Bridging the digital divide
The Internet has ushered in the greatest period of wealth creation in history. It's rocked the way we deliver and receive information and the way we do business.
And so, for many, it is easy to accept euphoric claims - that the Internet is also bringing about a brave new world replete with an "electronic agora" and "online democracy".
It's not. More than 80% of people in the world have never even heard a dial tone, let alone surfed the Web. And the gap between the information haves and have-nots is widening.
In a speech at Telecom 99 in Geneva, Switzerland, UN Secretary General Kofi Anan warned of the danger of excluding the world's poor from the information revolution.
"People lack many things: jobs, shelter, food, health care and drinkable water. Today, being cut off from basic telecommunications services is a hardship almost as acute as these other deprivations, and may indeed reduce the chances of finding remedies to them," he said.
Bridging the digital divide
The hype for everything online obscures the reality about how technology is changing life at the end of the 20th century.
Facts first
First the figures. The statistics on the basic building block of connectedness - that is, phone lines - are stark.
According to the latest UN Human Development Report, industrialised countries, with only 15% of the world's population, are home to 88% of all Internet users. Less than 1% of people in South Asia are online even though it is home to one-fifth of the world's population.
The situation is even worse in Africa. With 739 million people, there are only 14 million phone lines. That's fewer than in Manhattan or Tokyo. Eighty percent of those lines are in only six countries. There are only 1 million Internet users on the entire continent compared with 10.5 million in the UK.
Even if telecommunications systems were in place, most of the world's poor would still be excluded from the information revolution because of illiteracy and a lack of basic computer skills.
In Benin, for example, more than 60% of the population is illiterate. The other 40% are similarly out of luck. Four-fifths of Websites are in English, a language understood by only one in 10 people on the planet.
Barriers
The lack of resources in poor communities can't explain the technology gap alone.
In the developing world, there is still resistance to the idea that technology is a quick-fix.
Take the African Virtual University. The World Bank-sponsored programme has broadcast over 2000 hours of instruction to over 9000 students in all regions of sub-Saharan Africa. The initiative has allowed AVU students to take courses given by professors from world-renowned educational institutions in Africa, North America, and Europe.
That does not impress Ethiopian Meghistab Haile: "With that money just imagine how many lecturers you could have. If the World Bank is really wanting to help African universities then the first step would be to encourage and support the Africans to return back. In the end it is only the Africans who could solve their problems."
Others complain that high-tech education - available only to a select elite - is not worth it when so many places on the continent are still without electricity and running water.
"Our priorities are hygiene, sanitation, safe drinking water," said Supatra Koirala who works at a private nursing home in Kathmandu. "How is having access to the Internet going to change that?"
How to close the gap
As the famous Alcoholics Anonymous saying goes: Admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery. International organisations, governments and private institutions are just starting to do this.
When I was first talking about the Internet in the developing world in 1992, I was called a 'technofascist' and a 'cybercolonist'," said Larry Irving. "Now I don't get those comments, just questions about how can we get this - and fast."
Magda Escobar, Executive Director of Plugged In, a non-profit working to bring technology resources to poor communities in California, agrees.
The convergence of a lot of different interests has put this on the agenda," she said. "The general public is interested in having access to the tech revolution, businesses want to expand their markets, schools are interested in trying to change the way kids are taught. Everyone's awareness is coming together at the same time.
Experts like Mr Irving estimate that the Internet will be virtually global in five to seven years. But for that to happen infrastructure must be put in place, which means a lot of money - and fast.
The Net may be the wave of the future but age-old problems still apply.
The Digital Divide and Indian Country
As other communities focus on bringing Internet connectivity to their citizens, many American Indians and Alaska Natives have yet to be connected to a basic telephone network. In 1999, three reports examining the state of connectivity in Indian Country found that Native Americans face an urgent situation - one in which telecommunications and information technology infrastructure capabilities fall far behind the rest of the United States.
