” movement, I believe it might useful to add a 5th category to this hierarchy. This layer would be “Research by Communities towards self-empowerment”.

Much if not most “community-based research” is research done in response to an external requirement or stimulus–a community organization doing a donor-funded evaluation of a local program, a community doing a local needs assessment or resource inventory, and so on.  These types of research are of course valuable and useful in themselves including for building community capacity–skills and confidence.  They do however, for the most part, lack the broad means for placing the results of the research or perhaps more importantly designing the research itself in a framework which would allow the community to understand the broader social, economic, political, historical and/or cultural context(s) in which the community (and the particular research initiative) finds itself. A resource inventory that doesn’t look at how the local community accesses (or is restricted in its access to) larger social and economic resources including for education and health care for example, or a program evaluation that doesn’t look at historical factors in providing the context for program success or failure (or perhaps most important overall program conceptualization and design) is providing a severely restricted base for self-understanding on the part of the community.

It is only through a critical examination of the broader context in which the community finds itself (and including such things as externally funded projects and programs) that the community can achieve the degree of self-understanding sufficient for it to undertake effective action both in the context of specific initiatives and in larger environments. Only in this larger sense would it become possible to design and evaluate strategies for self-development which, by recognizing the range of forces and interests within which the community is enclosed, would allow for some possibility of successful implementation at the community level and the broad achievement of the goals for implementation and collaborative action. It is through providing support in this latter relationship that the researcher/academic becomes not simply a source of “technical” support to the community but through the contribution of their analytical skills that the most dynamic and powerful relationships can be developed.

To my mind, it is this latter form of relationship which could and should be the ideal for Community Informatics researchers particularly at this time of overwhelming financial crisis in so many parts of the developed world and particularly since the burden of responding to and working one’s way out of these crises are being foisted onto the backs of largely blameless grassroots communities.  Helping communities to understand these contexts and to explore alternative technology (and otherwise) enabled strategies to respond would seem at this juncture in history to be the highest possible calling for researchers of all kinds and including those working within the framework of Community Informatics.

The Journal of Community Informatics

Special Issue: Research in Action: Linking Communities and Universities

The Table of Contents

Editorial
——–
Evolving Relationships: Universities, Researchers and Communities
Michael Gurstein

Research in Action for Community Informatics: A matter for conversation
Matthew Allen,    Marcus Foth

Articles
——–
Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities: Imagining The Michigan State University Israelite Samaritan Collection as the Foundation for a Thriving Social Network
Jim Ridolfo,    William Hart-Davidson,    Michael McLeod

Visions, Participation and Engagement in New Community Information Infrastructures
John M Carroll,    Michael A. Horning,    Blaine Hoffman,    Craig H Ganoe,    Harold
R. Robinson,    Mary Beth Rosson

Research informing practice: Toward effective engagement in community ICT in New Zealand
Barbara Craig,    Jocelyn E. Williams

Community-based learning: A model for higher education and community partnerships
Peter Day

DigiPopEd: Popular Education and Digital Culture
Dan O’Reilly-Rowe

Conducting ICT Research in Community Networks: Reflections from a Long Term Study of the European Social Forum
Saqib Saeed,    Markus Rohde,    Volker Wulf

Towards Participatory Action Design Research: Adapting Action Research and Design Science Research Methods for Urban Informatics
Mark Bilandzic,    John Venable

Participant-Making: bridging the gulf between community knowledge and academic research
Ann Light,    Paul Egglestone,    Tom Wakeford,    Jon Rogers

Notes from the field
——–
Networking for Communications Challenged Communities: Report from a European project targeting conditions of poor or lacking ICT coverage
Maria Kristina Udén

This could also be placed in the context that (as someone mentioned at the conference) 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 and perhaps more tellingly, the major applications for mobiles in Sub-Saharan Africa seem to be premised on the likelihood that those for whom the application was being designed would not have enough money to actually pay for the connectivity costs of whatever information/services was being touted.

I should also mention here that my somewhat jaded question was in part the result of again hearing those energetically espousing the virtues of mobile (over for example, fixed Internet access through ahem… Telecentres) by pointing to the exact same applications that I was pointed to some 3 or 4 years ago when mobiles were still in their infancy i.e. providing up-to-date market information to farmers and providing (mostly) safe sex reminders to teenagers.

Both these applications are of course, worthy in themselves and significant if the (as yet to my knowledge, not undertaken impact/evaluation assessments) prove positive however, one would have hoped after all the hype and expenditures (and more or less total diversion of ICT for Development resources in that direction) there might be other additional significant applications that could be pointed to.

So I took my hesitations and provocative blogpost title to lunch with some colleagues here in Maputo (where I am at the moment) with very long and deep experience with development and ICTs in rural Southern Africa.  The discussion went back and forth but then a colleague drew a distinction between mobile communications and mobile applications (apps).  What they pointed out to me in example after example was the profound significance that having low cost access to communications was having on the well being of people (and in this instance particularly women). And of course, in the rural African context this necessarily means mobiles because of the total lack of alternative infrastructure .

