The presentation was held in conjunction with the launch of a new CIS paper: Libraries, telecentres and cybercafés: a study of public access venues around the world.

A community in Bangladesh gathers to discuss trusted sources of information with the Global Impact Study Bangladesh Country Research Team

This qualitative data collection tool allows a group to illustrate the networks of trust that exist in a geographic community. The tool works like a photograph of people’s personal networking experience. After developing several linkage maps, researchers can detect patterns in terms of trusted sources of information, or the information ecology around a focal point (a public access site in the context of this project).

Country Research Teams are visiting a minimum of six communities in their countries, each one with one or more of the public access venue types that are the subject of this study (libraries, telecentres, cyber cafes).

Francois Bar, Frank Tulus, and I joined the Bangladesh team on community visits on June 5, 2008. 

• Inform the International Advisory Committee of the progress of the project, particularly on the status of the research design effort
• Obtain advice and input on the research design development strategy
• Gather input on the emerging trends and issues related to public access to ICT and/or impact assessment methodology
• Gather input on the potential stakeholders’ interest in the project and strategy for outreach and communications to these stakeholders, and
• Clarify the Committee’s operational mandate and internal working mechanisms.

Based on discussions that emerged during the workshop, the International Advisory Committee provided the following recommendations:

• Consider three tiers of “success” for the project itself: data, analysis, and policy impact
• Collect as much data in a uniform way across as many sites as possible (both quantitative and qualitative data)
• Make all of the data, as well as the data-collection methodology, available to the general public
• Restrict attention to centers that provide public access to general-purpose computing devices and/or the Internet
• Brand the project
• Establish the core research working group as mentor figures to the country teams

Download PDF of the complete meeting minutes and more detail on the recommendations.

Download PDF of Francisco Proenza’s commentary on plans for the first phase of the Global Impact Study (dated May 13, 2008). Francisco is a member of the 5nternational Advisory Committee.

The workshop began with presentations about the public access environments in each of the pilot countries. This included:

• Landscape analysis — What are the major types of public access points (libraries, cybercafes, telecentres)? What is the scale? Who funds them? What are their missions? Who goes to them? What are some of the major activities that people do in these centers? Are there other distinguishing characteristics?
• Story gathering & visual representation — What does public access look like? How do people describe the best possible outcome case of people using the center? The average/typical case? The worst case?
• Data availability — What data exists about public access in the country? Types and number of venues, user numbers and demographics, and any other data that can be collected.

Following this, members of the Research Working Group presented a number of methodological approaches for consideration, including:

• Inventory and taxonomy (George Sciadas)
• Outcome mapping (Ricardo Ramirez)
• Most significant change (Ricardo Ramirez)
• Retrospective study (Mike Best)
• Quasi-experimental designs (Mike Best)

Research design brainstorm

Dividing into three groups with the Country Research Teams, participants developed hypotheses based on the characteristics of each country’s public access environment. Several ideas came out of this process, including the role of infomediaries, the gender of operators, and types of restrictions on computer usage.

The general conclusion? More information is needed to develop research questions that the Country Research Teams can confidently state represents the most important and relevant dimensions of public access to study in their respective countries.

Operationalizing the overarching research questions

Francois Bar, chair of the Research Working Group, presented a reformulation of the overarching research questions in terms that will lead to better operational research designs.

• Is there impact? YES/NO. If so, how much?
• Could we do it better? YES/NO. If so, how much? (relates to differing program design conditions)
• Is there something else we could do to achieve equal impact? YES/NO. If so, how much? (covers the cost/benefit question)

Next steps: parallel activities to develop research designs

Workshop participants underscored the need to undertake a number of parallel activities that will allow the project to develop a set of research designs.

• Research Working Group — Undertake information ecology mappings in a number of communities and conduct other related background research
• Research Working Group — Develop research designs based on own experiences
• Center for Information & Society — Complete a review of the literature to uncover documented impacts, novel methodologies, and knowledge gaps

The Research Working Group will meet during the summer to review preliminary findings and research designs from the Research Working Group. A second global workshop will be scheduled in the fall to finalize the research strategy for phase two of the project.

TASCHA has also contracted with researchers familiar with ICT literature in Chinese (Guo Liang), English (Susana Finquelievich), Spanish (Susana Finquelievich), and Portuguese (Mariana Balboni). The researchers will provide English summaries of the 20 references in their respective languages that they deem most important for describing the impact of public access to ICT.

References used in the literature review may include journal articles, books, reports, and conference proceedings. References and summaries are being compiled, annotated, and stored in EndNote.

A first draft of the literature review is underway.