Michael Gurstein – Bottom Up (& Top Down) Towards Digital Transformation

(rapporteur: Ruth Grossman)

  interested in ICTs for community enablement and job creation
  info technology providing unique opportunities to explore capabilities pre-existing in communities
  community informatics aims at working with the community and community resources to identify how ICTs can be transformative
  creative online strategies and tools for collecting data, programme supervision, etc.
  interested in promoting decentralization of public employment to a given region; some projects successful, others fail in terms of effecting enduring sustainable change, despite stats that demonstrate success of individual projects
  linking projects on the ground to larger political process
  idea is to enable not only engagement but appropriation of ICTs for benefit of communities
  defining CI as enabling (empowering) ‘communities’ (which may be defined in many different ways) by means of information and communication technologies (ICTs)
  important to broaden and acknowledge base of stakeholders… CI is of equal interest to practitioners, researchers and policy makers
  what CI did (as a field) was to bring practitioners and funders into the equation… one of the foundational tenets of CI
  it is the confluence of funders (or policy makers) + researchers + practitioners that animates the CI arena
  examples of stakeholder interests/camps: 1) communities themselves (the local resources, the things that are there for the long term), 2) governments and private sector (who, aside from the types of resources they provide, also generally provide constraints that make things possible or impossible; and have a regulatory function), and 3) universities and researchers
  the gov’t stakeholders typically offer the “opportunity structures” that can be presented or transposed to community situations and then be performed or enacted by the communities themselves (ideally)
  nb: too many resources can be a bit of a trap; e.g dead-end investments or providing for communities rather than channelling resources effectively into local entrepreneurship
  CI argues for redirecting public funding into effective community-based initiatives; the money is there already and already being spent anyways, therefore this puts no additional strain on the public purse
  researchers remain important part of the CI approach since they are sometimes the ones who can ‘see over the horizon’; therefore researchers as catalysts
  model of ACCESS then ADOPTION then EFFECTIVE USE then APPLICATION then IMPLEMENTATION
  need to add in all elements necessary for effective use and sustainability and for social meaning; not enough to merely provide access
  telecentres represent probably largest ICT operation in world; a lot of technology has been designed around telecentres and around linking telecentres with mobile technology
  defines telecentres basically as computer centres in places that normally would not otherwise have access
  many telecentre programmes exist not only in Asia, Africa, etc. but Europe, UK, South America, as well (for example)
  also PIAPs (Public Internet Access Points)
  telecentres and PIAPs are top-down affairs; are the result of gov’t funding and policy decisions (this sometimes brings problems re sustainability, structural rigidity of programs that have been too narrowly designed, and delimited funding)
  versus the bottom-up aspect of community networks: although these too can have problems around continuity, they are essentially emergent and responsive to local issues in ways that top-down structures cannot be
  also bottom-up systems have social capital
  essence of CI = recognizing balance of relationships between top-down and bottom-up processes
  bottom-up also means mobilization of grassroots initiatives that support digital empowerment; integrating community processes with technology is what CI is all about
  in order to scale for digital transformation and empowerment, need both top-down and bottom-up processes to enable deployment of the funding and policy framework
  relationship between ICTs and mobile technologies begs new issues
  example of K-Net (Canadian remote aboriginal communities) who created own telephone network and maintains control over it since aboriginal communities in Canada have governance authority
  other e.g.’s such as E-Bario, RLabs
  important not to create stand-alone services, which are by definition unsustainable and tend to fail due to being unconnected in an integral way to communities they were meant to serve
  aim is to build effective and efficient service delivery to and within communities
  CI’s real value and power comes from enablement based in local resources and capacities
  only bottom-up community-based strategies work for community ICT success; so focus on community is the key thing
  must not (in the same breath) be overly pre-occupied with the technology per se (even though technology is obviously required for these undertakings)
  idea that networked individualism is essentially politically disempowering for social transformation; social transformation comes from collective/collaborative/organic connections between people
  culture and knowledge about ICTs has become almost universal over the last 15 years
  idea is to take community issues and translate these into broader development programmes and structured interventions
  best solutions and sustainable projects are based in and are dependent upon local resources and local initiatives (and are also able to be somewhat emergent)
  given that in many parts of the world having personal computers is unfeasible, argument is made that telecentres, for example, often become more important as public community spaces than as technological access points
  some efforts to blend cybercafés and public access points; desirability of integrating these into broader development of service delivery programmes
  most exciting current CI trend from an academic point of view has been the legitimization of CI as a disciplinary area in iSchools around the world; acknowledges the practice element of engagement as an essential part of the logical and long-term evolution of development strategies