The digital divide in Indian Country can be seen to have five distinct components, all of which must be addressed in order to achieve technological equality.
American Indians and the Digital Divide
In June 2000, NCAI received a grant from the AOL-Time Warner Foundation to provide national leadership for tribal nations that are attempting to bridge the digital divide in their communities. The grant period began on August 1 and will extend to July 31, 2001. During this time, the NCAI Digital Divide Task Force will work with tribes to develop strategic partnerships and policy recommendations to provide technology access, education and training, and economic development to Indian Country.
The Task Force held its first Tribal Leaders Summit on November 16 during the NCAI's 57th Annual Session in St. Paul, MN.
By all accounts, the first NCAI Tribal Leaders Digital Divide Summit, held in conjunction with the NCAI Annual Session in St. Paul, Minnesota, was a resounding success. Approximately 70 people representing tribal governments, tribal and non-Indian telecommunications companies, federal agencies, and non-profit organizations attended the four-hour Summit.
Following opening remarks from NCAI President Susan Masten, Marcia Warren, Special Advisor to the Secretary of Commerce, provided an introduction to digital divide issues in Indian Country. Karen Buller, President of the National Indian Telecommunications Institute, explored current efforts to address the Digital Divide in Indian Country. Then, Albert Soatikee, Secretary of the Board of Gila River Telecommunications, Inc., and Victor Rocha, the founder and operator of Pechanga.net, discussed how they are using technology to spur economic development and to provide relevant information/advocacy tools.
After the panel discussion, participants broke into smaller workgroups, where they had the opportunity to delve deeper into the following areas with the expert panelists:
Access;
Economic Development
Sovereignty; and
Content.
Each of the workgroups provided suggestions for additional Task Force study or implementation. These recommendations will form the basis for planning a second Tribal Leaders*s Summit in the spring, as well as the Task Force*s workplan for the remainder of the AOL Foundation grant period. NCAI will provide regular updates on their implementation, and, in the meantime, tribal leaders are strongly encouraged to contact NCAI with comments and suggestions.
The high cost of telecommunications must be addressed
Provide incentives to businesses to provide services in Indian Country
Information dissemination on the digital divide and technology must be increased
Service quality must be improved
The low service population provides a barrier to access
Increased access means increased economic opportunity at home
The Federal Communications Commission should allow tribes to determine income eligibility under the Lifeline/Link-Up programs
Need to increase the opportunity for tribal-business partnerships
The barriers to access the spectrum should be lowered, and tribes should have a portion of the spectrum reserved for their use
Distance learning opportunities should be increased
Need for feasibility studies
Develop resource lists of business/contracting opportunities
Increase technical assistance funding
Develop model programs and success stories (maybe with the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Develop suggestions for technology-based businesses
Provide information on e-commerce
Create a checklist on the steps needed to become connected to technology
Create a website that would "red flag wanna-be*s" and false websites
Examine the ownership of cultural content
Develop tribal codes to fine "pretenders"
Establish a website that would show the legal and political infrastructure needed to protect sovereignty with respect to telecommunications
Ask AOL to create a toll-free or local numbers for Indian Country
The FCC should honor the government-to-government relationship by recognizing tribal telephone companies without state recognition
The FCC should punish telephone companies that fail to offer Lifeline/Link-Up services
Examine the ownership of airspace
Establish a NCAI standing committee on telecommunications
Educate federal officials
All federal agencies, including the Patent and Trademark Office, should have an Indian policy in place
Tribes should have right of first refusal on exclusive use of seal and name
Content
Develop technical assistance and funding for website creation
Create a clearinghouse of model websites
Provide awards to websites
Increase access and training for web development software
Provide information about legal and copyright issues
Need information about creating traffic, security, and firewalls
Assist with the development of tribal intranets
Explore the creation of websites that would have one tier for tribal members and another tier for the general public
An Inside Look at the New Digital Divide Database
The Benton Foundation's Communications Policy Program announced a major overhaul of its Digital Divide Network web site
(http://www.DigitalDivideNetwork.org).
