COMMINITY INFORMATICS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

COMMUNITY INFORMATICS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES Prof. Paul Licker, Ph. D. Department of Information Systems University of Cape Town

Abstract. This keynote lecture intends to explore the intersection of three concepts: community, informatics, and developing countries. The paper mentions what, if anything, these concepts have to do with one another and why the intersection is of interest. It then goes on to develop some of the challenges that can provoke discussion in a forum such as this. It ends end with some wild-eyed recommendations about community informatics as a general model of the adoption and use of information technology, especially in developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is explore the intersection of three concepts: community, informatics, and developing countries. Well see what, if anything, these concepts have to do with one another, why the intersection is of interest, talk about what is going on, and mention some of the challenges that can provoke discussion in a forum such as this. Ill end with some wild-eyed recommendations that our august participants can unpack while I watch, sort of like intellectual drawing and quartering. While I can hardly claim to be an expert on community informatics in developing countries, I have explored most of the sub-intersections in recent years and find the concept rewarding intellectually while remaining a practical challenge.

1. The Basic Concepts First, the major components (Figure 1). Here are some commonsense definitions Community: A group of people who associate somehow with one another Informatics: The development, adoption, use and management of ICTs (Information and Communication Technology) Developing country: A geopolitical region that doesnt quite measure up to some arbitrary standard.

P. LICKER

Community Roles and Uses for Informatics

COMMUNITY

INFORMATICS

The notion of Community in Developing Countries

DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Informatics in Developing Countries

Figure 1. Intersection of Concepts

Now I want you to note quite carefully that these concepts are not particularly new. Weve had communities forever it seems. Information and its processing have been important aspects of civilization for the same period. And all countries have been developing countries at some point in their histories, sometimes several times. For instance, consider Iran (ancient Persia), Egypt, and China. Development paths have been different (but has this difference been due to intrinsic country or extrinsic contextual factors?). There are also some folk beliefs or syllogisms about development and how the world is divided into different classes of development. One of these beliefs is that We are civilized, and others are barbarians. Another is a cluster of beliefs that our path towards development is imposable on others, that we should do the imposing and we are the best to decide how to impose it. A third syllogism is that our kind and degree of development is the best, the best possible or God-given, unique, and determined. Here, the term development is used in its most inclusive sense: economics, culture, religion, society, education. There are also intellectual theories about

COMMINITY INFORMATICS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES development, sitting poles apart, that might be labeled Marxist approaches and the New World Economic Order. Two interesting phenomena are now working to negate established theories of development. First, ICTs are making it almost impossible to speak about countries as entities any longer. Of course, in many cases, perhaps most, a country is a fiction of nineteenth century post-Waterloo politics, especially in Africa. Most of the country-like entities with which we are familiar with cities or collections of cities, held together by a variety of interests, mostly commercial or political/military -- a kind of commerce -- or religious -- yet another kind of commerce, of course. ICTs are bringing about multinational, multi-interest identifications, communities of interest that are both transcending as well as transecting traditional national interests. This is well known and well researched.

What must be taken into account is the vast web of people and talent that is making the concept of nation almost useless or at least operationally difficult. Those who count and later Ill speak about marginalisation -- are voting with their electronic feet working here and there, bringing up children hither and yon, investing the fruits of their labors in this and that. The idea of a nation developing uniformly is kaput! Just as the HIV virus was (and probably still is) hollowing out the demographic/reproductive centre of East Africa, the economic liberalisation of the flow of capital mediated and energized by the Internet is bringing about a hollowing out of the human resource/skill transfer centre of much of the developing world. Its not a brain drain; its a brain transfer. And the effect of this is to alter, probably forever, what anyone can mean by nation. For the first time, outside conditions of empire, a great many, maybe the majority, of people that influence thinking in the world, the knowledge workers, the productive professionals, know one another, are in continuous contact, exchange vital, interesting information with one another. When there is empire theres a brain drain from the periphery to the center, at least during the heyday of the Empire. Consider Rome, Britain, France, the Soviet Union. Those in the know already know one another. But there is no geopolitical empire now; it resides in the Internet. I know, and affiliate with, far more people I have never met than those whom I see daily, because I transact with them over meaningful issues daily on the Internet. Similarly the idea of community is mutating considerably and Im not just referring to electronic communities. One of the really annoying and most interesting traits of people in informatics is how they are all smarty pants who know everything and think that theyve invented new concepts when the electronic form is just a minor variation on an important and powerful human concept. The term Community has been around for aeons; both testaments of the Bible refer to communities in its

