April 30, 2014
It’s finally spring here in the Northern Hemisphere, and we decided to celebrate by highlighting some of our new research at TASCHA. From crunching big data on mobile money and developing new resources based on research findings to travelling around the world and working with new partners in the field, we’ve accomplished quite a bit in 2014 so far! Here’s a snapshot of a few new TASCHA research projects.
TASCHA’s Global Impact Study of Public Access ICTs wrapped up last year with the publication of the final research report, Connecting people for development: Why public access ICTs matter. In addition to the final report, we have also released research reports and summaries of the Global Impact Study’s in-depth studies, which were designed to answer more specific questions about the public access phenomenon, such as whether we even need public access ICTs anymore since everyone has a mobile phone (spoiler alert: yes, we do!).
April 24, 2014
TASCHA Research Assistant Professor Maria Garrido has a chapter in a new book, Cyberactivism on the Participatory Web, edited by Martha McCaughey. Maria co-authored the chapter, “Twitter as the People’s Microphone: Emergence of Authorities during Protest Tweeting,” with Alexander Halavais of Arizona State University’s School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. The chapter covers Maria and Alex’s research on over 30,000 Tweets using the #g20 hashtag, largely protest Tweets before, during, and after the 2009 G20 Meeting in Pittsburgh.
April 23, 2014
TASCHA Research Assistant Professor Araba Sey spent winter quarter 2014 (January-March) in Grahamstown, South Africa as a Visiting Mellon Scholar at Rhodes University. Made possible through both the Mellon Scholarship program and the University of Washington’s Vice Provost International Faculty Exchange (IFEX) program, Araba spent three months with the Journalism and Media Studies department at Rhodes, mostly working with Dr. Lorenzo Dalvit and his graduate students in their New Media and Society class.
April 17, 2014
We recently launched a project that is looking at public internet access and use in Vietnam. One of the main objectives of the study is to understand the role library-like institutions, such as cultural post offices in Vietnam, play in providing public access to information and communication technologies (ICTs). Surveying public access venues, users, and non-users to gather data about public access in Vietnam is a critical component of the study. While critical to answering our research questions, collecting data on a large scale like in this project can be challenging. As such, we are excited to employ a different method of data collection in this study, using the Open Data Kit (ODK), developed here at the University of Washington’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Using Android-based tablets, researchers in the field will implement the surveys and collect data through ODK.
February 13, 2014
Myanmar (Burma) has spent decades under authoritarian rule. It was isolated politically and economically from the rest of the world and home to one of the world’s longest civil wars. In the last few years, Myanmar has begun a transformation from authoritarian to democratic rule, from economic isolation and underdevelopment to an integrated market economy, and from war to peace. Come hear Myanmar expert and Jackson School of International Studies Professor Mary Callahan speak about her experiences living, researching, and working in Myanmar as this process has unfolded. She will also discuss a new USAID/Microsoft-supported information literacy project, housed in the Jackson School and initiated in collaboration with Burmese civil society groups and the Information School’s Technology & Social Change Group (more details on the project coming soon!).
February 6, 2014
In June 2013, I joined TASCHA’s Chris Coward to help launch a project on Innovation Spaces. This work builds on earlier conversations Chris has had with Christine Prefontaine and Beth Kolko, among others. Using a giant whiteboard, we shared, discussed, debated, synced, and altered our understanding over a period of weeks. The office got used to the hijacking of most of the common wall space. We had many questions: What are these spaces and what do we call them? What types of innovation do they foster? Why do people go to them?
January 28, 2014
In our research on innovation spaces, we needed to arrive at a definition of innovation that fit the spaces we were observing. It was not entrepreneurship, as that would be too narrow and not explain many of the uses. Rather, it was about problem solving, and making use of these spaces to find answers to individual questions in ways that were superior than trying to do it alone, on the internet, or otherwise. The works of three authors in particular resonated – Matt Kingdon, Ken Robinson, and Steven Johnson. Here are some snippets…
December 4, 2013
The International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) takes place in Cape Town, South Africa December 7-10, 2013. Researchers from TASCHA regularly participate in this conference, usually held every 18 months. This year, TASCHA Director Chris Coward will present a paper at the conference based on the Global Impact Study, “The impact of public access to ICTs: Findings from a five-year, eight-country study.”
November 21, 2013
This summer, TASCHA and Facilitating Change wrapped up work on Georgia Civil Society 2.0, implemented between May 2012 and June 2013. Since then, we’ve taken some time to reflect on the project: what we’ve achieved, what we’ve learned.
