Rucha Ambikarare and Rebecca Sears from the Center for Information & Society are exploring the information needs in different countries. They report on the challenges of working with multiple research teams stationed globally and their initial findings.
Research Questions:
Where do people access information?
What kinds of information do they need?
What venues provide access at low or no cost?
How can we improve public access to ICT to serve the needs of people better?
They conducted research in 25 different countries across the world. Their criteria for choosing them was based their interest in public libraries and eliminating the very top tier and bottom tier countries with respect to level of development.
“Participatory Research”
They chose do to their research via a participatory approach, employing research teams from different countries with a total of 15 country research partners. To coordinate their efforts, they ran a series of workshops every month or two in Seattle, Kuala Lumpur, Georgia, and Costa Rica. Coordination challenges included tight timelines, different calendars across countries with different holiday seasons, international fiscal issues, contract process, drop outs, and technology. Another challenge was to manage the different points of views of all researchers. For example, a local research team dismissed the importance of cyber-cafes because only “house-wives and teenagers(?) use them” this a population that the leading research team would not have dismissed.
They categorized countries according to the level of “physical access”, “human capacity and relevance”, and “enabling environment”. An example of “human capacity” is how uncritically people tend to take in information from particular sources. (Apologies, I didn’t catch the detailed description for each of these categories.) It appears that each country had some choice in how to interpret each category. For example, religion was considered by some countries (like Turkey) but not by all countries as an important part of “environment”. In Nepal, they wanted to look at transsexuals and “access”; in another country, tsunamis were calculated with respect to “access” as well.
Question: How did you recruit fellow researchers in these countries?
We sent out an electronic call for researchers. Sociologists, linguists, & a wide range of backgrounds.
Preliminary Phase I Findings allowed them to rate the different countries amongst themselves. They grouped the countries by the level of challenge in promoting public access to information. For example, “1 mountain countries” include: Brazil, Turky, Costa Rica, Egypt, Peru, and Sri Lanka. These countries had similar rates for access to information, capacity and environment. They find that they are producing guides to NGOs for promoting public access to information sites. These findings challenge preconceptions about the challenges a country might have. For example, Kazakhstan might have been considered a weathly country and, therefore, one that would have an easier time to promote public access. However, their findings categorize it together with Algeria, Mongolia, and Namibia as “three mountain” challenges according to their measures.
Given these findings, a natural point of discussion for the workshops was to discuss suggestions for intervention.
They also found emerging insights outside of the original three areas they studied (access/capacity/environment):
(a) Collaboration across venues
(b) Changing media landscapes include new media and behaviors (mobile phones, SMS, web 2.0, community radio)
(c) Perceptions of a particular venue matter: “How cool is it?” “Libraries are not a place to go.”
(d) Legitimate Information – Information needs revisited: trivial vs. non-trivial info & use, What is offered, where are the gaps?