P. LICKER non-proximal sense. Computer scientists didnt invent that. And others continue to reinvent this sense. Consider a recent protest march organised by the University of Cape Town Muslim Students Association to protest the treatment of Palestinians by Israelis (presumably Israeli soldiers). What was interesting was their choice of focus for their anger. That was the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies. Now fifteen microseconds of neuronic exercise will tell you that this makes as much sense as picketing a mosque to protest the behaviour of Indonesian soldiers in East Timor. But thats not the point; people make mistakes like this. Its the pattern of mistakes that is interesting. First of all, there couldnt have been more than a rew Palestinians in the group of probably a hundred students. But the crowd formed a community for a while, despite the fact that most Muslim students at UCT are descendants of Indonesian (incorrectly called Malay) slaves brought over in the 17th century to the Dutch colony and not the least bit related by blood, culture, ancestry or even closely similar religious practice to the Palestinians, half of whom are Christians, and all of whom are Semites closely related to the Jews of Israel. And even more interesting is the induction of community on the part of the protestors onto the mass of UCT Jewish scholars at the Kaplan Centre who, after all, are not Israelis, dont live in Israel, maybe dont even support Israel politically or economically, and in some cases would be treated as second-class citizens were they to wake up in Israel tomorrow. Never mind all those problems with community. Here are two created communities, both mediated by an idea. No ICTs are involved, no community informatics; its just plain old politics as the sage would say, but there arent real communities here. They coalesce around issues. But isnt that what its always been about anyway? Now, hold that thought in mind: community as a social manifestation of the issue construct. Well return to that later in the context of developing country. I dont want to spend time deconstructing informatics, because others have done a better job than I. But I do want to point out that there are at least three separate and only partially intersecting concepts here that need to be battled out. The first is the technology itself. The second is the use of the technology. The third is the socially constructed idea of informatics as a discipline. Technology exists independent of its users, no doubt. But its not much fun in that state. However, most of us from first-world environments have bought so heavily into the idea of technological determinism that weve stopped being able to see technology as just a lifeless thing. Weve reified the idea of tool to that of shaper of the tool user. Thats not quite right, of course; there are Luddites among us who

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keep us sharp, on our toes, and in analysis. But technological determinism1 runs strong in developing countries. A recent form (the super-strong form, perhaps) is that we must have technology and increasing and increasingly powerful kinds and amounts of it in order to get and stay developed. Another interesting idea is technological fatalism2, the idea that technology is unstoppable. If technology makes things happen, inexorably, and these things are shaping us, then our own evolution is in the hands of something, perhaps created initially (and irrelevantly) by us, but now with its own agenda. This is the stuff of nightmare. More compelling is the idea of technology being a latent skill that takes form in the hands (eyes, brain -- less frequently, body) of the user. Technology is emergent. You have to mix in user motivation, skill, and experience in order to get anything. According to this tradition, to understand anything about the technology you have to understand the users and pretty much everything about them. Theres no such thing as bad technology, only bad users. After all, Adam and Eve were punished, not the apple (in fact, I think apples were rewarded with the special skill to keep doctors, but not Ph. D.s, away). Our feelings about technology use are closely aligned to our values concerning our environments and the human role. To many of the Woodstock generation, dickering with the information environment seems cleaner and more environmentally friendly than dickering with our physical, social or chemical environments. Western religion has always preached that humanity has been given stewardship over the physical environment; God has hegemony over our informational (soul, psyche) environment, so we approach Godliness through using information technology. Milgrams (1974) research in the 1960s showed that these feelings are entirely transferable to the lives of those under our control and it

There are two forms. The strong form says that technology determines nontechnological outcomes. The weak form avers that technology is necessary for progress. The press is the primary booster for the strong form and various governments and NGOs and universities push the weak form. Normally wed distrust any salesman who says You just gotta have it, but for some reason, we buy the line, with hook and sinker. 2 There are also two forms here. One, the weak form, is that technology is going to happen, so lie back and enjoy it. The strong form is that technology is going to happen all by itself, so lie back and be frightened. Clearly these two views have strong roots in European culture, the first appealing to our need to worship and the second to our fear of the deus ex machina, the god that doesnt need our worshiping!