DDN, first launched in October 1999 as the Helping.org Digital Divide Clearinghouse, has evolved into a central exchange point for practitioners and policymakers working to bridge the digital divide. The new DDN web site, though stylistically similar to previous versions of the site, incorporates a range of new features, including its most groundbreaking effort to date: a national database of digital divide-related services. This database, the largest of its kind on the Internet, helps citizens easily identify local libraries, community technology centers and additional neighborhood entities that provide free or low-cost Internet access, IT training and other community technology services.
This article is intended to serve as an overview of the Digital Divide Database, including the basic uses of database-driven websites and the coalition of organizations that came together to build the database. The latter sections of the article highlight some of the ways users can take advantage of the database's many features.
Why A Database-Driven Approach?
Like the majority of sites on the Internet, previous incarnations of the DDN site were essentially static web pages. In other words, every time DDN staff wanted to add a feature story or update the home page, they would have to manually change the content in HTML, the coding language of the web. Similarly, if a specific editorial change had to occur on multiple pages, site editors were forced to adjust each page by hand, one at a time. For small web sites comprising only a handful of individual pages, manually updating static pages is often a simple matter. But for sites that may include hundreds or even thousands of individual web pages, the prospects of keeping content both fresh and accurate can be daunting, to say the least.
For these reasons, we began exploring the potential of upgrading DDN to a dynamic database. Database-driven web sites, unlike static sites, store content in an underlying database, not unlike the way you would store mailing address records in a simple desktop database. The web site is then programmed to "pull" content from the database and insert it into appropriate points on one or more web pages. So instead of requiring site managers to manually plug in articles or photos one web page at a time, a database-driven site could automatically update many individual pages simultaneously each time database records are created, edited or deleted.
Along with the staff time-saving benefits of a database-driven web site, the use of a database would allow DDN to develop new online features, including automatically updated news and events listings, personalized content for individual users and enhanced search tools. But among all the various services that could be offered via a database, there was one particular idea that stood out above the rest: a national digital divide directory that could help citizens identify a spectrum of IT-related opportunities in their communities.
Developing the Digital Divide Database
As early as 1999, the American Library Association (ALA) and the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) separately began work towards expanding their online databases that track the location and statistics of America's public libraries. In March 2000, independent of these efforts, the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS), the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Department of Education's Community Technology Centers Program formed a working group in cooperation with ALA. The goal of this group was to create a national database of libraries, CTCs and other community information and technology initiatives. During the same time period, the Benton Foundation also began to ponder the idea of creating a national digital divide database that would significantly augment the directory of digital divide initiatives then contained on the DigitalDivideNetwork.org web site.
The reason these groups felt the need to develop a unified database was straightforward - the distribution of information in multiple databases makes it difficult for users to find what they need. Additionally, local digital divide initiatives that are not affiliated with a national entity are sometimes hard to identify -- even local project coordinators often have a difficult time keeping track of what other digital divide activities are going on in their own community. And because a number of the directories were only available online, they were often totally inaccessible to the people who needed the information most -- citizens without Internet access or IT-related skills.
In May 2000, ALA facilitated the development of a coalition of these separate efforts into a single taskforce that could begin discussions on how to implement a unified online digital divide database. Discussions quickly progressed when the Kaiser Family Foundation expressed an interest in developing a national digital divide Public Service Announcement campaign targeting young people. The campaign would feature English- and Spanish-language commercials that would encourage youth to take advantage of local IT opportunities, including free Internet access and training programs. In order for this PSA campaign to succeed, though, it would need to provide a way for young people to identify local initiatives.