From being able to make contact with a migrant worker spouse, to knowing that someone could be easily summoned in the event of an emergency (including the police), to being able to determine if supplies to support home crafts were available in the shop several kilometres away without having to spend the day walking to the town only to find that what was required was out of stock–the effect of (finally) having the telecommunications access that most of the rest of us have taken for granted for all of our lives was truly beneficial and even transformative of life in rural Africa.

My colleagues went on to talk about the “shiny apps” which is where I had started the conversation. They more or less dismissed these as being irrelevant, at least in the case of Mozambique which is where their experience was, given the relatively high cost of mobiles that could handle the apps we were talking about and similarly the very high communications costs which would be required in most cases to take advantage of these services.

So, we answered my question–

No! mobiles aren’t completely a capitalist plot to keep the poor poor at least for simple low cost person to person communications, but the jury is still out on answering the question for all the shiny M4D (Mobile for Development) apps that seem to be so attractive these days to development funders and the development-erati.

Castells and Wellman and his colleagues have argued that the Digital or Information Society (or in their term the “networked society”) results in social relationships characterized by what they call “networked individualism”

…It is the move from densely-knit and tightly-bounded groups to sparsely-knit and loosely-bounded networks. 

Each person is a switchboard, between ties and networks. People remain connected, but as individuals, rather than being rooted in the home bases of work unit and household. Each person operates a separate personal community network, and switches rapidly among multiple sub-networks. 

For them, the organic and multi-dimensional relationships of communities are being transformed into narrow digitally-enabled, highly individualized, networked relationships; perhaps most widely recognizable as Facebook “friend”-ings accompanied by Facebook “like”-ings as a possible substitute for shared community values and norms. Regrettably their analysis nowhere points out how these changes reduce the capacity for individuals to protect themselves from the on-going encroachments of an impersonal neo-liberal marketplace and particularly how it undermines the possibility of solidarity which in the past has proven to be the most effective basis for effective resistance.

According to Wellman and his colleagues there is a parallel transformation in the political sphere with

civic involvement … increasingly … taking the form of e-citizenship, networked rather than group-based, hidden indoors rather than visibly outdoors.

and

This move to networked societies has profound implications for how people mobilize and how people and governments relate to each other …  But such e-citizenship also facilitates, and to some extent reinforces, mass society, with the individual in direct relationship with the state without the intermediary of local and even central groups. … the turn away from solidary, local, hierarchical groups and towards fragmented, partial, heavily-communicating social networks.  

Certainly politics in the Information Society seems to have taken the shape prescribed for it by the marketplace—fragmented, concerned with short-term individualized interest maximization, personality-obsessed media saturation and so on. These changes in turn have been propelled by the forces of technology and the breakdown of established employment structures, education patterns, industry-based physical communities, even family and friendship ties under the avalanche of neo-liberal induced corporate and governmental restructuring, outsourcing, downsizing and so on.

Elsewhere I have critiqued this position as one that is profoundly pessimistic and depoliticizing and that it ignored the possibilities for community-based ICT-enabled resistance arising within the Information Society. I pointed out that while applications such as Facebook manifested these types of alienated and alienating individualized relationships (where individuals interacted with each other as fragmented and depersonalized “profiles” linked through these social media); I also suggested that such social frameworks could and would be countered through community informatics – digitally enabled communities networked both internally (as community networks) and externally (as networked communities).

It is not I think an accident that the Occupy Movement overall is characterized by processes of community formation enabled by Information and Communications Technologies both locally – site by site – and as a movement wide, mega-community rhyzomatically linking the individual sites electronically and through shared values.  Tis emergent resistance is a result of the fusion of the local and global – interacting and being enabled both by face-to-face connections and electronic media – Facebook and Twitter certainly, but perhaps most significantly through technologies of presence in distance such as skype, online chat and streaming video.

What can be seen in individual sites are communities being formed – the articulation of common core values; the emergence of behavioral norms governing conduct within the community and between the community and its external environment; and the creation of systems for knowledge gathering, opinion sharing, decision-making and boundary setting; among others.

These emergent communities are internally networked – linking individuals via mobile phone, iPads, netbooks etc. to each other and into broader personal networks which aren’t permanent parts of the sites but which weave in and out following the vagaries of personal schedules and inclinations.  As well, the individual sites are directly and more or less continuously digitally networked into other sites and sympathizers both locally and globally allowing for both physical absence and virtual presence.

For the Occupy-ers there is a very strong emphasis on both place and continuity.  Rather than (as for previous such movements) focusing on individual events such as demonstrations is on the continuing occupation of a focal point of territory – a site.  Individuals can thus find and integrate themselves into the evolving Occupy community allowing for very many individuals to come and go, achieving through slectronic means some degree of identification with the movement while still living their daily lives.

This focusing on the physical presence of a site is a significant step beyond the virtuality and externally imposed structuring of the set of digital connections of social media(ted) networks e.g. Facebook and allows for a face to face connection to support and deepen involvement with the overall movement. Thus the virtual connections (the “networked individualism” of a Facebook or an email connection) is superseded or even transformed into a more organic and deeper connection of shared values and norms through physical interaction at the site.  This transformed connection can then be more easily maintained and where necessary mobilized through the much shallower and more fragile but continuous and distance-spanning technical capacities of electronic networks and social media.

