After some 6 days of being unable to access or use my primary email address or account with gmail, as suddenly as it started the floodgates opened and I was once again able to communicate and feel in sync with the larger e-world of which I have been a part for the last almost two decades. (See also my earlier blogpost on this is Gmail Hell, Day 4: Dealing with the Borg (Or “Being Evil” Without Really Thinking About It)
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”.
But in looking at this array of attractive intellectual baubles I’m left with one nagging concern. Amidst all this media and networking and mobility what exactly will be the content of this “Twenty-first Century University as global learning network”? Where will the content come from, that will constitute the “learning” component of this learning network? How exactly will the promise implicit in this statement—“digital learning is increasingly recognized as an important part of development worldwide” be realized in fact, and by whom, and ultimately in whose interests?
In this, I think that the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia have access to skills and resources which were unavailable to earlier movements that is—the Internet, social networking, mobile telephony and perhaps most important, the experience and knowledge of how to use these in support of collective social ends.
Clearly to ensure that “open information” is not a series of “leaks” and ensuing scandals or becomes a form of information based cooptation and manipulation, those advocating for “open information” and those who are agreeable to providing it must provide a framing and contextualizing as effective use which goes much beyond anything provided by WikiLeaks in partnership with its press collaborators or beyond simply making various statistical runs or information files available to public users.
What the above analysis suggests is that for “open data” to have a meaningful and supportive impact on the poor and marginalized, direct intervention is required to ensure that elements currently absent in the local technology and social ecosystem are in fact, made available..
Regulators, policy makers, access suppliers in Developed Countries have a considerable pre-occupation with how to bridge “the last mile” i.e. the gap between the common carrier and the end user’s premises. Here in Hong Kong, where I have been for the last few days at a conference, the concern on the part of regulators, policy… [Read more…]
I think that there is a second issue to be addressed which is going beyond "open access" to that of "open use/usability". Giving LDC researchers access to the range of publications and research which are currently denied to them is a good thing to be supported but regrettably I don't see a lot of evidence that doing this would in fact, mean that the uses to which they as researchers would put the information would be very different from what those who currently have access do with the information. Hopefully it would be different, but regrettably and from both observation and experience researchers and academics in LDCs appear to be no more likely to be concerned with making “their” information useful to the potential lay end user audience than their counterparts in Developed Countries.
March 12, 2012
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