ICTS for Rural, Indigenous and Other Disadvantaged Communities: Cross Cultural and Sustainability Issues source – Culture and Public Action (Rao and Walton) April 13, 2006 Ramesh Srinivasan – Department of Information Studies UCLA intellectual property of Ramesh Srinivasan/ucla

Three key questions: How can ICTs impact development in culturally specific scenarios? How can communities that are non-technological and non-literate still benefit from ICTs toward the aim of sustained development? How can ICTs impact communities through their ability to connect populations and share resources (servers/clients and web/portable ICT-based connections)?

Some key findings: ICTs can be utilized to gather community-articulated development indicators, enabling dialogues and sustainable solutions with development professionals ICTs can generate local economic impact when built on community goals, and current development practices within community ICTs can be developed and sustained when based around community-specific behaviors/realities Cross-regional e-strategies for ICT development ICTs can share knowledge via localized ICTs if they can acknowledge the underlying context behind the information that is being shared.

Methodology in ICT development projects - community-centered information and literacy (cross culturally often appears in narrative form) ** mobile phones (voice), video and visioning - ontologies: information systems, what the system shared should be built around community-specific perceptions: where the community meets the code - social design and deployment: how can systems sustain and become embedded within communities? - write up and dissemination of best practices – Developing e-strategies for a certain demographic or region

Two projects – goal is to identify the best practices occurring across cases and methods of research I. Tribal Peace (Salton Sea/Baja California/San Diego County (CA))– How ICTs can re-engage a dispersed and marginalized Native American set of reservations to locally develop educational, cultural, and economic infrastructures. II. Village Incubators and Oral Cultures (Andhra Pradesh – Godavari District) –. how can an oral community create and reflect on its own technological information and utilize this process to generate community development indicators?..how can mobile phones allow information to be accessed according to non-literate behaviors?

tribal peace

tribal peace: precontact

tribal peace: spanish incursion

tribal peace: GIS-generated mapping

Impacts of Tribal Peace toward impacting Community Development Schools and Local Education: Timely, Locally-specific curricula, Engaged with community priorities, Education as focused around bridging the inter-reservational distance, Education involving the creation and design of ICTs and ICT content, Distance learning enabled Health – Digitization and preservation of native issues in health, allowing external parties to work with local issues; Native remedies are preserved and connected to clinics on reservations, Issues of obesity/diabetes, etc. are discussed and externalized Economic – Local businesses formed around sharing of assets/resources across distance, Community needs are perceived by viewing and browsing system content (eg housing/casinos/technologies), expansion of social networks Cultural – Digitization of language, songs – Allowing identity to remain in work with external parties

Rebirth metaphor & creation of narratives

Industry Village Incubators: How ICTs can enable community development indicators to be envisioned, and investments to be returned through sustenance?

tribal peace: GIS-generated mapping

Defense (Politics, Religion, War, Health)

Non-Players(Pavement Dwellers, Outcasts)

Methodology and Data Collection (Village Incubators) Partnership with non-govermental organizations (Byrraju foundation) Video and Information Production and sharing within Community Transitions into ICT development initiative and indicator articulations (Menou, 1990; Arunachalam, Srinivasan(2006)) Study of the shifts in capacity building (Sen), information poverty (Gigler and others), discovery and identification of development indicators (Srinivasan), edevelopment (Schware), social network impacts of resource-sharing within the community (Wellman and Gulia; Hampton and Wellman), and relationships with development professionals (Srinivasan, UNESCO)

Channeling Information Creation and Sharing into ICTs and other Development Solutions Identifications of indicators that may sustain and work within the community via the information-sharing/indicator-mapping approach (in both examples) How this functions in marginalized/depressed (Native comms) – Oral and Ritualistic (Godavari villages) communities Impacts this can have on ICT development Information services in laptops (100$ laptop/Digital Divide Network/WSIS) Mobile phone information access services and interfaces (oral-mind interfaces) Micro-enterprise ICT utilizations can emerge from the visioning process

Interests – Channeling this research in ICT (e-development) and other development Initiatives conducted by World Bank groups and professionals Ongoing projects: Los Angeles South Asian Diasporic Media and Information Orality and Voice Distance Learning, Indigenous Development in Central Asia Questions: April 13,