At a recent workshop to help unpack the issue of the impact of public access to ICTs, jointly sponsored by IDRC and Gates, a few key insights were shared in terms of process and ideas:
- the definition of public access is a complex issue that is charged with inherent meaning (eg from publicly funded to a public space). Getting at those definitions helps to navigate the ideological waters that are prevalent in any discussion about this issue.
- at the core of the impact of public access is the issue of whether one thinks we are in the throes of a paradigm shift (in which case trying to measure change through the lens of benefits and costs related to public access is incredibly complex and possibly futile, but where the potential benefits of public access are enormous) or whether we are simply dealing with an evolution in efficiency in an existing mode of production, where information is a good, either publicly provided or privately traded (in which case public access can be measured against other access modalities, many of them private).
- Richard Heeks reminded us that in workshops there are generally "closed-downers" (i.e people who want to close debate on an issue and get on with the work) and "open-uppers" (people who want to get back to define the "what and the "why" and re-open debates that were perceived by some as closed). There are generally tensions between those two groups, but they are both necessary to developing a productive research agenda
- Discussing tensions in the research area you are looking at (impact of public access) is a simple way of uncovering some of the challenges to undertaking research
- Mike Best pointed to the importance of doing impact assessments with an impact, i.e. allowing one to gain from research findings and improve the field of study (eg improving women's participation in a telecentre once the researcher finds out its lacking)
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