A couple of other elements might be noted. Rather than focusing on specific events or demonstrations which are transient and ephemeral, the occupation of a specific site requires the creation of a variety of structures of internal management and governance all of which are the on-going elements of a community – food provision, waste management, security, education, governance and decision making, external relations/diplomacy, even in Vancouver – a lending library. All these are as necessary for a continuous occupation as they are for any other community. Notably one of the constant themes of the discussions and the placards is this process of community creation/recreation – often as in opposition to the imposed alienation of the contractual relations of work or formal education which participants experience as characterizing life in the modern era – a deft fusion of means and ends.

Another effect is the internal emphasis on continuity and even permanency.  Thus the communities have the time, even the leisure to work through their internal processes in a relatively unhurried manner without the pressure of fast approaching crucial events. This allows the sites to take their time to be more democratic, inclusive and tolerant – allowing for broader group collaborative norms to hold sway while reducing the pressure for rapid (and thus almost inevitably) top-down decision making.  This overall has the effect of preventing the emergence of a leadership cadre whose function is to move events along at a pace determined not by internal processes but rather by external exigencies.

Facebook or Twitter in this context become tools for organizing and making connections rather than being fundamental infrastructures of linkage and networks/networking as many have suggested (incorrectly I believe) underlay the events in Tunisia and Egypt. But importantly the social media create initial linkages towards community relationships. Once face to face connections have been established the social media remain useful for maintaining connections/networks beyond physical presence allowing vast numbers to remain “attached” even though the presence is mostly virtual but who nevertheless are available to participate as might be necessary or possible as events unfold.

These developments are perhaps the next step “up from Facebook”—integrating and using the social media tools that Facebook and the like provide but as elements in the re-construction of normative communities within urban environments and most importantly perhaps as a foundation for broader social action and transformation.  The characteristic of place-based communities as resilient and persistent locales for education and nurturing become dynamic opportunities for the recreation of personalities not as fragmented profiles but as whole beings linked both organically and technologically with their fellows as well as into the larger world and most importantly being able to work outwards from the strength that such communities provide in a process of remaking and refiguring the world in their image.

Precisely what this emergent future might look like is not clear. But that this process has unquestionably begun, that it is globally dispersed but rhyzomatically linked, and that there is the rise of community as a step beyond networked individualism and as the basis for resistance and ultimately transformation in the corporate structures and exploitative processes of a neo-liberal dominated society now appears possible. And overall there is the need to recognize that the Information Society is not condemned to be a place of alienation, fragmentation, distancing and powerlessness but rather a more democratic and economically and socially egalitarian society can be constructed on a foundation of digitally enabled and empowered communities.

I attended along with a diverse group of academic and government economists, professional national statisticians, heavy hitting business consultants (McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group who provided a paper which was used as background), and a few others with areas of specific interest (think canaries in the coal mine) in how the Internet is (or in many cases is not) being measured in national economic statistics. I was there because exceptionally the OECD has now established a committee in the Information and Communications Technology sector giving Civil Society the opportunity to participate in “expert” discussions alongside similar committees representing business and labour.

This isn’t an area that I have paid a lot of attention to in the past and quite honestly as someone with a background in Sociology and Philosophy rather than Economics I’ve spent considerable energy in avoiding these kinds of largely theoretical and overwhelmingly statistical discussions. However, in preparation for this event I did some rummaging around on the net, precipitated some interesting discussions on selected professional e-lists and interacted with various colleagues and friends.

What I got out of this background reading and discussion were a few somewhat disconnected observations—

First, it appears that there is a quite significant hole in the National Accounting (and thus the GDP statistics) around Internet related activities since most of this accounting is concerned with measuring the production and distribution of tangible products and the associated services. For the most part the available numbers don’t include many Internet (or “social capital” e.g. in health and education) related activities as they are linked to intangible outputs. The significance of not including social capital components in the GDP has been widely discussed elsewhere. The significance (and potential remediation) of the absence of much of the Internet related activities was the subject of the workshop.

Second, I was reminded that there had been a series of critiques of GDP statistics from Civil Society (CS) over the last few years—each associated with a CS “movements—the Woman’s Movement and the absence of measurement of “women’s (and particularly domestic) work”; the Environmental Movement and the absence of the longer term and environmental costs of the production of the goods that the GDP so blithely counts as a measure of national economic well-being; and most recently with the Sustainability Movement, and the absence of measures reflective of the longer term negative effects/costs of resource depletion and environmental degradation. What I didn’t see anywhere apart from the background discussions to the OECD workshop itself were critiques reflecting issues related to the Internet or ICTs.

The third thing that I came to realize both prior to and even more strongly during the OECD event was that the implications of the limitations in the Internet accounting went beyond a simple technical glitch and had potentially quite profound implications from a national policy and particularly a CS and community based development perspective. The possible distortions in economic measurement arising from the absence of Internet associated numbers in the SNA (there may be some $750 BILLION a year in “value’ being generated by Internet based search alone!) lead to the very real possibility that macro-economic analysis and related policy making may be operating on the basis of inadequate and even fallacious assumptions.

