Making a World of Difference: It in a Global Context
Making a World of Difference: It in a Global Context
Governance lessons from the experience of telecentres in Kerala
European Journal of Information Systems - Special section: PACIS 2004
The qualitative interview in IS research: Examining the craft
Information and Organization
Digital literacy: Problems faced by telecenter users in Mexico
Information Technology for Development - Information Technology Research in Latin America
The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid
The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid
Intermediated technology use in developing communities
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Exploring the interplay between community media and mobile web in developing regions
Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Human-computer interaction with mobile devices and services
E-government intermediaries and the challenges of access and trust
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)
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Donor and government funded Internet kiosks, telecentres and community multimedia centres continue to be implemented in developing countries, yet many remain underutilised, and subsequently shut down. This paper argues that a large part of this is because not enough attention is paid to the information intermediaries - the centre or kiosk manager and staff, whose responsibility it is to translate government or donor policy at field level, and make ICTs more accessible to the public. There appears to be insufficient research on these critical individuals. Drawing on the ideas of contradiction and conflict from Giddens's structuration theory, and Goffman's concept of performance, we present the position of information intermediaries at a donor funded community multimedia centre in rural India. The analysis illustrates that the intermediaries stand on a shaky bridge between various groups of stakeholders. Firstly, they are somewhat condescending towards the community they are working with. Secondly, they are in turn regarded by their superiors as the bottom of the (developmentalist) pyramid. Thirdly, they encounter contradiction and conflict with other stakeholder groups. Fourth, they manipulate their performance according to the circumstances required. While information intermediaries play a critical role in facilitating public access to ICTs, they can also hinder it, and we call for greater care paid to these intermediaries when such centres are implemented.