P. LICKER remains to be seen whether or not we succeed in this third attempt to become gods3 (after the apple and the tower of Babel). Finally, one interesting concept is that of the field of informatics itself. Notwithstanding the cosmetic shift of names for data processing to electronic data processing to information services to information technology and so forth, there has been a movement towards increasing intellectualisation of what we do. Originally we manipulated numbers, either numbers representing missile trajectories or accounting figure in the earliest days. More recently weve moved up the management chain (to MIS to DSS, to GDSS, to ESS and EIS, to SIS4) and out to wider societal arenas (to BIS, to CIS and BCIS5, to informatics, to social informatics and a variety of computational fields such as computational linguistics, computational biology, soon computational missionary informaticsyou heard it first here!). But in biology, the true sign of maturity is sexual maturity. Whereas 20 years ago when I reentered this field from communication I taught about our reference disciplines (computer science and psychology, for examples), now we have spawned our own daughter disciplines. There is no limit to the power of metaphor and the term discipline or field brings with it a panoply of goods and advantages that job didnt. Not only is the term informatics sexy and slick, it also conjures up a variety of powerful, intuitive images (to inform, to automate, to

Robert Milgram used a clever ruse to induce normal, middle-class people to kill others under instruction from people who merely appeared to be scientists. Space doesnt permit going over the research design, but Milgram showed unequivocally that given the right circumstances, people would voluntarily give up important decisionmaking rights (he termed this the agentic shift) to those who appeared to have the right kind of authority. Although he didnt use computerized equipment, the appearance of technology clearly enhanced the apparent validity of a situation in which volunteer subjects were induced to deliver apparently lethal voltages to others. Milgram was seriously censured for his deceptive research, but his lesson lives on in the excuses people make for their behaviour because of computer failure or other computer-originated activities. 4 MIS is management information systems, the use of information systems to aid management especially in decision making. DSS is Decision Support Sysetms, the use of computers and the like to aid decision making per se. GDSS is Group Decision Support Systems, the application of information systems to group decision making processes. ESS is Executive Support Systems, aiding executives in their work of developing and executing strategy. EIS means Executive Information Systems and is mostly synonymous with ESS. Finally SIS is Strategic Information Systems or the use of information systems in strategic fashion, for example, to increase competitiveness. 5 BIS is Business Information Systems, CIS is Computer Information Systems and BCIS is the hybrid Business Computer Information Systems. They essentially mean the same thing, but serious fights break out when that assertion is made among academics!

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study, to direct). One could be without soap for a while, but now in business and increasingly in government one cant be without ones informatics, can one? For a field without unified theory, grand goals, or its own intellectual history, informatics has achieved quite a cachet. Psychology took 100 years, as did management studies itself. Maybe this is another sign of the speeding up of the intellectual clock. And speaking of the clock, its time to move on to what the concepts of informatics, community and development have to do with one another.

2. What these concepts have to do with one another Community Informatics: A technology strategy or discipline that focuses on the use of Information Technology by territorial communities (Romm & Taylor, 2000). Developing Country Informatics: The use of ICTs in developing countries. Developing Country Community: A group of people in a third-world country, probably related geographically but far more likely related ethnically or by interest, class, caste or historical or physical accident These definitions inherit problems from their elements but they will form the bulk of what Im going to be challenging you with today. Im going to use the ARI (Romm &Taylor, 2000) model to illustrate the problematics and derive challenges for you. And Ill recommend at the end that we have a long, long way to go before community informatics in developing countries means anything practical. A few things are obvious about these intersections. First, communities have always been held together by informatics. As I mentioned before (and Webster backs me up on this), it is commonality of interests rather than propinquity that defines a community. A community is the physical, sometimes (often, really) geographical instances of interest (again, often physical). Hence one should expect communities to act in ways that interest dictates. For example, interest depends on information, information flows and precision. Without information, interest is vague, whimsical, uncontrolled. With unreliable information, an interest is dispositional, more like an opinion or attitude than belief. Cement the information with precision and validity of content, guarantee of access, and predictability of delivery (i.e., all those things that informatics promise) and youve got manageable interest. If the interest is geographically confined, you have the classical community, but if the interest is neither geographically, geopolitically, or geosynchronically confined, then youve got a virtual community. And because people can hold many, often conflicting interests, people can belong to many and conflicting informationally-

