Community IT Champions Initiative

BT Draft Discussion Document

Date: 12/10/2001

1. Apparent Causes of the Digital Divide

Please bear in mind our comments on the nature of the digital divide as being more than economic; indeed, we suspect from the answers about the cause of the digital divide in this document that people were given a limited list of choices from which they could select; for ease of reference we quote the answers in the document under reference:

The causes of the divide are believed to be:

Cost of Equipment 24%

Cost of Internet calls 23%

Lack of public access 15%

Low incomes 10%.

The immediate comments that we have about these figures are as follows:

As a factor in technological uptake cost is by no means a simple matter: vide uptake on VCR and more recently on 'advanced' forms of television reception such as satellite/cable/digital. Those who are poor may, conversely, uptake domestic technologies more rapidly because they go out less, rely more on domestic entertainment, like football etc.
In terms of the technologies and services concerned with the Internet we would note, discussed at much greater length in other documents, that: systems relying heavily on text are difficult for people with low literacy levels; Internet literacy requires more advanced skills than traditional literacy; there are also other physical and cognitive problems. In sum total this amounts, we think, to about half of the population, though the overlap between various bars to effective access are difficult to map.

Looking at the responses to the situation described above, the document says:

Most significant contribution BT could make is:

Help with connectivity in poor areas 20%

Help with providing equipment 19%

Lower 'surfing' costs 19%

Help with training 9%

The last of these is probably the nearest to the truth, though.

2. Underlying Causes of the Digital Divide

Based on our research and experience we would list the following as the key causes of the digital divide:

Economic
Lack of knowledge
Lack of skills* qwerty dependence
Bad design.

We would connect these factors in the following statements:

Although there is some evidence that there are economic factors in the digital divide we suspect that these are inextricably bound up with incentive; where people have a strong incentive to use technology because they understand its benefits, economic factors are usually not central. There is no correlation between economic status and television, VCR use and decreasing correlation in cellular telephony. It may be that the very poor have later uptake because they wait for reduction in 'real prices' but it is not clear whether the delay might also be because of a lack of perceived benefit.
There has not been a co-ordinated, commercial campaign to convince people of the benefits of computer/internet technologies. Government emphasis on the 'heavy' literacy end has made many people suspicious of the medium whose benefits are best spread, short of a commercial campaign, by word of mouth messages about benefits and ease of use, e.g.: grannies using the Internet to get pictures of grandchildren from the net largely spring from advice from children and peers, not from government or commercial propaganda.
A central problem concerning the Internet is that it is still perceived as a set of technologies designed by the clever for the clever. Conversation about it is still dominated by engineers, e.g.: "How big is your hard drive?!"
Many training costs arise directly from poor design. There are five sets of factors in design, which need to be taken into account to make the Internet more user friendly:
- Language engineering and other language-related functionality such as engineering INSIDE languages.
- Navigation simplicity and uniformity/interoperability, e.g.: The Power of Nine.
- Data labelling and stratification to facilitate manipulation and customisation.
- Tools and compliance procedures within data sets rather than separate from them; effective use of hypertext for orientation and searching.
- Simple user interrogation and voice-in facilities.
Key social factors to be added are:
- One of the key commodities we buy when we can afford it is privacy. The idea of geographic community is one wished upon people by one social class above them; in support for communities of interest we will return to this.
- People have a clear idea about the nature of broadcasting ownership but the Internet's 'power' of citizens is not so clear, complicated by the heavy Government pressure to describe its mission as 'improving'.
- The emphasis on training is counter-intuitive to the idea of citizenship; you don't expect to be trained in order to be a good citizen, or to enjoy yourself.
The nature of the information is such that even enthusiastic teenagers are leaving the net after about six months, vide: Wyatt, Sally: They Came, They Surfed, They Went Back to the Beach: why some people stop using the internet. Virtual Society? 1999. Said Business School. Oxford)
There is also a key set of factors around the receiver technology. Computers, as well as being forbidding, alien, not domestic electronics, are seen as places where privacy is difficult to assure, either because of networks or because of 'Big Brother'. People might access some health information, for example, using a television screen but they are most likely to want delicate information on the screen of a mobile phone. If you wanted to look up data on sexually transmitted diseases you would most likely use technologies in this descending order of preference:
- Private mobile phone
- Shred mobile phone
- Digital radio with screen
- Digital television
- Private PC
- Shared PC.