The Kaiser PSA campaign was the shot in the arm needed to spur the group's development of a national digital divide database. With funding from the AOL/Time Warner Foundation, the Benton Foundation joined forces with a network of national organizations working to bridge the digital divide. The ALA, NCLIS, NCES, CTCNet, NTIA, HUD Neighborhood Networks/IFC Consulting, IMLS, PowerUp, Univision, OMB Watch, the Federal Communications Commission and GeoLib.org, among dozens of other groups who submitted information about their work for compilation in the database.
Additionally, the project partners developed two separate campaign web sites that would be featured in the new PSA advertisements: ConnectNet.org and Conectado.org (Spanish for "connected"). When viewers would see the PSAs on television, they would have two options for accessing database information. If they already had Internet access and were interested in seeing what other activities were available locally, they could visit either http://www.Conectado.org or http://www.ConnectNet.org and search for local organizations. If viewers lacked Internet access, they could call a toll-free number featured in the commercial (1-866-583-1234) and ask an operator to conduct a search for them.
After almost nine months of non-stop work, the new database and redesigned DDN web site were completed in early 2001. The PSA campaign, featuring two 30-second spots developed by an award-winning director of Nike commercials, officially launched on March 27. The two PSAs will run on national networks and local television stations across the United States.
How to Search for Organizations in the Database
Internet users may currently access the database from three separate web sites. DigitalDivideNetwork.org features a "Get Connected" icon on the right side of its home page; users simply have to type in a zip code (an American postal code, such as 10003 for New York City) and press the "submit" button. For users of either the http://www.connectnet.org or http://www.Conectado.org sites, a similar option appears at the center of each home page.
Once a user has submitted a zip code, the web site then connects with a map-generating database hosted by MapQuest, Inc, which is donating its services to the campaign. MapQuest's database compares the zip code with a collection of over 20,000 organizations submitted by the various campaign partners, then generates a graphical street map for the zip code in question. If there are local organizations within the proximity of the area featured on the street map, the database will plot out their location on the map by generating small black circles with a number inside them.
Along with the street map displayed on the user's screen, the database will also generate a text table featuring basic contact information for the organizations featured on the map. The organizations, listed in order of proximity, each feature a number that corresponds with the numbered black circles on the map. This feature allows the user to match organizations to their exact geographic location. Users may also click on the name of an individual organization and access additional details about it, such as operating hours, types of courses offered, whether they offer free Internet access, etc. At minimum, all organizational listings include an address and telephone number, and many also include a URL for their web site. (An important note: because an organization's information can sometimes change faster than the database can be updated, users should always call the organization to verify its information before attempting to utilize its services.)
It's also possible for users to access city- and statewide listings of digital divide initiatives. By visiting DDN's advanced search option (http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/content/search/index.cfm, located just below the basic search tool), users may fill out the parts of the form that request the name of a city and/or a state. The web site will then output all known database records for that area. For large states, of course, this might mean hundreds of listings -- New York and California, for example, each have nearly 1200 entities in the database. Nonetheless, this option can be particularly helpful for individuals interested in identifying digital opportunities across a wide region.
The Digital Divide Database is the first large-scale attempt to plot the locations of organizations providing free/low-cost Internet services at the local level. In the future, additional information such as local literacy programs or community-related online content may be added to the database. Similarly, we hope to expand the database internationally in order to identify the locations of digital divide services outside of the United States. Recent advances in web protocols, including the popularization of Extensible Markup Language (XML) could potentially allow multiple databases to share information with each other, interacting as part of a worldwide network of local digital divide directories. There have also been proposals to incorporate the results of the 2000 Census into the database, allowing users to identify the location of digital divide services as well as the demographic and economic status of surrounding neighborhoods. While such possible developments have yet to be agreed upon, they demonstrate the database's potential of becoming a truly powerful geographic and informational resource for combating the digital divide.
