Digital Divide/s and Inclusion Minitrack – Notes from HICSS-42 Conference

Narcyz Roztocki and I chaired the digital divide/s and inclusion minitrack in HICSS-42. It was a great session. Special attention was given to Azari and Pick who tried through structural equation modeling to examine different factors that reflect digital inequality in different context in 110 countries. This paper was also nominated as the best paper of the mini-track.

Understanding Global Digital Inequality: The Impact of Government, Investment in Business and Technology, and Socioeconomic Factors on Technology Utilization/Rasool Azari and James B. Pick

Another paper that received attention was this of Coward, Gomez and Ambikar – An Assessment of Venues Providing Public Access to ICT:A Tale of 25 Countries. This paper reflects the landscape project under The Center for Information & Society (CIS). which examined public access venues (Libraries, telecenters and cybercafes) and theirimpact in the context of 25 countries. Recentely I published with two colleagues from CIS (Gomez and Ambikar) a paper that elaborates the methodology of analyzing digital divide/s and inequalities, and we exemplified it through this project. The methodology paper can be found here: http://ekarine.org/wp-admin/pub/BarzilaiGomezAmbikar.pdf andt he full reports of the 25 countries can be found here .

Here are the other two papers that presented in this session:

Local-Global: Reconciling Mismatched Ontologies in Development Information Systems/Jessica Seddon Wallack and Ramesh Srinivasan

Social Ties, Literacy, Location and the Perception of Economic Opportunity: Factors Influencing Telecentre Success in a Development Context/Arlene Bailey and Ojelanki Ngwenyama

HICSS-42, Hawaii, Big Island

Tags: Access, Development, Digital divide/s, HICSS, Inequality, Public Access