In summary, if you have a badly designed system which ignores human factors, breaks down frequently, is non-intuitive, is promoted by anoraks and Government ministers and is full of unclassified, undifferentiated information, much of which is rubbish or irrelevant, you can understand why some people can't be bothered with it; the miracle is that, in spite of these drawbacks, the Internet commands such a large and loyal following.

3. The Six Concepts.

Concept 1. The Campaign for Digital Inclusion.

Yes, we fully support this though we would warn that BT should not become too involved in the Government's target for online use which is unrealistic at best and bogus at worst. Given the factors cited in Section 2. above, it is unrealistic to think either that half of Government transactions will be digital by 2005 or that every citizen who wants to (and there is a weasel phrase) will be on line by then.

We particularly endorse BT's statement that the access to ICT is not an end in itself. In addition to delivering useful and enjoyable advice etc, it should be optimally accessible to people, possessing the attributes we mentioned in 2.d) above. The imparting of skills should not be seen as an inevitable inverse to design, i.e.: the poorer the design the more training/capability required.

Although this is commercially somewhat tricky, any campaign should promote good design even if it is an implicit critique of existing systems.

We support the concept of universal service but only as an industry requirement not as a requirement specific to certain companies. However, to limit this to geography is to misunderstand the problem. Accessibility (as opposed to availability) should be considered, not least within the context of the Disability Discrimination Act.

Potential Partners:

We would appreciate being included with something like the following:

humanITy, the world's first digital charity, exclusively focuses on ICT and social exclusion and specialises in digital information design and the relationship between design and accessibility. It is already an adviser to the UK Government and the European Union and is involved in leading edge work in information navigation, stratification and customisation.

Nab: We have already worked with Citizens Online, community and are in discussions with Rowntree.

Concept 2. The On-line Directory

We think a much more valuable idea is to look at some of the flagship community ICT projects and see where they have gone right and gone wrong. There is a heap of self congratulation but, when it comes down to it, you hear about the same few projects over and over again; this looks uncannily like the examples quoted in Third World Development. We need a dynamic, critical assessment of good practice rather than being an uncritical portal.

Compared with the benefits the costs might be very high, not least because while the costs are fixed the benefits depended on the external driver of the good practice being created elsewhere; the extent to which you share good practice depends critically on the extent to which it's being created and then made known to you. This is a very high risk venture for BT where it would not have enough control over what was being put out with its name attached.

It is rightly observed that there are many “mini networks” but we always need to ask: What size is optimal? The extent to which people come together holistically depends critically on information systems design rather than size of network. The better the taxonomy the better the mapping.

We will return later to "Templates" in Concept 6.

Concept 3. Helping Kids by Supporting Teachers.

We support this enthusiastically.

We need to learn from the limited success of the NGFL and related activities.

It may well be important to post basic resources onto the Web but what Bt could best do would be to facilitate a hierarchy of communities of Interest as set out in Concept 5. In other words, there are things that teachers want to talk about but there are very specific things geography teachers want to talk about and even more specialist things physical geography people want to talk about. This also fits with the Concept 6. idea of templates; there is already a huge piece of template in the testing framework and National Curriculum in Literacy and Numeracy Hours, in GCSE and other examinations; this could be livened and humanised within a large but easily grasped navigation system based on what teachers know and teach; they don't want yet another set of templates and navigation criteria.

As a start, because the content is vital but limited, I suggest we look at Literacy and Numeracy Hours and how we can help there.

Concept 4. A Prototype Wired Community.

A prototype of what? There seems to us to be an implication in this concept which is that there is an idea of geographical community, which can be better bound together and made more effective through cyberspace.

To quote from the document:

There are many different trials and tests going on around the UK, each addressing a different need or problem associated with the digital divide. But nowhere is there an integrated test taking place of all of the initiatives together.

The problem with mixing initiatives into a single pot is that elements of causality get lost on the number of variables; did this happen because of this, or that? Or was it an accident?

