Although there have been isolated attempts at counting individual public access ICT venues in specific countries (e.g., ITU Telecentre Global Portal and Observatório Nacional de Inclusão Digital), there has not been a concerted effort to capture data for multiple venue types across multiple countries. Thus, conversations about public access ICTs often occur in a vacuum, unrelated to two basic questions — how many of these venues exist and where precisely are they located? Our first research goal has therefore been to carry out an inventory of all public access venues in the project countries — Bangladesh, Chile, Lithuania, Brazil, and the Philippines. This will enable us to quantify the public access ICT phenomenon and thus put our subsequent research findings in an appropriate context.

Since we were trying to design an inventory data collection tool that would be usable in multiple countries, the effort required several months of collaboration amongst project members to reach agreement on issues such as what types of data to include in the inventory; definitions of telecenters, internet cafés and libraries; and how to account for unique features of public access ICT venues in different countries. For example, some people describe telecenters as  donor or publicly-funded computing venues that provide free access to computers, while others define telecenters by their mission, that is, whether they have social rather than economic goals.

It has taken about 12 months to complete this process and we will have four distinct outputs:

1. A taxonomy that provides a common language for categorizing public access venues across countries
2. A template for data collection with detailed instructions
3. A database containing inventory data from Bangladesh, Chile and Lithuania
4. A report describing our experience in developing the inventory and some preliminary descriptive analyses of the data

Following our open research data approach, the database will be accessible online after the data have been cleaned and our researchers have had the opportunity to perform some analyses of the data. First versions of the inventory guidelines and data collection template are now available to anyone interested in replicating our process. We hope this tool will be useful to others performing similar activities. The first set of data for Bangladesh, Chile, and Lithuania will be available in early 2010. Research teams in Brazil and the Philippines will begin data collection by January 2010, and their data should be accessible in mid 2010.

Download the inventory guidelines and spreadsheet.

Our next steps are to finish cleaning the data, test the database, and develop a system to enable yearly updating of the data by researchers in each country.