But 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. Thus for example, the millions of hours of labour contributed to Wikipedia, or to the development of Free or Open Source software, or to providing support for public Internet access and training is not included as a net contribution or benefit to the economy (as measured through the GDP). Rather, this is measured as a negative effect since, as some would argue, those who are making this contribution could be using their time and talents in more “productive” (and “economically measurable”) activities. Thus for example, a region or country that chooses to go with free or open source software as the basis for its in-school computing is not only “not contributing to ‘economic well being’” it is “statistically” a “cost” to the economy since it is not allowing for expenditures on, for example, suites of Microsoft products.

All of this might be dismissed quite reasonably as economic/statistical folderol except that so much of economic policy and particularly by politicians in their assessment of relative well-being is based on these kinds of measurements and particularly the GDP tables. A country which chose to put all of its resources and purchasing power into open source p2p ICT efforts would, from an economic “growth” (as measured by conventional statistics perspective), be shooting itself in the foot and potentially causing a significant reduction in its GDP!

In practical terms there is a failure to measure or otherwise account for the vast voluntary not for profit (civil society and community) contribution to the development and growth of the Internet. Those activities, features and contents of the Internet which are most widely used and useful–Wikipedia, FAQ’s, Open Office and other free and open source software, as well as the almost overwhelming abundance of freely provided texts, documents, images and sounds which now constitute an enormous global commons and freely and widely accessible patrimony; is not accounted for and the result is to give a totally misleading picture of how the Internet developed, the overall contribution it is making (the “value it is creating”) and the economic and other significance of this to the actors involved and to the overall well-being of humanity.

One effect among many of this distortion is that there appears to have been no systematic attention paid to the relationship of the activities and growth of voluntary contributions to the Internet and the volume, range and depth of Internet activity, digital literacy and economic value being derived from the use of the Internet. Thus for example, while anecdotally the greater the voluntary activity around the Internet in a country the greater the volume and use of the Internet; there would appear to be little or no data in this area and no available means of systematically undertaking such analyses in the absence of a series of expensive one-off research studies—and certainly there is no way based on available national statistics to make this argument to politicians or policy makers who might benefit from such an insight.

Thus for example, an identified association (for example in OECD countries) between voluntary Internet involvement and overall digital literacy might suggest to policy makers (for example in Less Developed Countries) that one way to increase Internet use and activity in a specific country or region might be through encouragement and even incentives towards voluntary participation and contribution to the various elements of Internet activity. However, in the absence of data on voluntary Internet contributions this would be highly unlikely to come forward in policy discussions.

Those things that are not measured are not given “value”—either in formal and official terms as well as in more subtle and informal ways—they are not seen as having worth, at least when compared with those things that are being measured such as for profit software packages and services. Thus the millions upon millions of hours contributed by the technically proficient, those motivated by the driving force of intellectual curiousity and those simply with a motivation to contribute to public well-being through contributing to the development of the Internet are not assessed as “having value”. What should be seen as a triumph of civil society and of freely associated communities both physical and virtual – the building and maintenance of large parts of the infrastructure and operating elements of the Internet and many of its most significant and enduring outputs are devalued as compared to the activities of those whose motivation is for example, pure self-interest or even greed.

The failure to honour and give value to those who freely contributed and continue to contribute to the building of the Internet and its use in support of the public good—the coders, the system architects, the hackers, those spending hours training and supporting their fellow citizens in becoming computer literate, those contributing their thoughts and images to the massive and accelerating pools of freely accessible knowledge and understanding—means that those who are coming up, the young, those just getting on-board, those in Less Developed Countries on the wrong side of the Digital Divide aren’t provided with a clear picture of what has gone before and what is achievable outside of for profit software, the translation of the free contributions of the public into marketable packages for advertisers, the marketing of electronic communities and so on.

When I asked those at the workshop closest to the design of these measurement processes—why there were no procedures in place to measure the voluntary—civil society and community—contribution to the Internet, the answer was a simple—“it’s too difficult”. What they meant was that measurement starts with those things that are easy to measure, but unfortunately as is well known, in practice it stops there as well.

The effect of this of course, is to overall impoverish and diminish the public sphere. This should give us all motivation to insist that account be taken, and measurements, even if partial and inexact, be undertaken of the overwhelming output of support for the public good which the Internet represents.

As an aside it might be worthwhile as a thought experiment to ponder what the Internet and contemporary society/economy would look like in the absence of the the unmeasured and thus unvalued contributions.

I would be interested in examples of the ways in which the absence of measurement of the voluntary contributions to the Internet are having negative and impoverishing effects…

The special issue editors, Suely Fragoso and Gilda Olinto in their introduction to the issue have provided a very useful introduction to the range of issues that are of interest from a broad CI perspective but there are a few other items which an outsider might identify which someone closer to the scene such as they might overlook.