Looking at the list of activities (the activity is shown in quotes with our comments following):

"Access initiatives in community centres and other public places, including commercial premises".
Comments: This begs a number of questions about, for instance, community versus domestic access (digital television and telephone), some of which have been answered effectively by Sonia Liff (vide “Gateways to the Virtual Society: Innovation for Social Inclusion”, Virtual Society? Profile’99. Said Business Centre, Oxford). Still, there are some interesting matters about simple availability (which should by no means be confused with accessibility which refers to what you can grasp from information not whether you can simply get it). Some of these issues are discussed in 2.g. above.
"A campaign to maximise usage among specifically identified groups within the community to test what works best and what gaps may exist in content and usage capabilities".
Comments: This is a perfect example of a whole host of variables making it difficult to separate any pieces of causality: as we have pointed out, poor uptake may be associated with a huge number of factors from poor design to individual disability or cognitive limitation, lack of incentive or pure indifference. There is some important work to be done on barriers, incentives and disincentives and BT's own commercial people should be called in to help with this. One central reason why people don't want things is because a demand for it hasn't been properly created. I think most of this is marketing rather than a real barriers problem. Where there are barriers, these have been set out in Section 2 above which can be added to economics in Section 1. The whole lot, however, is daunting.
"Schools liaison, with special training and support for key teachers in each school as well as support for after school training for children".
Comments: This should be linked to Concept 3. Along with the suggestion about Literacy and Numeracy Hours, we might, then, want to add out of school clubs in ICT &c. This piece, then, could be 'lifted' out of the rest of this proposal for now, though see comments below, beginning with a).

"Skills training for local people".
Comments: yes, but these need to be tied to an output purpose; the process on its own is useless, so this should probably be divided between various classes of output such as education, employment, etc, not forgetting enjoying yourself. Learning to have a good time with ICT is a sadly neglected idea! This list in the document, for instance, has nothing about leisure.

"Working with local employers and employment agencies to provide training, resources and content for the local community".
Comments: This could and should be done as, again, a relatively self-contained piece of work.

"Support for local 'entrepreneurs' to provide low cost/free Internet based facilities to operate from and use".
Comments: Very good as long as the word 'entrepreneur' in the context of deprived geographical communities includes social entrepreneurs as well as the founders of SMEs.

"Ongoing measurement and assessment of the project including research among participants and non-participants to gauge what has/has not worked and develop continuous improvement"
Comments: See Section 4. On measurement but bear in mind the problem of attribution of cause and effect in an environment of multiple variables. I'm not being a picky academic here; it's important to know whether p combined with q causes r or whether it's contingent rather than causal; and if you get too many variables tracing the causality just gets harder.

Having said all of this, there are some really important questions to be asked about connectivity in physical communities. Here are ten questions:

Will on-line facilities strengthen or deepen elements of the curriculum for children and teachers?
Do children work better/longer with Internet access (vide Rockman et al.: Powerful tools for Schooling: Second Year Study of the Laptop Program. A Project for Anytime Anywhere Learning by Microsoft Corporation. Notebooks for Schools by Toshiba America Information Systems. October 1998. San Francisco, CA)
Does ICT provide stronger links between what children learn and employment opportunities?
Can the Internet facilitate help by the skilled for the unskilled? Is there an effective role for cybertwins?) What do entrepreneurs give back (other than precarious employment) for the free services they are offered?
Is there any evidence that virtual community strengthens real community?
In a virtual community, do the general rules of input and output apply, e.g.: equal input (absolute uniformity of provision) results in unequal output?
At what price to people value connectivity and is there a balance between that and what they can afford?
Are the ideas about receivers in 2.g. above broadly correct?
How much help do physical communities need in order to make their connectivity measurably effective for the least advantaged, economically or intellectually?

Notice that the questions depend upon a broad socio-economic sample; there is not much point asking how under-privileged people do when they are lumped together without much help.

In other words, the use of targeted funds to focus on communities, which are the most deprived, makes the same mistake we make with housing ghettos for poor people; it cuts them off from the community. This bears some relationship between Communities of Interest in Concept 5.

What most initiatives are testing is how people react to large amounts of digital information, not how the Internet helps them to work with other people.

In summary then, if you want to look at a totally wired community I would suggest:

A population of mixed intellectual, social and economic means
A manageable quantity of logistical and conceptual problems, without the least advantaged being labelled
A community which has some self-referential, recognisable boundaries (It is not useful to test the operation of community in a place which knows it is not a community)

There will be more discussion of some of these factors in Section 5 below.

Concept 5. Connecting Communities of Interest.

