Global Impact Study at ICTD 2012

Many of the Global Impact Study research partners will be attending ICTD 2012 in Atlanta in March. In addition to TASCHA staff members, representatives from our survey implementation teams from Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Ghana, and the Philippines will attend, as will some of the principal investigators of our in-depth studies. Components of the Global Impact Study will be highlighted in two open sessions and one poster presentation.

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Who uses public access ICTs? First survey working paper released

Who uses public access ICTs? With the release of the first survey working paper, Public access to ICTs: Sculpting the profile of users, the Global Impact Study offers insight into who the users of public access ICTs are. Written by George Sciadas, with input from Hil Lyons, Chris Rothschild, and Araba Sey, this working paper results from data analysis of the user surveys in Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Ghana, and the Philippines.

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Benefit cost analysis components of the Global Impact Study

One of the research questions the Global Impact Study is considering is the relationship between the costs and benefits of providing and using public access to information and communication technologies (ICTs). Understanding this relationship is important for governmental and non-governmental decision makers who fund or are thinking about funding public access ICT venues. There is a multitude of approaches in the cost-benefit analysis field for examining this issue, as well as a multitude of perspectives from which it could be studied. The Global Impact Study is employing three different methods to estimate the use and non-use benefits of providing public access to ICTs and examine how these are distributed by geographic and demographic characteristics. Tyler Davis, PI for the Benefit Cost Analysis in-depth study, describes the three methods.

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Global Impact Study open-source inventory web application poster presentation

Global Impact Study developer Alex Tulinsky presented a poster, "Vizmo: Open-Source Tools for Geospatial Data in Web Applications," at University of Washington's GIS Day (Geographic Information Systems) on November 16, 2011. The poster he presented provides an overview of software components used in the upcoming 2.0 version release of the Global Impact Study inventory database web application.

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TASCHA Research Seminar – analysis of Global Impact Study data

The TASCHA Winter 2012 Research Seminar focuses on analysis of data from the Global Impact Study. The Global Impact Study comprises a variety of research activities, including a comprehensive set of surveys of public access venue owners/operators, users, and non-users at more than a thousand public access venues in Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Ghana, and the Philippines. The result is a rich source of data on demographics, usage needs/behaviors, and services in these countries. The seminar will focus on analysis of the survey data and provide opportunities to participate in different aspects of the project from crunching numbers to reviewing related literature.

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