A first observation and this comes out very strongly in the Fragoso and Olinto overview as well as a number of the papers is the strong recognition in Brazil of the social determinants of Internet use, and the need by government through policy and programmes to respond to this so as to not have the Internet exacerbate already significant social and economic divisions.  As a Less Developed Country rapidly moving to becoming a middle income country, a regional power, and a member of a global group of similar regional middle income powers Brazil very well recognizes the drag that significant digital inequality can present to its aspirations for development and equally the opportunities that are available as these inequalities are being addressed.

There is a clear recognition on the part of the national and even state governments in Brazil that responding to digital inequality is a responsibility of the State and the result has been the assignment of considerable public resources to responding including through the range of programs and initiatives that Suely and Gilda and others have noted in their papers. From the papers in this issue it is clear that the governments of Brazil are making extraordinary efforts to broaden the base of Internet access and use.  In addition, again from the information presented in this issue the efforts towards digital inclusion are being done with a considerable measure of creativity and imagination reflecting in considerable degree Brazils unique multi-ethnic and multi-cultural heritage and building on this through linking Internet access and use to cultural production particularly in music but also in graphics and the visual arts.

Regrettably most of these initiatives are little known outside of Brazil or beyond Latin America or others in the Portuguese speaking world and it is one intention of this special issue to help in a small way to overcome these gaps.

One additional observation comes from a closer reading of the articles in this issue and that is the close connections between the digital inclusion efforts and programmes and Brazils long and effective experience with community based processes and particularly community based education.  Brazil has contributed a very great deal to the practice but especially and notably the theory of community based initiatives and community development overall and it is of special interest and with some excitement that I note that this issue is making a very strong set of conceptual and theoretical connections between this tradition most notably through the work of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.

For me this was an unexpected discovery and I have been particularly delighted to see the ways in which this community-based approach to education and especially literacy education is being applied to processes of digital inclusion in various regions of Brazil and with various of the more marginalized populations.  As well, and of particular note is the way in which the theorizing in this area of the observed processes and emergent formations of community development fits so directly into my understanding of an emerging community informatics theory while deepening and extending these somewhat tentative and still partial developments.

Community Informatics for many is a linking of the processes of community development with the content, affordances and historical and technological dynamics of Information and Communications Technologies. In the English speaking context, and particularly through work coming from Information Sciences and Science and Technology Studies there has been considerable advance in understanding and to a degree in conceptualizing the processes of technology change and the ways in which technology and particularly the Internet provides opportunities to communities and individuals for advancement and change.  We now know quite a lot about networking, about management at a distance, about identity in a digital environment to point to only a few. However, from a CI perspective there has been much less theorizing and a much shallower pool of conceptualization to draw upon when one is looking at the community development side of the CI equation. What are the processes and dynamics which can be enabled at the community level which in turn can result in the absorption and effective utilization of ICTs.

The links to the work conceptualizing community development and community processes in Brazil goes some way, I believe towards providing a deepening of understanding of the dynamics of communities and through certain of the articles in this special issue we begin to see examples in practice of how these conceptualizations can inform CI practice as well. While only two of the articles in this issue (Alvear et al and Maia et al) point specifically to Freire as influences, several of the other articles clearly are linked into a similar set of concerns linking technology to processes of community enablement, recognizing community enablement and technology training and development as a process of coming into a position of self recognition and understanding, linking education into processes of the creation of a self-understanding of economic and social contexts, and overall a strong sense that in community development including for technology skills and understanding can be most effective when understood as an emergent process of communities and individuals coming into self-awareness. In this external formal  community supports have to be seen and introduced simply as tools and enablers of these processes but as not the fundamental structures by means of which these processes occur.

This linking of community process, emergent self-awareness, self and community empowerment, with ICTs particularly for marginalized populations is at the very core of  a community informatics and thus this issue and the practice of community informatics in Brazil has much to teach all of those with an interest in or activities to support Community Informatics anywhere in the world.

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The Journal of Community Informatics has just published its latest issue at
http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej. We invite you to review the Table of
Contents here and then visit our web site to review articles and items of
interest.

Thanks for the continuing interest in our work,
Special issue Editors: Suely Fragoso and Gilda Olinto
Editor in Chief: Michael Gurstein
Journal of Community Informatics, Centre for Community Informatics Research,
Development and Training, Vancouver CANADA Phone 604-602-0624 Fax
604-602-0624 gurstein@gmail.com

The

Journal of Community Informatics
Special Double Issue: The Internet and Community Informatics in Brazil Table
of Contents http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/issue/view/29

_____________________________

Editorial

Points of View

Articles

Reports

___________________________________________

The Journal of Community Informatics http://www.ci-journal.net

One of the basic understandings of the Philosophy/Sociology of Science is that we all tend to reduce our understanding of new phenomena down to a mode which is intelligible within our existing framework of understanding/knowledge. When it is no longer possible to do this then a new framework (paradigm) comes haltingly forward that allows us to explain those phenomena that remain inexplicable–incommensurable–with the attempts at imposing the existing framework and a new framework/paradigm of understanding is born and very soon becomes the new orthodoxy and in turn becomes “that of which it is impossible to consider an alternative”.