As you know, we have been involved in work in the West End of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. One of the most interesting aspects of the recent work relates to the annual visit to the community of a number of children from Chernobyl. This has created a wonderful community of interest and, it seems to us, at a moment of high global tension, partly fired by terrible, mutual, misunderstanding, there is no better time than now to create communities of interest spanning geography, politics, religion, social habits etc. Of course, there will be communities based round hobbies and professional interests but we believe that in the current climate the Internet's power to inform and generate reciprocity and mutuality is vital.

This should provide BT's campaign with a proper international dimension.

At this point you need to look carefully at enfranchisement. One of the problems which is arising in the current 'war against terrorism' is that the intelligentsia and theologians of different communities do not understand each other well enough. It is usually rich people that mess up the world and poor people who have to put up with it, not the other way round.

Looking again at the list in the document:

"Dispersed families"
Comments: this is an obvious and interesting case, which calls for a highly targeted initiative on elderly and/or women.

"Non English speaking groups"
Comments: the idea of the people of a country and its linguistic Diaspora helping each other is a critical idea and could contribute greatly to Third World Development. We have written extensively on this and are interested in experiments with mobile phone technology in developing countries with content on health &c developed by Diaspora.

"People with specific disabilities"
Comments: The statistics on the disabled on being housebound are terrible, even for people who are only blind or visually impaired.

While connectivity should never be a substitute for socialisation it can be an immense blessing. Here, however, we must stop looking at pure information exchange and look at such things as banking, shopping, benefits payment via the phone etc.

"Parents with young babies”, "Carers”, "National organisations/societies”
Comments: None.

To serve these groups requires a huge variety of resources in addition to a Web site and the skills of the users themselves. We have made brief comments about the top three classifications above, indicating how much resource would need to be committed. One reason why so many similar schemes fail is that people are simply given Web space and told to get on with it.

We are anxious, therefore, that we look critically at what it takes to establish a community of interest, particularly where the means of different parts of it vary widely. Here are three more questions:

Does anonymity and geographical distance blunt the resentment of different circumstances?
Do virtual communities want to become more 'real' through face-to-face contact?
What resources do people need to establish an effective 'wired' community of interest?

Research has shown, against the implication in the "Centres of Excellence" proposal that although wired communities sustain and develop 'real' relationships they do not precede them and they do not happen spontaneously. To give a brief example: if a group of people meet at a conference they may well establish a community of interest, agree its rules, and find a monitor but this will not work if a conference organiser proposes it as a precursor to the conference. Equally to the point in our context, one of the primary reasons why people are economically or socially disadvantaged is simply that they don't know how to organise themselves or those around them.

As set out, the BT proposal looks horribly 'top/down'. Having said all this, given the intractability of disadvantage within 'real' communities and the difficulty of pulling people out of deprivation, the digital escape, the cyber exit, the community of interest, need to be investigated to the very last degree to see what can be got out of them for the benefit of the least advantaged.

Concept 6. Building Templates

This is the concept that most recognises that people just can't be given a box of kit and software and be expected to get on with it. This was always a silly idea which grew out of the self sufficiency of academics and engineers - "It's obvious, isn't it?" - but a good deal of the thinking behind some of the Concepts in this document reflects that assumption and that what we are short of is a bit of money, space and push.

The list of templates provided in the document represents a good cross section of sectoral templates but below this, at a deeper level, it needs to be a set of generic templates. We have dealt with some of these aspects in Carey, K.: BT, ICT & Social Exclusion: Options in the Context of CSR. Report produced for BT Group Social Policy. April 2001, but here are a sample ten topics:

Helping yourself and getting help
Netiquette
Public and Private Communication
Navigation
Orientation
Size/Limits/Parameters
What you can/can't do
Collaboration
Copyright
Disputes Procedures.

The document concludes with four things people want:

Fast download
Easy and Efficient interface
Text which is clear and easy to read
Easy to use navigational structure.

We have a wealth of information about the last three; in many ways this is our core expertise.

