Logo courtesy of ICTD 2012, Georgia Tech

Many of the Global Impact Study research partners will be attending the upcoming ICTD 2012 conference in Atlanta, Georgia March 12-15, 2012. In addition to TASCHA researchers, representatives from our survey implementation teams in 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 presentation. We hope that any of you attending ICTD 2012 will consider participating in one or more of the sessions and presentation.

Open session: Want open research? Deep dive into data with the Global Impact Study

Technology and Social Change Group, University of Washington Information School

This session will bring together individuals interested in survey data analysis, for an intensive day of exploring user survey data from the Global Impact Study. As a core component of the project we carried out surveys of public access ICT venue operators, users, and non-users in five countries – Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Ghana, and the Philippines. The data with accompanying meta-documentation will be made publicly available upon completion of the project.

Session participants will have the opportunity to review and work with the user survey dataset representing approximately 5,000 users. The data cover a wide range of topics including user demographics, usage patterns, and perceived impacts. Opportunities abound for participants to pursue diverse lines of interest.

This session will be facilitated by the project’s management team with support from staff of the University of Washington’s Center for Statistical Consulting.

Open session: Distant fields, common findings? Identifying the challenges and benefits of multi-country qualitative research

Jenna Burrell, UC Berkeley; Janet Kwami, Furman University; Elisa Oreglia, UC Berkeley; Ricardo Ramirez, Independent, Canada; Andy Gordon, University of Washington; Balaji Parthasarathy, IIITB – Bangalore, India

The goal of this workshop is to discuss experiences in multi-country ethnographic/qualitative field work, an area that has been mostly the domain of quantitative studies. We build on the two separate multi-country projects carried out by the organizers, in order to identify what are the advantages and the risks of such research, how to coordinate research questions and hypothesis-making with the need to keep open to discoveries, and what role can this type of research play in the field of ICTD.

The first project is a 3-country (Ghana, Uganda, and China) study employing an ethnographic research to look at the adoption and use of ICT among ‘marginalized populations,’ focusing on market women in Ghana, farmers in rural China, and slum dwellers in Uganda, and comparing their practices and the information processes that exist around their businesses.  The second project combined several qualitative data collection tools, including ethnographies, with country-wide surveys to study ‘infomediaries’ (persons who combine a set of technological resources and coaching to meet users’ information needs and communication capabilities) in Lithuania, Chile, and Bangladesh. It focused on libraries, telecenters, and cybercafés to investigate and generate evidence on the scale, character, and impact of public access to ICT. Part of a larger project entitled Global Impact Study of Public Access to Information & Communication Technology, it investigates the impact of ICT in a number of areas, including communication and leisure, culture and language, education, employment and income, governance, and health.

Presentation: Sharing in public: Working with others in Ghanaian cybercafés

Michael Best, Bence Kollanyi, Sunil Garg, all of Georgia Tech

This paper explores the different ways in which people collaborate and share knowledge in public internet venues, or cybercafés, in Ghana, West Africa. Based on 150 survey interviews conducted in two different cybercafés, one urban and business-oriented and the other peri-urban and family-oriented, the authors find that most cybercafé customers, largely regardless of their demographic, would like to engage in collaborative work in public internet venues and that a large percentage already are. This paper is based on the Collaborative Knowledge Sharing in-depth study of the Global Impact Study.

Contrary to the belief of resource constraints driving shared use, those participants who reported already working together in the cybercafés generally did not cite economic motivations for their collaboration but instead identified enhanced productivity as the main reason. These collaborating respondents also reported performing more instrumental activities in the café and were more likely to have learned critical computing skills there when compared to those who were not already collaborating. Furthermore, they report being more social in their activities at the venue. Finally, the paper notes that collaboration and peer learning is not always planned or made public; voyeuristic forms of knowledge sharing, such as when someone glances at a stranger’s computer screen, are also cited by the survey participants as a learning opportunity in these public venues.

For more information about ICTD 2012, please visit http://ictd2012.org/.