P. LICKER mediated communities. In fact, the very same people can belong to manifold communities partitioned in a variety of ways by issue (see the star in Figure 2). In this example you can see how interests, perhaps mediated by information, dictate multi-layered, overlapping, mutually antagonistic and even schizoid communities. Unfortunately, Developing country informatics is a very small set. Ill return to this later, because of the odd state of development path theory vis--vis informatics. The final intersection is developing country community. Now heres a problem. Because we think of countries like Gabon or Mozambique as developing we lose sight of the fact that in fact they have been developing for centuries. Our myopic focus on economic or democratic-political development leaves us blind to the fact that social and political development has been going on relentlessly in developing countries forever. In fact these countries are as developed in any real sense (outside political development) of the word as any so-called developed country. Hence the idea of community, while thought of as something trendy to be interested in in North America and Europe, is just as developed, complex, sophisticated, tied into the social fabric, functional, useful, interesting, fascinating and valuable as any idea we may have.

Figure 2. How Interests (and Information) Determine Communities and Community Conflict As Ive traveled around Africa and I am by no means an experienced traveler; others have more stories to tell Ive been impressed with how complex the notion of community is among my informants. OK, there may have been something lost in the translation and perhaps theres a bit of what psychologists call experimenter

COMMINITY INFORMATICS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES expectancy going on, but surely, for example, the idea that a man I met in Tanzania supports distant relatives (and were not talking small donations, were talking 50% of his salary) because he was supported as a youngster is as delightful an idea of community as any coming from the community development literature.

So communities in developing countries must be regarded as every bit as complex, sophisticated and interesting as those in the developed world. In fact, one might say that communities in Africa, for example, are probably more highly developed in some senses than those in America, since people do look out for those in their communities without prodding, public information campaigns or public guilt. What they do to their neighbours of other ethnic groups is another story. Perhaps our only advantage in the first world in terms of community is the papering over of tribalism. Of course, dont say that to an Afrikaner in South Africa or a Canadian of Ukranian descent.

3. Why the Intersection is of Interest Now that weve covered the two-way intersections, lets look at the three-way intersection: community informatics in the Developing World. What can this concept mean? One thing the joint concept means is that ideas of community development either are completely generalisable across all development milieu or, in fact, are sensitive to levels of development. In other words, why would we expect the three-way intersection to be any more restrictive than the two-way one? The common arguments are these: Access: In the third world, there is uneven and far lower density of access to the technology Infrastructure: Also, the hardware, software, and netware infrastructure is lacking, inadequate, unreliable, too expensive, etc.; the banking infrastructure isnt there, the legislative infrastructure isnt there, etc. Knowledge: Human resources are not available to train, maintain, and develop uses of community informatics to their full potential I put these up as straw persons in order to have you ask the question: maybe it aint necessarily so. Perhaps even if there were access, infrastructure and knowledge, there still wouldnt be appropriate uses of informatics for community creation and development in the developing world. Or you could see it another

