Some thoughts on Research as an Element in Telecentre/Community Informatics Practice April 3, 2010

This is part of an ongoing discussion on Mike Gurstein's blog

Hi Mike

You make interesting points about research and possible topics for universities in developing countries, but I would need your help to follow that up. If you have any thoughts about appropriate universities please let me know. From the field work side of things, it would make a lot of sense to work with an African university. Certainly John does have links with various universities. However it is not just a matter of the field work, it is also about use of ICT for planning and follow-up. I'm not currently aware of any who would fill the bill - i.e. be interested in development studies and also be easily able to link with us via the Internet. Do you have any in mind?

I agree with you that ICTD2010 should be an excellent opportunity for creating some research-practitioner collaborations. In fact I have put in two submissions in the hope of helping that to happen.

One submission was partly influenced by your blog and is called "ICT4Research – Are ICTD research methods still “20th century", or is ICT changing the way ICTD researchers do their research?"

The idea is that it seems reasonable to expect that the trailblazers for using ICT creatively within their research (to enable better research) would be ICTD researchers. So I want to find out if this is happening (and if so how is it happening) and if not why not? Obviously I want ICT to be used for better collaboration between researchers and practitioners. (I quote your blog as academic evidence for such a session being timely.)

This session is planned to be highly participative, exploring what people are doing (or planning to do) i.e. given their experience of ICT how do they see "21st century research" being different from "20th century" research?

The other session is called "Reality check - an online Q and A session with the providers of Nigeria's First Rural Community Wireless Network: Zittnet" The idea is that the format will be like Dadamac's weekly UK-Nigeria team meetings - which we do via skype (typing).The big difference is the involvement of ICTD2010 participants, who will be able to type questions directly to the team in Nigeria.. The meeting will explore the practicalities of running Zittnet (Nigeria's First Rural Community Wireless Network).

The online meeting will be chaired in Nigeria by John Dada. Bidi Bala the manager of Zittnet also plans to be there and other members of the team.On the UK side the meeting will involve ICTD2010 participants who are not used to how things go in a Dadamac online meeting, so I'll be giving a bit of a commentary as things go along to explain who is who and to help overcome confusions and culture gaps.

There will be two benefits of the session. Through the Q and A people will get a reality check about connectivity in rural Africa (and other local issues). By participating (or watching others participate) they will get a flavour of what it is like to work on a project with us, helped by regular team meetings. At least that is the plan.

So - two submissions - and I'm looking forward to 11th June 2010 when the decisions on acceptance should be available.

If the sessions are accepted for ICTD2010 then I will try to make sure I "hit the ground running" by connecting up online beforehand with likely participants (on blogs like this, twitter etc). Of course if the sessions don't happen I will still be trying to connect up with people in the same way - but without the extra boost of ICTD2010. So let's keep discussing these issues and hope to meet up in December.

I am glad you started this blog topic. It is so helpful to be able to explore these ideas with you. I hope we can keep strengthening this link.

Pamela