Among the core elements of these conceptual frameworks is the various systems of standards/definitions/measurements that allow us to order and “manage” our processes of knowing and thus our actions in the world. In the economics (and thus to a considerable degree the policy) world one of the basic frameworks is the SNA–the System of National Accounts which presents a means for a consolidated measurement at the national level (and thus comparative at the global level) of “all significant economic activity”.

Much of current economic policy nationally (and globally) (within the competitive market/neo-liberal policy environment) is founded on/driven by these measures as outputted as GDP/GNP etc. Various waves of civil society interventions have subjected these measurement procedures/strategies to what might be called “paradigmatic” critiques–the consumer’s movement critiqued the exclusive focus on production (and the absence of measurements concerned with consumption/consuming); the environmental movement critiqued on the basis of the absence of measures reflecting the lifecycle costs of goods and including impacts on the environment from resource depletion and contributions to environmental degradation and change); the women’s movement critiqued on the basis of a failure to include measures reflecting women’s contribution to domestic work; and as well there have been a number of critiques/alternatives proposed along the lines of the GPI–General Progress Index, and the recently widely noted “Happiness Index“–these latter being presented as more meaningful and significant from a “sustainability” policy perspective.

As well, the SNA has a very strong bias away from the measurement of “social capital” related activities (and towards the measurement of the production of physical goods). In many respects this area is perhaps the most damaging from the perspective of Less Developed Countries and the poor and marginalized in Developed countries since it tends to privilege (and give emphasis to) the production of consumer goods (and public policies supportive of this production) over for example, public investments in social capital related activities such as education, health and social support.)

I’m wondering in this context whether there are areas or issues concerning measurement and indices specifically associated with the Internet that would be of particular interest to Civil Society(CS) that might (or might not) be of interest from the perspective of a “critique” of the SNA and broad measures such as the GDP–parallel to the critiques related to the measurement of “women’s work” and “environmental costing” for example?

The obvious measurement(s) are of course related to the “digital divide” — those who have access and (I would add) the capability of using the Internet and those who do not. But I’m also thinking that there may be an additional set of arguments that quite significantly link back to the earlier critiques and those have to do with the linkage of the Internet with social capital.

Thus, it might be possible (and reasonable) to argue that the enhancement of social capital (internetworking, communication at a distance, speeding up of communications etc.etc.) while not unique to the Internet is so much accelerated and intensified by the Internet that “quantity” becomes “quality” that is, the Internet adds so much to these elements of social capital (and is so much a product of previous investments in social capital) that:

1. it would be impossible realistically to “measure” the economic impact of the Internet without including measurements of the intensification of social capital–social capital is of the very “essence” of the impact (social, economic, cultural) of the Internet that one is trying to measure (“the Internet changes everything” effect). The Internet fundamentally changes the nature of economic (and of course other) relations and activities and the intensification of social capital being of the very essence of the Internet means that this intensification of social capital must similarly be accounted for in one’s measurements associated with the SNA.

2. the Internet through its intensification of social capital is transformative (and not simply summative) of the overall economy, economic relations, transactions, production, distribution and consumption; such that it is impossible to describe let alone measure the various components of the SNA without including various of the Internet (and thus social capital) related impacts in any assessment and thus measurement of each of these components (the “Walmart effect“). Thus, for example, a company such as Walmart would not be possible without the affordances provided by telecommunications/the Internet and hence any measurement including Walmart as a component needs to include measures reflecting this relationship.

The value of such an argument from a civil society perspective I think, is that it links overall economic activity (GDP) with the Internet, and links the Internet with the production of social capital which in turn becomes something of a backdoor way of arguing that investment in ICT (and our understanding and measurement of the benefits of the Internet) should be as much focused on education, health, and social support as it is on bits and bytes–hardware and software–something I’m assuming CS all agrees with but also something which is not taken as a necessary given by those folks managing current economic policies.

He comments on the increasing shift of governments to making agricultural information available primarily in electronic form via the web or through mobile access. This is inevitably linked to declining support for the provision of agricultural information through the more traditional face to face connections of agricultural extension:

The so called “food price explosion” and consequent crises of hunger and poverty especially for the world’s poor is a classical case of market failure primarily due to lack of symmetry of information access and ability to effectively use it within various agricultural actors, especially small producers, organized major market intermediaries, the multinational corporates, financial institutions etc and the governments.

Current information models for agriculture, ranging from those contributing to production and to marketing and consumption, especially for resource poor small holder producers who make almost 80 per cent of all farmers and 60-65 per cent of the global poor are extremely weak. Barring a few highlighted pilot projects in providing these poor communities the information they need for their livelihoods, there is a growing vacuum in enabling information access and its effective use in these communities.

The public and civil sectors have and are withdrawing from providing information, even when they know that agricultural is ever increasingly becoming knowledge intensive, while governments liberalize domestic trade regimes removing even the most minimal protection especially in procurement of commodities and with it also availability of information to these farmers. With trade liberalization and procurement being shifted through policies from government and public sector to the private sector alongside promoting complex market chains, the stage is being set for a disaster of extreme hunger and poverty especially in rural areas of economically developing countries. The main cause is that the private sector is selective, because of its interests, in providing information to its clients at both ends, producers and consumers and the public sector cannot be bothered and does not care.