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P. LICKER way: what is the minimum access/infrastructure/knowledge portfolio (s) necessary to reach a certain level of community informatics? This latter question is approached, albeit obliquely in the Romm & Taylor (2000) ARI model (Figure 3). As with many other informatics questions, causality and necessity are often conflated. The ARI model speaks of sufficient conditions in a virtuous cycle that builds community informatics (measured presumably through the integration or aggregation phase) by creating supply for the demand. The model is useful because it spells out exogenous influences that shape action (supply), reaction (demand) and integration (aggregation) or provide a context. Clearly these contextual influences are appropriate to speak of in a developing countries context. In addition, it indicates endogenous characteristics of communities that might explain differences in adoption of CI, such as culture, politics, or individual motivation. There is even room there for what has been called, in typical 1950s sexist fashion, the great man theory of leadership, but which has now been refashioned into the IS Champion idea. One of the most charming aspects of the ARI model is its insistence that demand precede supply. Or more precisely demand related activities should take precedence. This is charming because it recognises that the way communities adopt technology might be different from baseball fields and soap. That group IS adoption, especially groups of untutored individuals with raging but unformed and uninformed needs might not act as a traditional market and demand what they are being supplied. More to the point, communities in developing countries might indeed have very sophisticated needs that are simply being unmet by the relatively simple technological solutions in search of problems. Consider E-commerce, for example. When I proposed to a journal editor that we do a special issue on E-commerce in Africa, he retorted with a comment similar to Gertrude Steins description of Oakland, California (Theres no there, there): What E-commerce? I have to agree. E-commerce as we see it is really an emanation and creature of North American business at this time. In a variety of ways, E-commerce meets a significant proportion of commerce needs now in North America (and probably Europe and maybe elsewhere). Ditto for community informatics, especially in rural Canada (theres LOTS of there, there) and Australia. But that is a really simple-minded way of viewing E-commerce and Africa. Think for a moment about Africa. Its been there a long time. Commerce has been there a long time, longer than in America. Business culture, the movement of goods, supplier-buyer relationships, competitive and cooperative business modes: these are all there in abundance and in complexity and sophistication. Why hasnt Ecommerce caught on yet in Africa? And dont say its access, infrastructure and knowledge. These are necessary conditions, but we actually dont know in what proportions and what portfolios work and what doesnt work. Whats sufficient?

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Clearly theres a need to conduct business but not in the North American mode. If we assume for the moment that the big three (access, infrastructure and knowledge) are actually there in places or will be soon enough, what are the forces that will make E-commerce successful in Africa? Demand. The need to conduct business electronically. The need to have verifiable transactions with reliable content. The need for speed to beat the competition. The need for unfalsifiable audit trails. Not the ability to access these, but the need. And how will we find out the need? By studying African business, not by forcing what goes on in Africa into an American or British or Australian mode.

ACTION (Demand)

REACTION (Supply) Endogenous Input

Exogenous Input (Commy Characteristics) Motivation Politics Culture History Task

INTEGRATON (Aggregation)

Technical Development Environment Resources Government Era, Time, Fashion

Measures of Success Output Adoption of CI, Use of CI, Variety of CI, Integration of CI, etc. Figure 3. ARI Model (after Romm & Taylor, 2000) So the ARI model is a more general model of all communities. Its cybernetic, goal-oriented, knowledge based and takes into account more of what it means to be active in a community of others pursuing similar (if conflicting) goals than the common business model. We need to expand our repertoire of models, taking into account that communities are issue based rather than merely geographical, that they are multilayer, that communities run on conflict as well as cooperation. When this is done, intellectual models such as ARI will help us understand all aspects of informatics in a community environment, even E-commerce.

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P. LICKER

4. The Challenges to CI, You, and This Session Now Ive rambled through many fields of play and Id like to bring them together with a single example of what interests me and my colleagues and students. Back in Cape Town, I run a taught doctoral program which is unique in Africa, probably in the world. Weve brought together a multidisciplinary team of Associates (i.e., people formerly known as students) to examine the appropriateness of the applicability of information systems6 to national development goals. In todays forum, it might be best to say that were concerned with business community informatics in developing country mileux. Our first research project is funded by the International Development Research Council and most of us are looking at some aspect of the question of whether or not E-commerce is going to marginalise some or all Africans, and if so, how, and how to avoid this or prepare for the fallout. Elsewhere (Licker, 2000a, b, 1999, 1998a, b, c; Licker & Motts, 2000) Ive addressed the problematic concept of marginalisation, so I wont review that here. But for this group, I can rephrase our research interest at looking at why and how E-commerce will succeed or fail to advance (business) community interests in Africa. In order to do this we are adopting two novel approaches, looking at e-commerce models as: as models for community rather than as ways of doing business only and as models of development rather than merely as ways of making money

You see, if we are to avoid marginalisation of any particular group in Africa, weve got to see how that group can be kept in in some sense. There are two ways of being in and one of them, assimilation, has already been demonstrated to work rather effectively in America we dont need to go there; its not so interesting. The other way of being in is integration at the community model level, taking the needs of community (in our case, business community) groups into account through the power of informatics. So were interested in the community aspects of
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I completely give up in trying to distinguish information systems and information technology. The latter usually refers to the boxes and wires and programs, the things; the former often refers to systems or organisms that accomplish non-electronic goals in larger milieux and includes people, organisations, etc. Most of my colleagues admit that its often useful to blur this distinction, as do almost all textbooks, consultants, and professors. The only people who still seem to care are NGOs who cannot afford whole systems and must make do with the boxes and wires!

