My experience as both an academic and a practitioner in two disciplines; Information Systems and ICT4D, has been that there’s very little interaction between practitioners and academics in either discipline. Perhaps this is typical of other areas and therefore it may be naïve and/or unrealistic to expect that there should be with WG9.4. But in the case of ICT4D this is a pity. There are many lines of enquiry that could be usefully explored by those who are equipped with the skills that academics possess and which could usefully inform practice towards ICT implementations that are more robust and effective in their pursuit of poverty reduction.
Generally, practitioners in ICT4D don’t attend academic conferences because they know there will be little by way of any practical take-aways that they can use. They don’t read academic journals for the same reason. Moreover, it seems rare to see any summarised form of the findings of academic research in the media channels that policy-makers and their advisers do read. The more serious media that such people tend to take notice of, such as The Economist or the Wall Street Journal, seem to conduct their own research and they nearly always come up rather superficial conclusions; like “telecentres are unsustainable” or “mobile phones have closed the digital divide” or “increasing the density of mobile phones boosts GDP.” It needs an academic approach to dig beneath these superficial generalizations to recapture the complexities and to help practitioners and policy makers come to the more nuanced conclusions that are closer to reality.
Possibly the most important area where academic research can contribute to practice is in the area of project evaluation and impact assessment. There are many aspects of orthodox development practice that do not lend themselves well to the application of ICTs to development problems. What often occurs is that the problem is shaped to suit the tools available for solving it, rather than the other way round. Evaluation is one area where this stands out as an inhibitor of learning within the practitioner community.
We should ask if the academic community is concerned that practitioners remain largely un-interested in their work. Perhaps they’re not; it’s clear that academics conduct research, attend conferences and publish their results in the leading journals in order to survive within their professional situations. There doesn’t seem to be a component of any sort of practitioner linking that would contribute seriously to this process. I remember MISQ used to have an “Executive Summary” in each edition, presumably as a way of linking its research to practice, although I couldn’t find any such thing on their web site after 10 minutes of hunting. In the closed-loop community of IS research there’s probably more effort goes into counting citations than reaching out to the IS professionals.
It seems a pity for the same to happen in ICT4D. The developing world academics that I work with seem to have a genuine concern for how their work can contribute towards their country’s progress. They are under less pressure to publish in leading journals and they have less access to resources for attending international conferences. Generally budgets for conducting research are miniscule anyway. The bi-lateral and multi-lateral donor organisations that have far greater access to funds tend to conduct their own research, ignoring the in-country academic resources that they could bring into their programmes and squandering the opportunity for learning that such involvement offers (in both directions).
So beyond the general question of the legitimacy of academic-practitioner links, what does this mean for WG9.4? Whilst others may disagree, I would argue that there are benefits to be had for both communities from closer links between the two. ICT4D practitioners need practical solutions to their pressing concerns, a few of which can be identified briefly here as; achieving sustainability; rolling out applications for mobile phones; scaling up from pilot projects to national programmes; conducting evaluations and impact assessments; promoting technology convergence and synergies; formulating pro-poor approaches; and devising demand-driven methods.
A cursory glance through the WG9.4 programmes since 1998 doesn’t reveal too many instances of these topics, which is an observation not a criticism, but for some researchers there is some satisfaction to be had from the knowledge that they are addressing real-world problems, so a mechanism for surfacing them could be of interest. For the practitioners, there’s the potential benefit of rigour and independence in their evaluation research enquiries, which is again not always to be found in the sort of practitioner studies that confuse correlation with causation and which often generate rather predictable outcomes when conducted by the project implementers.
Two particular aspects of WG9.4 present themselves in the context of fostering closer practitioner links. They are identity and outreach. The original remit of ‘social implications’ seems to have less clarity and to be less relevant than the current focus on ICT4D, which is emerging now by popular demand. Is WG9.4 doing ICT4D or is it just a sub-set of its realm? There are practitioners in ICT4D but I don’t know any working in the area of ‘social implications of computers.’ The name continues to reflect the early conceptualization of 9.4 which arose before ICTs were recognized as a tool for poverty reduction (viewing poverty here in its widest sense of social and economic inequality). It seems that the Group can no longer be regarded as a sub-branch of Information Systems, but whose members are now more likely to regard themselves as belonging to a branch of Development. In either case, the issue of links with practice remains; the only question is; which community of practitioners to connect with?