It is also concerning that almost all information in resource poor small holder agriculture is generated by the agricultural communities themselves but there is hardly any investment made to collate, aggregate and amalgamate and disseminate the information through public, open and transparent means. There is almost a conspiracy by governments to promote asymmetry in information access and use by resource poor agricultural communities across the world and more so in economically developing countries. Very few in the public and civil society understand that information is a very critical resource for agriculture and food production even among very small farmers who mainly produce only for themselves to feed their families and bring little (which is highly precious to these producers) to the market.

The potential of new information and communications technologies, not only mobile computing and cell phones but modeling, simulation, GIS based spatial information, knowledge based decision support systems on data based on clouds and using local small devices when used can do a lot to change these information asymmetries. However, hurdles exist in policies, rules, regulations, investment, capacities etc to reduce them.

To add to these very important comments… There is currently an overwhelming pre-occupation of donors and those concerned with ICTs and development with “mobiles for development” that is with additional means for the infrastructure for “accessing” information. However, there would appear to be little or no related concern (or resources) for ensuring that the pre-conditions for ensuring the effective use of this information particularly by rural small-holders—that the information to overwhelmingly non- or only marginally literate end users is in the multiple languages of the end users, is accessible on devices available to end users a, provides sufficient information context to be usable by end user, is structured in such a way as to enable necessary collaborative action by small-holders and so on.

In the absence of provision in these areas (or at least clear evidence that such is not required) then these potentially very exciting innovations in information provision could end up simply being additional instances of empowering the already (information and technology) empowered. There is a risk, without evidence it is hard to determine how great, that the truly astounding statistics concerning the uptake and very widespread distribution of mobile communications will be used as a surrogate for assuming that all mobile users are equally capable of making effective use of the variety of applications including in this instance applications providing information support for agriculture.

Equally there is the risk associated with the multiple service providers enabled by mobiles that the agricultural information being provided – in many cases either sponsored by or directly provided by providers of agricultural products will be inappropriate to small holder requirements meanwhile with their superior financial resources crowding out not for profit and less self-interested sources of information.

eWeek.com introduces the development as follows:

The U.S. Department of has launched a set of new online tools for software developers to tap into DOL data for use in applications.

The DOL’s new first-of-its-kind federal Website is aimed at making it easier for software developers to incorporate Labor Department data into online and mobile applications. The site features published APIs (application program interfaces) and SDKs (software development kits) that enable developers to remotely access data collected by the department.

The tools, available at http://developer.dol.gov, are part of the Labor Department’s ongoing efforts to increase transparency, participation and collaboration through the administration’s Open Government Initiative, Labor Department officials said.

The eWeek site goes on to quote DoL as follows:

“While a handful of other federal agencies are making data available through one or more APIs, the inclusion of SDKs is a federal first,” said Deputy Secretary of Labor Seth Harris, in a statement. “By doing so, we’re lowering the technical barriers and providing developers of all experience levels the opportunity to turn good ideas into powerful software applications for the American public.”

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. (If this were happening a couple of months from now I’ld even try to claim credit based on my suggestion that 10% of the investment in an Open Data initiative be assigned to ensuring a basis for broad opportunities for “effective data use” which this clearly seems to be. )

Also, following on from my earlier blogposts on the Data Divide and Open Government Data, Tracey Lauriault introduced herself to me and I discovered through her that there was a very active “community data movement (consortium”  and a new NGO (Community Data Canada) right under my nose here in Canada. Tracey has done an excellent but as yet unpublished report documenting some of this but I’ld like to point to two specific cases that she highlights, in advance and then I’ll at a later point, when Tracey’s paper is out, do a longer discussion.

The sites are EMIS — Espace Montréalais d’information sur la santé (in French) and Saskatoon’s CommunityView Collaboration. Both of these are designed to provide opportunities for active data use and some manipulation by the non-specialist end user.

The Saskatoon site particularly, provides effective (video based) training programs for the reasonably data literate user. Through these there is access to interactive maps and other data sets specifically of interest to those at the community level (primarily I would guess professionals like planners or social workers) interested in local level planning and particularly social planning.  Not surprisingly the site was developed by the local social planning council and is an extremely good model for how to start some of those local processes of data use.

The EMIS site is sponsored by the Province of Quebec and focuses primarily on health data.  This site probably provides more opportunities for “activist” use particularly around health and environmental issues but doesn’t seem as easy to manipulate or as visually user friendly. As well, there isn’t so far as I could see, any indication on the site as to how the site might actually be linking in practice with the broader potential user community in Quebec.

What is interesting about all three of these sites is that they are taking the issue of making their data available and usable by the non-professional end user very seriously and are putting significant resources in that direction. Tracey tells me that in fact there is something of a “community data movement” in Canada which has been around for a number of years (focusing particularly I believe, on maps and mapping). My plan is to start monitoring those developments more closely and hopefully start to bring about some sort of active linkage between the community informatics community and the community data communities as their interests and objectives seem to be converging at a fairly rapid rate.