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business (such as the ways e-commerce can build markets to satisfy the needs to sell products) and the development aspects of e-commerce (such as the ways ecommerce can create equity markets for micro-entrepreneurs and micro-investors). Our projects examine e-commerce as a vehicle for education in entrepreneurship, ecommerce readiness as a component of e-commerce success, and distinctly African business modes as expressed in the language of e-commerce. Much of this work is conceptual; we are only just beginning to collect data. Our efforts have borne fruit so far in a successful lecture series available on the web soon, a number of working papers, and several almost-ready doctoral proposals. So my challenges to you are the same as I throw at my doctoral Associates. What is there about technology, specifically information technology, that can help us understand business, commerce, community in the developing world? How can a communitys appropriation of a technology be advanced or hindered by information technology as it pursues development goals? Which development goals are antithetical to specific information technologies or uses of information technology? What are the hidden cultural, political and economic assumptions behind any particular appropriation of any particular information technology? What is our role as developers of individuals (i.e., lecturers and professors) with regard to this technology? Whose interests (i.e., which communities) are being furthered by specific uses of specific information technology or all information technology? How are specific models of development across a broad spectrum impacted by the new kinds of technology available? And finally, who is the developing country here? And where is it? And when?

5. Summary This ramble across the dictionary began with independent ideas of informatics, community and developing countries and has ended with a call to adopt a community informatics approach to all employment of IT, including the newest IT fad, E-commerce. Ive spelled out an ambitious research program were undertaking through our doctoral program in Information Systems and National Development at the University of Cape Town. This program seeks to explore the concept of marginalisation in order to prevent decommunitisation of various people, groups, and institutions with respect to E-commerce. I invite you to participate with us, to enrich our business models with community development models and to provide a broader menu of choices for development of all sort.

Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge the financial support of the International Development Research Centre (the Johannesburg office of this Canadian

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P. LICKER organization based in Ottawa and one of the most important and visible organizations supporting research into development and technology, among other topics, most notably through its Acacia project) and the Associates of our doctoral program for their kind comments and suggestions concerning this paper. Thanks also to my life partner Susannah for her incomparable help in editing and sensemaking.

References Licker, P.: 2000a, Will E-Commerce marginalize South Africans? Proceedings, South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists annual conference, Cape Town, November 2000 (electronic proceedings). Licker, P.: 2000b, New Business Models for E-Commerce. Panel Presentation, Proceedings, First Annual Global Information Technology Management Conference, Memphis, TN USA, 11-13 June 2000, pp 280-281. Licker, P. and Motts, N.: 2000, Extending the Benefits of E-Commerce in Africa: Exploratory Phase. Proceedings, Global Information Technology Management conference, Memphis, Tenn., June 2000. Licker, P.: 1999, Information Systems and National Development: Research Frameworks. Proceedings, First International BITWorld Conference, Cape Town, 1-2 July 1999. Licker, P: 1998a, A Framework for Information Systems and National Development Research. Proceedings, Annual Research and Development Symposium, South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technologists, Cape Town, 23-24 November 1998, pp. 79-88. Licker, P.: 1998b, Information Systems and National Development. Inaugural Lecture, 28 April, 1998, University of Cape Town Licker, P.: 1998c, Information Technology and National Development: Enlarging the Opportunity by Enlarging the Workspace. Proceedings 1998 ACM SIGCPR Conference, Boston, MA, March 26-28, 1998, pp. 82-85. Milgram, S.: 1974, Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper and Row. Romm, C. and Taylor, W.: 2000, Thinking Strategically about Community Informatics: The Ation, Reaction, Inetgration (ARI) Model. Proceedings, PACIS, Hong Kong, June 2000.