How to Edit or Add Your Organization's Data
In order to keep organization listings as accurate and complete as possible, the database has been equipped with mechanisms to allow individual organizations to submit new data. Organizations' must go through a verification/approval process by DDN staff in order to insure that data accuracy is maintained. If you would like your organization to be included in the database, or if you would like to edit data currently contained in the system, please complete the following instructions:
1. First check and see if your organization is in the database. Go to http://www.DigitalDivideNetwork.org and type in your organization's zip code in the "Get Connected" search form on the right-hand side of the page. If your organization appears on the results page, it's in the database. If it doesn't, it's probably not in the database. If you want a second opinion, go to the advanced search page (http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/content/search/index.cfm) and enter the name of your organization in the place next to where it says "title." If your results come back without a listing, that means you'll have to enter your organization's information from scratch.
2. Once you've verified whether your organization is in the database or not, select "Join DDN Now" on the left navigation bar. This will allow you to register as an affiliate of the DDN web site, which is required if you'd like to add or edit data.
3. Fill out the form as completely as you can. If your organization is already in the database, you'll want to pay particular attention to the "Organization Association" option. (If you're not in the database, you should skip this option entirely and fill out the rest of the form before proceeding to Step 4.) This option is used to identify you as having a relationship with your organization. Here you should type in the name of the organization you wish to associate yourself with and request editing privileges for its listing. Unfortunately, the system currently allows you to associate yourself with only one organization. So if you want to edit multiple organizations, you'll have to re-register multiple times. (We hope to fix this situation in the near future.) To associate yourself with an organization in the database, type in the name its and press "find organizations." The page will reload with a list of organizations that have the same or similar spelling. When you find the organization you want to associate yourself with, be sure to select it with a mouse click before submitting your registration. If you don't, the system will not identify you as wanting editing privileges for that organization. 4. Submit your registration by pressing the "register" button at the bottom of the page. If you've requested an association with an organization, DDN staff will be alerted to your request, and they will then verify whether you are actually associated with the organization whose data you wish to edit. Meanwhile, you'll get an automatic email from DDN saying that you've been added to the network as a member. The email will include your login name and a temporary password, which you should change immediately by clicking on the URL listed in the email. Once you've done this, your DDN membership will be activated.
What you do next depends on whether you're editing your organization's listing or if you're entering your organization's data into the system for the first time.
If you're trying to edit your organization's listing: As soon as your affiliation with your organization has been verified by DDN staff, you'll receive another email confirmation entitled "You Have Been Approved!" Inside this email is will be a URL for a web page that includes all the data we know about your organization. At the bottom of this page is another link entitled "Update your organization!" -- this link leads to a form that will let you update your organization's data. Click on it, and you'll then reach the editing form. Edit your data as accurately as possible, then press the submit button.
If you're entering your organization's data into the system for the first time: Once you've registered as a member of DDN and changed your password, you can add a new organizational listing to the database by filling out the form at http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/content/organizations/suggest.cfm.
Whether you're editing or adding organizational data, DDN staff will review your edits for accuracy and appropriateness before adding your information to the database. Please note it may take several days for the new information to appear publicly. If your changes aren't apparent within a week, please email ddivide@benton.org and let us know.
How to Post Other Content to DDN
Registered DDN members also have privileges to post other content on the web site, including articles, news stories, events listings and web resources. Anyone can join DDN, and membership is free. The only requirement is that you have an email address, since the database uses your email address to verify that you were the one who actually requested DDN membership. Once you've completed your registration (as described in Step 3, above), you can select from the following options.
To post an article (written by you or a colleague, but you must have copyright permission in order for it to appear on DDN):
http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/content/stories/suggest.cfm?type=1
To post a news item:
http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/content/news/suggest.cfm
To post an event (conferences, symposia, lectures, etc.) on our calendar:
http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/content/events/suggest.cfm
To post a web resource:
http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/content/webresources/suggest.cfm
Once you've submitted the information, DDN staff will determine its appropriateness and edit it as needed. You will receive an email confirmation to inform you whether or not the information has been added to the web site.
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