2006 International Conference on Information and Communication Technology and Development (ICTD2006)

Abstract

A simple web search on "ICT Development" produces some 40 million hits. No doubt, a large fraction of these will not be about information and communications technology relating to development (variously known as ICT for development, ICT4D, or ICT for sustainable development), but the overwhelming majority of the highest ranked search results were non-profit, community, and academic webpages dealing with ICT and development (ICTD). That ICTD has entered the public discourse is undeniable; entire UN conferences attended by heads of state (the World Summits on the Information Society, WSIS) related to how information impacts society. However, in the scholarly world, this work remains limited, and many of the visible success stories, write-ups and ideas behind ICTD remain narrow in scope, such as the digital divide, or even anecdotal or unsustainable. If one attempts to critically ask what ICTD is, who the stakeholders are, and how they participate, one gets different answers depending on whom one asks. Is it even a scholarly domain, or one best left to field practitioners? If it is the former, in what discipline(s)? How does a scholarly community, if one even exists, recognize academic excellence? It is with these questions in mind, with the goal of creating the important community of scholars, that several researchers and professionals set out to organize a scholarly, double-blind peer-reviewed conference on ICT and development. There is increasing recognition of this field even within traditional scholarly conferences, sometimes as a special track, say, on emerging regions, and even a handful ofjournals, such as MIT Press's ITID-Information Technology and International Development. However, we felt there was a need for a regular, formal conference on ICTD, one not limited to purely technical or purely social science issues, but rather the combination or intersection of the domains. The result has been ICTD2006, which is being held at the While these proceedings are published by IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers), and there is also technical cooperation with the professional body for computer science, the Association for Computing Machinery, ACM, there has been a strong recognition of the interdisciplinary nature of studying ICTD. One of the conference chairs, Dean AnnaLee Saxenian of the UC Berkeley Information School, is a Social Scientist, and the program committee spans multiple disciplines from around the world. There are other scholarly conferences in the ICT and development domain, especially ones focusing on issues such as connectivity or community informatics, …