I was invited by ijgd (Internationale Jugendgemeinschaftsdienste e.V.), a German non-profit organization which, amongst others, organizes volunteer service programmes in Germany and abroad. I was asked to hold a presentation on the Digital Divide at a seminar on "Media Perspectives On, From and In Developing Countries" (own translation from German).
The presentation can be accessed here.
As announced in my last entry, I took part at the ICT4D Postgraduate Symposium in London and presented my own preliminary results.
The two days with many presentations on all kinds of different topics related to ICT4D were extremely motivating not only for the completion of my own thesis, but also for future involvement in the scientific area of ICT4D. Short (and subjective) abstracts of each presentation as well as some pictures of the symposium can be found at www.ictlogy.net, a very good ICT4D Blog with many other interesting sources on the topic.
Thanks a lot to all the organizers from the ICT4D Collective - it was fantastic!
One of the first things I did after coming to South Africa was to attend the IST-Africa 2006 Conference (IST = Information Society Technologies) in Pretoria (nowadays called "City of Tshwane").
The conference was aimed to bring people from commercial, government and research organisations across Africa and Europe together to discuss different strategies of how to bridge the so-called digital divide.
My conference fee was kindly sponsored by the IST-Africa Consortium and so I was able to attend the lectures and workshops offered, as well as get to know many fascinating people from different organizations. Particularly the informal discussions during the breaks were very interesting and I will use some of the information gathered during those 3 days for my thesis.
The following IST-Africa 2007 Conference will take place in May in Maputo, Mozambique.