In addition to presenting the paper, Mike was also invited to participate in a workshop sponsored by the Wee School of Communication and Information and the Singapore Internet Research Center of Nanyang Technological University, at which he presented on the Collaborative Knowledge Sharing study.

For more information on the Collaborative Knowledge Sharing study, browse updates.

Users at Busy Internet, Ghana, in 2005. Photo courtesy of IDRC/telecentre.org.

The Collaborative Knowledge Sharing Study investigates the way that people share knowledge, experience, and technologies among friends and strangers while physically co-present in cybercafés. Our hypothesis is that this shared use of ICTs is in many cases preferred to individualized private use since people in public cybercafés benefit from physical interactions sharing knowledge and socializing experience with their co-present neighbors.

To examine our hypothesis we have conducted a survey of 75 computer users at a major cybercafé, Busy Internet, in Accra, Ghana. Survey participants were recruited from all computer users in the café, of majority age, during a period of four weeks across in late 2009. Our survey was designed to ascertain if these computer users connected with other people within the cybercafé — either friends, strangers, or café employees — in order to enhance their experience with communication technologies.

Survey results reveal that all respondents report interacting with café employees around technical issues. This result is, admittedly, not very surprising as simple technical issues routinely arise when using the café’s computers. More importantly, we found that more than one-third of respondents (37%) reported some deeper forms of computer sharing and collaboration with friends, family members, business associates, or even strangers while in the café.

Sharing took on different forms, for instance many respondents reported arriving together with friends or family and sitting close together while using separate machines (54%), others reported serially using a single PC one after the other (21%), still others worked simultaneously on the same machine leveraging differential levels of expertise (12%). Of those respondents reporting computer sharing, one-third reported gaining knowledge and learning from the other user as their primary reason for sharing and, surprisingly, only 18% sited purely economic reasons for sharing.

The population of respondents who reported significant or occasional computer sharing was similar in many ways to the population of users who reported never sharing. For example there was no difference in the demographics, computer fluency or experience, frequency or type of technical assistance sought, or the range of applications used between the sharing and non-sharing populations (p  > 0.05 on all questions using standard statistical measure). In contrast, these two populations were different in some interesting ways. For instance the sharing population was less concerned with privacy issues than the non-sharers, typically came to the cybercafé with more people and with a different mix of people, and had generally a better view towards collaborative group work and broader forms of interaction while in the café (p < 0.01 on all questions using standard statistical measures).

Results from our survey in Accra, Ghana, suggest that face-to-face connections among people co-located in cybercafés are an important component to the experience and enhance impact. In future work we intend to explore design innovations for the computers and café environment that will enhance the best forms of collaborative work and in-person sharing.

The two-year study (2009–2011) will be led by Michael Best, along with Beth Kolko and François Bar, and supported by Mark Davies in Ghana. Researchers will visit a dozen public access venues in Ghana — large and small, rural and urban, upscale and relatively modest — to identify when sharing enhances or diminishes a user’s experience as compared to individual use (at a public access venue) or private use (at home). Download the full research proposal.

The study’s mixed-method approach will include broad survey work (including working with the national surveys), focused ethnographic-inspired research at a few venues, quantitative methods, natural and formal experiments, and ultimately system and space design exercises. It will examine five hypotheses:

1. End-user co-present space sharing (i.e., people occupy the space together but have their own computers) enhances the outcomes/impacts of computer use in many cases.
2. End-user co-present technology sharing (i.e., people occupy the space together and also share a single computer) enhances the outcomes/impacts of computer use in many cases.
3. End-users will share at times equipment even in the presence of abundance in order to satisfy individual interests or social norms.
4. The architecture, rules, and norms of the public access space influence the ability of people to engage in end-user co-present space sharing. These spaces can be designed to encourage the best sort of sharing.
5. The code of technologies influences the ability of people to engage in end-user co-present technology sharing. These computer technologies can be designed to encourage the best sort of sharing.

Ultimately, the research team’s goal is to understand end-user sharing in public facilities while innovating upon potential designs, policies, and architectures that support and enhance the best forms of collaborative use.

Browse collaborative knowledge-sharing updates »