Ben Anderson and Mark Gaved discuss how ICT can help communities generate higher social capital and thus better quality of life while suggesting some policy priorities to address the social capital gap in society.
Background
Social capital - the reserve of goodwill generated through people’s social interactions - is a key resource on which individuals and communities can draw to support their everyday activities. Through this reserve of goodwill people gain access to the skills and knowledge as well as social support of others. Quality of life is widely seen as an indicator of societal wellbeing. Measures of quality of life include personal dimensions such as health and wealth as well as social and psychological well-being, together with external factors such as access to local resources, amenities and local environmental conditions. Some of these aspects are affected by social capital. Thus a key question in current policy circles is whether ICT can increase social capital and thus improve quality of life in local communities?
There has been considerable enthusiasm for the idea that ICTs can foster local community ties through education, job opportunities, encouraging community activities and increasing general sociability. Externally initiated and funded ‘community networks’ form a key element of government proposals to overcome the ‘digital divide’, for example extending the pilot UK Online Centres (Cabinet Office 2005), and the Wired Up Communities project (Devins, Darlow, Petrie and Burden 2003). However, researchers are increasingly questioning the types of opportunity that such community networks offer, and the types of social change they can facilitate.
We have been researching the evidence for both short and long term effects of community networks on social capital and quality of life to help guide policy recommendations for future developments and their maintenance
Overview of Results
We have found that detailed research into the effects of community network initiatives on any kind of social outcomes is scarce, especially over the long term. This may in part be because it was assumed that their effects would be positive, but also because of the relatively short-term nature of the projects and constrained forms of ‘impact analysis’, if carried out at all. This makes it almost impossible to know what the long-term effects of such activities are, despite continuing large scale public investments. In a search for evidence we have examined material from a wide range of countries both inside and outside the European Union to draw a rich comparative picture of the effects of community networks.
We have found evidence that most ICT initiatives support community development of social capital although it seems the “rich get richer” with those communities already rich in social capital benefiting the most: it is still an open question as to how to benefit less well connected communities. Initiatives can also contribute to a broad range of quality of life indicators but it appears that the effects are often short term.
There is also evidence that the communication tools provided by community networks can help groups to self-organise to achieve local action with respect to environmental issues and, in once case, the ICT infrastructure itself. However this may again be a case of those most socially minded taking advantage of a tool they were already familiar with.
There is some evidence that older people, with more free time but more acutely aware of issues of mobility use local ICT initiatives to enhance their social and leisure activities with potentially positive outcomes for perceptions of health and well-being.
Our research suggests that top-down, centrally managed projects are prone to a range of problems that make their long-term sustainability doubtful in contrast to grassroots initiatives owned and managed by the communities themselves. Grassroots initiatives may offer a more sustainable model for local ICT provision than policy driven outside interventions: “the very fact that the project is not dependent on external money means that there is nothing to run out of” (Davies 2004). Grassroots initiatives may be more sustainable, as they are supported from within the community usually on a financially self-sustaining model, but often draw heavily on the community’s social capital, which can be spent as well as accrued through the maintenance of the initiative. As a result there is a need to help develop links between individuals and communities to resolve ICT problems when resources of community are stretched and smaller communities often do not have the technical expertise nor the funds to support community networks. This means that cooperative collaborations need to be supported, such as the Community Broadband Network.
Finally, it is important to remember that the stage in the lifecycle of the community at which data is gathered will determine how successful the community appears to be because the different characteristics of early and late adopters will always influence the data collected.
Recommendations for policy makers
Based on our research we offer the following recommendations:
- Policy initiatives should be oriented towards grassroots actions and to provision via social enterprises. Sustainability should be encouraged through committed long term (5-10 years) low-level funding.
- Collaborations between grassroots initiatives should be encouraged and actions (such as financial support) to help exchange of knowledge and experience through the setting up and support of associations should be taken.
- There should be an explicit strategy to transfer from Government/NGO ‘provision’ to community self-provision and ownership during the lifetime of any given initiative.
- Funding agencies should consider providing support for the development of social capital that links separate groups, as this appears to create the most resiliency within communities.
- Development of local ICT initiatives should consider first developing or assuring the presence of social capital within communities before the introduction of technology.
- Home access is preferred over local (e.g. telecentre) access. Telecentres provide a “third place” and are valuable in encouraging support, training, and cohesion across different groups within communities, , but usage of public access facilities is limited by social and cultural factors.
- ‘Technological capital’ is required. Technological skills allow individuals to produce their own cultural products as well as being consumers, leading to increased social capital. Initiatives should consider very carefully how they can provide this though easy access to free training and experimentation.
- Initiatives need to go up the citizens’ value chain - technology interventions will not be used if they don’t address community purposes.
Figure 1: The citizen’s value chain and the role of local ICT initiatives (after Gaved and Mulholland 2004) - Tools and frameworks for self-production of content and services as well as for the self-reproduction of community should be created and supported to enable citizens to build the content and services they want not the ones ‘we’ think they should have.
- A systematic programme of follow-up impact assessment research should be initiated on existing or recent initiatives to understand their long-term social impact and costs/benefits. In addition all new Government funded initiatives should insist on the implementation of longer-term (> 4-5 years) multi-method studies of their social impact as a condition of funding.
- Policy makers and academics research goals are seen as too abstract by community activists. Often their involvement in grassroots initiatives is seen as getting in the way of the real work, an amusing distraction at best and often viewed with caution and scepticism “entertaining, but not useful”. Policy makers need to support grassroots activists to enable them to engage in reflective thinking beyond their day-to-day concerns (setting up and running their networks) and carry out their own research, or participate as equal partners in externally supported research projects.
Further reading
Gaved, M and Anderson, B. (2006), 'The impact of local ICT initiatives on social capital and quality of life', Chimera Working Paper 2006-06, University of Essex.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by SOCQUIT, a Specific Support Action (SSA) of the European 6th Framework Programme Priority 2 (Information Society Technology), IST-2002-507753
References
- Cabinet Office (2005). Connecting the UK: the digital strategy. A joint report with the Department of Trade and Industry.: 60.
- Davies, W. (2004). Proxicommunication: ICT and the local public realm. London, UK, The Work Foundation.
- Devins, D., Darlow, A., Petrie, A. and Burden, T. (2003). Connecting Communities to the Internet: Evaluation of the Wired Up Communities Programme. Leeds, Policy Research Institute, Leeds Metropolitan University.
- Gaved, M. and Mulholland, P. (2004). Ubiquity from the bottom up: grassroots initiated networked communities. Internet Research 5.0: ubiquity?, Brighton.