One thing that all three sites seem to lack is an evident involvement by end users in the design of the data, the sites or the tools being presented through the sites.  It would be very interesting to, for example, work with a local anti-poverty or anti-homeless activist group (in the case of the Saskatoon site), health or environmental community (or activist) organizations in the case of the EMIS site, or labour or organizations of the unemployed (in the case of the DoL site) and have their input into the design of the site, the selection of the data being provided, the design and selection of the tools and so on. Any of this may have occurred on any of these sites but there isn’t, based on my casual review, any evidence that this has happened. My guess is that the result might have been even more user useful than what is there now, although in all three cases these are excellent beginnings.

One final observation based on a review of the above is that expecting governments to take Data Divide considerations into their planning should be much less costly and onerous than for example, engaging them in responding to Digital Divide issues.  Developing applications or application support software, community/grassroots oriented data access/use websites, non-professional oriented video training programs all go quite some way to overcoming the Data Divide while being very much cheaper and easier to accomplish than the quite significant infrastructure and site developments that have been the primary approach to resolving the Digital Divide in many regional and national environments.

I would be very pleased to get information on any other sites or strategies for responding to the “Data Divide” as others might come across these.

(I’ve covered a lot of this below in earlier blog posts and elsewhere but my intention in presenting this here in this form at this time is to raise and focus the discussion of a “Data Divide”particularly for Open Government Data now, when things are still somewhat in flux, and there is the real possibility of those most directly involved–data designers and government folks–paying some attention and intervening in a positive way.)

Researchers have extensively explored the range of social, economic, geographical and other barriers which underlie and to a considerable degree “explain” (cause) the Digital Divide.  My own contribution has been to argue that “access is not enough”, it is whether opportunities and pre-conditions are in place for the “effective use” of the technology particularly for those at the grassroots.

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”.

Thus the “open data” which was being argued for would not likely be accessible and usable to the groups and individuals with which Community Informatics has largely been concerned – the grassroots, the poor and marginalized, indigenous people, rural people and slum dwellers in Less Developed countries. It was/is hard to see, given the explanations, provided to date how these folks could use this data in any effective way to help them in responding to the opportunities for advance and social betterment which open data advocates have been indicating as the outcome of their efforts.

As I presented this uneasiness in public fora and through my blog it became additionally clear that many involved in “open data” saw their interests and activities being confined to making data ‘legally” and “technically” accessible — what happened to it after that was somebody else’s responsibility. And with this I partially agree. Ensuring the broadest opportunity for the use of (for example) Open (Government) Data (OGD) is a broad public responsibility which of course, is shared between public authorities and technical developers; with however, the technical developers having the responsibility (IMHO) to ensure that from their – technical – side no barriers are introduced (and technical barriers are removed) to allowing for the broadest possible public use of the data where they are undertaking their activities.

As I thought more actively on these issues I realized that while there were striking parallels between the Digital Divide and what I was rapidly coming to see as an associated “Data Divide” there were also very substantial and significant differences –notably while the Digital Divide deals with, for the most part “infrastructure” issues, the Data Divide is concerned with “content” issues.

As well, where a Digital Divide might exist for example, as a result of geographical or policy considerations and thus have uniform effects on all those on the wrong side of the “divide” whatever their socio-demographic situation; a Data Divide and particularly one of the most significant current components of the Open Data movement i.e. OGD, would have particularly damaging negative effects and result in particularly significant lost opportunities for the most vulnerable groups and individuals in society and globally. (I’ve discussed some examples here at length in a previous blogpost.)

The Data Divide thus would be the gap between those who have access to and are able to use Open (Government) Data and those who are not so enabled.

I have suggested elsewhere that there are seven layers/components through which a “Data Divide” (building on my similar analysis of the Digital Divide”) might be understood:

1. infrastructure—being on the wrong side of the “Digital Divide” and thus not having access to the basic infrastructure supporting the availability of OGD.

2. devices—OGD that is not universally accessible and device independent (that only runs on I-Phones for example)

3. software—“accessible” OGD that requires specialized technical software/training to become “usable”

4. content—OGD not designed for use by those with handicaps, non-English speakers, those with low levels of functional literacy for example

5.  interpretation/sense-making—OGD that is only accessible for use through a technical intermediary and/or is useful only if “interpreted” by a professional intermediary

6. advocacy—whether the OGD is in a form and context that is supportive for use in advocacy (or other purposes) on behalf of marginalized and other groups and individuals

7. governance—whether the OGD process includes representation from the broad public in its overall policy development and governance (not just lawyers, techies and public servants).

Intervening at this relatively early stage – whether by Open Data designers or through government (or other) policy and programmes (or most desirably both) –can help to avoid a Data Divide and preclude many of the negative effects (and relatively costly make up efforts) and lost opportunities associated with the Digital Divide.

My strong suggestion/hope would be that a minimum of 10% of expenditures on OGD would go to ensuring that structures of “data haves” and “data have nots’ was not being created as an outcome of OGD projects. Contributions to training for data use, for digital literacy, for disability oriented user interface design, to support advocacy based on OGD, for ensuring that OGD is not device dependent, to assist in participation in OGD governance and others would go some way in ensuring this outcome.