News

February 28, 2012

Two years ago — on February 27, 2010 — a massive earthquake struck Chile, followed by a tsunami that devastated several coastal communities. Libraries and telecenters played an important and unexpected role in responding to the crisis, helping to restore communication and promote recovery. Produced in partnership with the Assocacion de Telecentros Activos de Chile (ATACH), the Technology & Social Change Group’s latest series of publications on Global Impact Study related research project — Disaster response in Chile: The critical role of libraries and telecenters — examines post-disaster information and communication needs, services provided by libraries and telecenters, response times, and factors contributing to successes and shortfalls. It also provides recommendations to improve emergency planning efforts.

February 22, 2012

Much of the Global Impact Study data comes from our public access ICT user survey, venue survey, and non-user survey in Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Ghana, and the Philippines. Conducting such surveys in diverse countries is a complex process that requires rigorous methodologies to ensure the data and subsequent findings are sound. Our methodology report presents the context and the methodologies used for each of the three surveys. In addition to providing details about the survey implementation in each of the five countries, the report also covers the challenges we faced with these surveys and our mitigation strategies for these challenges.

February 15, 2012

The Global Impact Study is pleased to announce that we have just launched a web library, through which users can search for and download Global Impact Study reports, tools, papers, data, and other documents. We will continue adding to the library over the coming months.

January 30, 2012

Many of the Global Impact Study research partners will be attending ICTD 2012 in Atlanta in March. In addition to TASCHA staff members, representatives from our survey implementation teams from Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Ghana, and the Philippines will attend, as will some of the principal investigators of our in-depth studies. Components of the Global Impact Study will be highlighted in two open sessions and one poster presentation.

TASCHA Talk: Chris Coward and Michelle Fellows February 2,  2012 Public libraries play vastly different roles in providing Internet access and information services around the world. In some countries they are active players and have adopted new technologies to help people meet their information needs. In other countries, libraries are routinely overlooked when new information…

January 13, 2012

Who uses public access ICTs? With the release of the first survey working paper, Public access to ICTs: Sculpting the profile of users, the Global Impact Study offers insight into who the users of public access ICTs are. Written by George Sciadas, with input from Hil Lyons, Chris Rothschild, and Araba Sey, this working paper results from data analysis of the user surveys in Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Ghana, and the Philippines.

December 6, 2011

One of the research questions the Global Impact Study is considering is the relationship between the costs and benefits of providing and using public access to information and communication technologies (ICTs). Understanding this relationship is important for governmental and non-governmental decision makers who fund or are thinking about funding public access ICT venues. There is a multitude of approaches in the cost-benefit analysis field for examining this issue, as well as a multitude of perspectives from which it could be studied. The Global Impact Study is employing three different methods to estimate the use and non-use benefits of providing public access to ICTs and examine how these are distributed by geographic and demographic characteristics. Tyler Davis, PI for the Benefit Cost Analysis in-depth study, describes the three methods.

December 1, 2011

Following Open Cambodia 2011, I spent a day touring libraries with Margaret Bywater, a 25 year veteran of Cambodian libraries and development work. Margaret is at the epicenter of the movement to train librarians and open libraries in Cambodia. It is an uphill struggle because the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970′s […]

Global Impact Study developer Alex Tulinsky presented a poster, “Vizmo: Open-Source Tools for Geospatial Data in Web Applications,” at University of Washington’s GIS Day (Geographic Information Systems) on November 16, 2011. The poster he presented provides an overview of software components used in the upcoming 2.0 version release of the Global Impact Study inventory database web application.

November 21, 2011

This mind map lays out a framework for thinking about “innovation grounds” — spaces where people can come together and generate ideas, solutions, knowledge, culture, and relationships. It emerged from perceiving coworking spaces as next-generation telecentres; seeing connections between telecentres, coworking spaces, hackerspaces, and libraries; and being somewhat exasperated at how libraries are often overlooked as key actors in community development — despite the fact that they’ve always been places where people convene, learn, and create (especially information… and we’re in the information age, Hello!).