4. The Measurement of Effectiveness.

The measurement of effectiveness depends fundamentally upon the collection of robust baseline data. In looking at effectiveness you are not measuring absolute output (which does not require a baseline) you are measuring the difference between the start of your intervention and a point further in time or in the deployment of resources; you mare measuring value added per resource over time.
The most tempting but misleading form of measurement is numeric: How many? How much? Our society is now sophisticated enough to know how to 'fix' numeric measurement by setting numeric targets which it knows can be exceeded or which mean nothing. An example of the former is to expect that an input will achieve a percentage result without saying what the baseline percentage result is. In other words, if 25% of a population can read a document but that is not stated but the project then says that by the end of it 25% will be able to read such a document, you would have to have terrible luck for the project not to be seen to work! An example of a meaningless target is where the meaning of the achievement is not defined as in: "Effective use of resources", depending on what "effective" means. There is, however, a vital third way between numeric nonsense and Lawyers' language.
The best starting point for measuring effectiveness, in spite of its weaknesses caused by beneficiaries knowing the answer you expect, is monitored self-assessment. Here are eight basic indicators of effectiveness (of which just projects only interest themselves in the last):
- Time you are on line
- Enjoyment of time
- Number of cyber friends
- Number of 'real friends'
- Something you've made that you're proud of
- Confidence to do what you want
- Self esteem
- Income.
The above indicators are not in strict logical order but income is deliberately placed last because it cannot be readily obtained or increased without some of the above. In any case, it is not clear that it is a good idea to make projects overtly economic even when that is the primary purpose.
Most ICT projects fail because they measure the wrong things; they largely measure human/computer interface skills increase regardless of all the external factors. It is not actually the use of the technology that matters but what people get out of it.
A whole new set of measurement is required for the collaborative work which the Internet facilitates but little has been done in this area and it is one in which we are particularly interested.

5. Community IT Champions Initiative

We generally support this Initiative, so the notes below must be seen in that context, i.e. they are detailed criticisms of what is generally the right approach:

The mapping data sounds interesting and it should be seen in conjunction with the Local Futures geographical connectivity data and viewed in the context of our ICT exclusion model.
The Champions scheme as outlined assumes that communities have everything except co-ordination; too many projects are simply trying to tie up bits of other projects. The investigations might show that far more needs to be done than to give a community an IT Champion.
Our experience in Newcastle and Brighton shows that the most difficult cases are people who lack fundamental skills such as self-discipline and self-organisation, time management and consistency. They require enormous human development input in order to succeed. They are almost always involved in crisis management on a daily basis, so establishing regular connectivity patterns is very difficult. They are also, and this is not surprising, low in self-esteem and not very good at self-tuition (distance or on-line learning). Most people chronically under-estimate the resource required to deal with this which is why economic and now ICT exclusion are so persistent.
Looking at the details and the budget; in our two community projects we have found it very difficult to be effective even with full-time, ICT qualified community development workers, so a part time catalyst raises some questions. In spite of community centre ICT capacity we have also found in Newcastle that even where we are supplying laptops for domestic and micro community use the outputs are still not good. Again, you need to look at Liff (ref: Concept 4). It follows from this that the whole project superstructure is very top heavy, with too many projects at the bottom without enough resource for each of them.
The deal seems to be that BT pays and Citizens Online manages the project. We think you would be better off seconding your own staff to be part time Champions, finding the budget for full-time community workers to work with them and using more resource for kit. You could also absorb the PR into your own corporate budgeting. We are not sure whether the PR is for the projects or the project sponsoring organisations; if the former, word of mouth is the only way.

Turning to the Additional Information:

We are working with Re:Source and the People's Network to look at content in libraries; you should also be aware of the Cybrarian project currently being planned by the DfES which we are trying to link with the People's Network initiative
As with comments above, we must be careful not to 'preach' to people, imposing a literacy agenda they are not interested in.
We would, as in Section 4 above, want wider measurement than raw connectivity statistics.
This proposal does not explain how computing would be very different from digital television. Our view is that the difference is in networking and collaboration, which needs special consideration.
An independent study on impact may be important but that will depend, as we have said above, on the establishment of the right baseline data.
We do not have access to the mapping but, as we have said earlier, a fundamental question is whether 'community' should be defined as the highest concentration of disadvantage you can find; this assumption needs to be questioned first.

6. Conclusion

We are willing to continue to comment informally on these proposals and, if necessary, formally and publicly.
We are willing to manage one or two of the IT Champions projects but only if they are much nearer to our idea of what is needed.
Our expertise lies in templates, procedures, digital information creation and navigation; we still believe there are key areas where we can be of use in this field in alliance with BT staff at Martlesham.
If, for a variety of reasons, we are not directly involved in the IT Champions project and related developments, we are prepared to manage the independent evaluation.

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