ICTs for Global Development and Sustainability: Practice and Applications

Many hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted by well meaning philanthropists, aid agencies and governments in projects to deploy ICT solutions in developing contexts. The very long list of public Internet access facilities (telecenters, internet cafes, multi-purpose community centers) that were either closed down, or that never got off the ground in the first place, is very troublesome. Yet, there are some cases that seem to be very effective. ICTs for Global Development and Sustainability: Practice and Applications unites the theoretical underpinnings and scientific methodology of an approach of deploying ICT in marginalized communities to bridge the so-called digital divide. This book contains case studies of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean that demonstrate which approaches work and which do not in deploying public access to information sources."

About the Author :
Jacques Steyn holds a PhD in language and complex systems, and he received an award for excellence in science from the South African Association for the Advancement of Science (S2A3) for his Masters Degree. In 1999 he developed the first XML-based general music markup language (http:// www.musicmarkup.info). He was member of the international ISO/MPEG-7 standards workgroup on metadata for interactive-TV and Multimedia. He was also member of the ISO/MPEG-4 extension workgroup for music notation (i.e. symbolic music representation). In 1999 and 2000 he was Associate Professor of Multimedia at the University of Pretoria. Since February 2005 he served as Head of the School of IT at Monash University's South African campus. Prior to that, for close to a decade, he was a private consultant in the field of new media, web technologies and multimedia. His interest in ICT4D began in 1999. In 2006 he established the International Development Informatics Association, which at the time of writing had its 3rd annual conference. The idea of this book was born from frustration with the scarcity of well-founded academic research in the field of ICT4D, where media hype seems to reign. Jean-Paul Van Belle joined the Department of Information Systems of UCT in 1997 and became an associate professor in 2006. He is currently Head of the Department. He obtained a licentiate in 1983 (Rijksuniversiteit Gent, Belgium), an MBA in 1988 (GSB, Stellenbosch University, South Africa) and his PhD in 2004 (UCT, South Africa). In the last 8 years, he has authored or co-authored about 15 books/chapters, 15 journal articles and more than 60 peer-reviewed published conference papers. His key research area is the social and organisational adoption of emerging information technologies in a developing world context. The key technologies researched include e-commerce, M-commerce, e-government and, more recently, open source software. He has considerable experience with both quantitative survey approaches as well as qualitative case study research. His main research focus for the near future will be on small organisations i.e. small and micro-businesses as well as NGOs. Eduardo Villanueva Mansilla holds a B.A. in Library Science and a M.A. in Communication Studies both by PUCP. After working as systems librarian and webmaster of his University, since 2005 is a full-time faculty member at the Communications department where he conducts research and teaches on subjects related with ICT and communications, including information society, media and new media policy. From 1994 to 1997 he was a member of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Latin American and Caribbean standing committee, as well as a corresponding member of the information technology committee; in 2002 he acted as Senior Policy Advisor for the vice minister of communications of Peru, as well as advisor to the President of Peru’s National Science, Technology and Innovation Council. His multiple publications, in Spanish and English, led to his current position as associate editor of the Journal of Community Informatics (ci-journal.net).