The current name of the Group is therefore an immediate inhibiter of potential ICT4D practitioner interest. So along with the name and the identity which it conveys, the Group may wish to re-consider its core mission if there is a desire to engage with ICT4D practitioners. If not, then there’s no such need. Some may shrink from the idea, given that there’s already an ICTD conference, but surely there’s enough room for more than one? There’s another potential identity problem here regarding the difference between ICT4D and ICTD (if there is one), which I’m not going to debate here, but it may be worth mentioning that the recent ICTD2010 conference in London was organized by the ICT4D Collective at Royal Holloway, University of London, and it aimed to provide a forum for those with interests in information and communication technologies in development practice (my emphasis).
The second aspect is outreach – to members and potential members. With today’s technology it’s easy to cultivate an on-line community with more-or-less continuous interaction. Whilst we have the Group email list, there are more effective tools for supporting an on-line community and which would encourage new members by being more open and inviting and clearer about the Group’s identity, purpose and activities and therefore more appealing to non-academics.
As a final point, I would like to raise another issue. I attend many conferences/workshops /seminars on ICT4D (although not 9.4 for, as a practitioner, the reasons mentioned), but usually I notice that there are no poor people in the room. In fact, the events take place in locations that poor people never visit. Why is this? Why should development issues be debated without any participation of those who are intended to benefit? There are gains to be had from forging links not only between academics and practitioners but also between them and the poor people who suffer from the problems that they are trying to solve.
Everybody benefits when this happens, and I have demonstrated how this can work with the eBario Knowledge Fair (eBKF). This is a multi-disciplinary biennial conference held in the remote indigenous village of Bario, Malaysia, in the central highlands of Borneo. eBario is a multi-award winning telecentre project that I began in 1998. We are setting up a community radio station there this year (Malaysia’s first). The first eBKF was held on 2007, the next one will be in November 2011. The event works because the community comes together with the pundits to discuss local (and wider) development issues. It’s an approach that 9.4 could consider in bringing academics closer to practice.
Roger Harris; Hong Kong; January 2011
Generally, practitioners in ICT4D don’t attend academic conferences because they know there will be little by way of any practical take-aways that they can use. They don’t read academic journals for the same reason. Moreover, it seems rare to see any summarised form of the findings of academic research in the media channels that policy-makers and their advisers do read. The more serious media that such people tend to take notice of, such as The Economist or the Wall Street Journal, seem to conduct their own research and they nearly always come up rather superficial conclusions; like “telecentres are unsustainable” or “mobile phones have closed the digital divide” or “increasing the density of mobile phones boosts GDP.” It needs an academic approach to dig beneath these superficial generalizations to recapture the complexities and to help practitioners and policy makers come to the more nuanced conclusions that are closer to reality.
Possibly the most important area where academic research can contribute to practice is in the area of project evaluation and impact assessment. There are many aspects of orthodox development practice that do not lend themselves well to the application of ICTs to development problems. What often occurs is that the problem is shaped to suit the tools available for solving it, rather than the other way round. Evaluation is one area where this stands out as an inhibitor of learning within the practitioner community.
We should ask if the academic community is concerned that practitioners remain largely un-interested in their work. Perhaps they’re not; it’s clear that academics conduct research, attend conferences and publish their results in the leading journals in order to survive within their professional situations. There doesn’t seem to be a component of any sort of practitioner linking that would contribute seriously to this process. I remember MISQ used to have an “Executive Summary” in each edition, presumably as a way of linking its research to practice, although I couldn’t find any such thing on their web site after 10 minutes of hunting. In the closed-loop community of IS research there’s probably more effort goes into counting citations than reaching out to the IS professionals.
It seems a pity for the same to happen in ICT4D. The developing world academics that I work with seem to have a genuine concern for how their work can contribute towards their country’s progress. They are under less pressure to publish in leading journals and they have less access to resources for attending international conferences. Generally budgets for conducting research are miniscule anyway. The bi-lateral and multi-lateral donor organisations that have far greater access to funds tend to conduct their own research, ignoring the in-country academic resources that they could bring into their programmes and squandering the opportunity for learning that such involvement offers (in both directions).
So beyond the general question of the legitimacy of academic-practitioner links, what does this mean for WG9.4? Whilst others may disagree, I would argue that there are benefits to be had for both communities from closer links between the two. ICT4D practitioners need practical solutions to their pressing concerns, a few of which can be identified briefly here as; achieving sustainability; rolling out applications for mobile phones; scaling up from pilot projects to national programmes; conducting evaluations and impact assessments; promoting technology convergence and synergies; formulating pro-poor approaches; and devising demand-driven methods.
A cursory glance through the WG9.4 programmes since 1998 doesn’t reveal too many instances of these topics, which is an observation not a criticism, but for some researchers there is some satisfaction to be had from the knowledge that they are addressing real-world problems, so a mechanism for surfacing them could be of interest. For the practitioners, there’s the potential benefit of rigour and independence in their evaluation research enquiries, which is again not always to be found in the sort of practitioner studies that confuse correlation with causation and which often generate rather predictable outcomes when conducted by the project implementers.
Two particular aspects of WG9.4 present themselves in the context of fostering closer practitioner links. They are identity and outreach. The original remit of ‘social implications’ seems to have less clarity and to be less relevant than the current focus on ICT4D, which is emerging now by popular demand. Is WG9.4 doing ICT4D or is it just a sub-set of its realm? There are practitioners in ICT4D but I don’t know any working in the area of ‘social implications of computers.’ The name continues to reflect the early conceptualization of 9.4 which arose before ICTs were recognized as a tool for poverty reduction (viewing poverty here in its widest sense of social and economic inequality). It seems that the Group can no longer be regarded as a sub-branch of Information Systems, but whose members are now more likely to regard themselves as belonging to a branch of Development. In either case, the issue of links with practice remains; the only question is; which community of practitioners to connect with?
The current name of the Group is therefore an immediate inhibiter of potential ICT4D practitioner interest. So along with the name and the identity which it conveys, the Group may wish to re-consider its core mission if there is a desire to engage with ICT4D practitioners. If not, then there’s no such need. Some may shrink from the idea, given that there’s already an ICTD conference, but surely there’s enough room for more than one? There’s another potential identity problem here regarding the difference between ICT4D and ICTD (if there is one), which I’m not going to debate here, but it may be worth mentioning that the recent ICTD2010 conference in London was organized by the ICT4D Collective at Royal Holloway, University of London, and it aimed to provide a forum for those with interests in information and communication technologies in development practice (my emphasis).
The second aspect is outreach – to members and potential members. With today’s technology it’s easy to cultivate an on-line community with more-or-less continuous interaction. Whilst we have the Group email list, there are more effective tools for supporting an on-line community and which would encourage new members by being more open and inviting and clearer about the Group’s identity, purpose and activities and therefore more appealing to non-academics.
As a final point, I would like to raise another issue. I attend many conferences/workshops /seminars on ICT4D (although not 9.4 for, as a practitioner, the reasons mentioned), but usually I notice that there are no poor people in the room. In fact, the events take place in locations that poor people never visit. Why is this? Why should development issues be debated without any participation of those who are intended to benefit? There are gains to be had from forging links not only between academics and practitioners but also between them and the poor people who suffer from the problems that they are trying to solve.
Everybody benefits when this happens, and I have demonstrated how this can work with the eBario Knowledge Fair (eBKF). This is a multi-disciplinary biennial conference held in the remote indigenous village of Bario, Malaysia, in the central highlands of Borneo. eBario is a multi-award winning telecentre project that I began in 1998. We are setting up a community radio station there this year (Malaysia’s first). The first eBKF was held on 2007, the next one will be in November 2011. The event works because the community comes together with the pundits to discuss local (and wider) development issues. It’s an approach that 9.4 could consider in bringing academics closer to practice.
Roger Harris; Hong Kong; January 2011
