By Jonathan Peizer
We are witnessing a technological revolution. But we are also witnessing a growing "digital divide," a technological apartheid. Over the last year the catchphrase "bridging the digital divide" has entered the vernacular. However, the divide itself has many different definitions, and each week, somewhere in the world, representatives of different sectors meet to discuss ways of partnering to resolve it. Unfortunately, says Jonathan Peizer of the Open Society Institute, most are talk-fests with few results save the all-too-occasional cross-sector collaboration. Successful partnerships are the product of trust, mutually desired objectives and mutual understanding. Sometimes players are so focused on trying to resolve problems, they forget they still do not understand each other very well. This three-part series of essays seeks to provide some insight on how corporations, foundations and non-governmental organizations can improve their relations.
Part I: NGOs And The Digital Divide
Institutions that want to fund social change have two main options. The first is to create and fund a program from scratch. The second and often better option is funding a local "non-governmental organization," or NGO, that has already developed the credibility, the network of contacts, the understanding and the trust of the community it serves. NGOs are the front-line troops tackling civil society and development issues. So what they need out of the Internet is space to define their Net presence and to promote understanding of their missions — and they can't do this without technical and financial assistance.
Leveraging the Internet is a daunting task. NGOs have historically survived by owning their information and that of their constituents. This constituted their value and substituted for significant financial assets. Yet this behavior is antithetical to effectively leveraging the Internet to meet their missions. Because of resource constraints, many continue to be behind the technology curve. The technology is not intuitive, and many NGOs don't have the requisite experience with it. Consequently, many still mistakenly judge their organization's value on pre-Internet criteria and modes of operation.
The real transforming effect of the Internet is its breakdown of the information hierarchy. Historically, the boundary to knowledge dissemination was that it was owned and distributed in an unequal hierarchy, from doctor to patient, lawyer to client, teacher to student, car salesman to buyer, etc. The information owner set the criteria and price for its dissemination. The Internet has broken this barrier by eliminating impediments to global information sharing, thus equalizing the relationship between those who own information and those who want it.
Information is becoming a commodity whose value is determined by all who have access to it. This fundamentally changes the role of the information owner to a value-added knowledge facilitator. The Internet provides lots of information, but trusted sources are still needed to filter and interpret it, to turn it into knowledge.
For NGOs, the challenge is understanding that information once unique to them is now widely available over the Internet. These new information sources may be qualitatively better, worse or similar. If they are leveraging their Internet presence effectively and developing online communities around it, they directly challenge the continued viability of NGOs not doing so. This is true even if the latter presently have better quality content and larger constituencies. Many NGOs mistakenly believe
the data they amassed pre-Internet is still valued at the higher costs incurred to collect it. The reality is, once that information is available online, from any source, both the value and cost to collect it are significantly reduced. Organizations that understand this new reality share their information and constituents with like-minded peers. The worth of their information is not derived from its ownership, but by the value-added services they provide turning it into knowledge for their constituents. They leverage their resources and fulfill their missions more effectively by accumulating new constituents from like-minded organizations with which they share information and links.
Aggregation of content allows NGOs with low advertising budgets and important contributions to make to be found more easily on the Internet. About 1.5 billion Internet pages exist as of this writing, with 8 billion pages projected by 2004. Current search engines track only about 20 to 25 percent of the existing information. For NGOs like the ACLU, with a well-branded name and matching domain, a large offline constituency, the smarts to establish an early Web presence and good positioning on search engines and links, being found may not be so problematic. But for most NGOs, pooling content and constituencies in some form is an imperative. For the smaller organizations, it may mean banding together and collaborating on Internet Web-site development. For most organizations it will probably mean linking their sites and sharing their information with a site aggregator — a third-party, trusted source that brings together like-minded sites under an umbrella site acting as a portal into the larger community.
An excellent aggregator example is OneWorld.net, the human-rights and development site aggregator. OneWorld spiders information from each of its site members. Editors categorize the information and format it as the OneWorld entry point for those seeking access to the human-rights and development sector on the Web. Individual members still have their sites and their autonomy. Entrée is simplified by having one well-branded access point for these sectors.
OneWorld edits information for different age groups, and also provides some value-added content of its own. It has a variety of interactive tools that foster communities and draw people back to the site to visit often. This "stickiness" creates a vibrant, issue-based community that grows along with the Internet, providing all participating sites a significant value-added entry point for their content.
A commercial entity or an unscrupulous aggregator could easily create a portal site by accumulating information on a given topic if they knew how to market well on the Internet. NGOs need to understand that information aggregation and the creation of communities is a natural component of the Internet. If they do not do it, someone else will — and without the trusted sources or credibility NGOs bring to the table. Commercial sites understand that being first on the Internet is important because being second makes it that much more difficult to draw an audience away from the first. Fortunately, OneWorld was an early Internet adopter and as a
trusted human-rights aggregator, it will be much harder for a less relevant or credible source to enter this space in the future.
It is very difficult to push people or organizations to embrace change unless they own the idea. People have a natural aversion to change, especially if it is perceived as scary, complicated or costly. At the same time there is a natural human tendency to want what others have. Funders can do most to help NGOs adapt to the Internet by funding early adapters who use the technology for effective capacity-building and by supporting well-defined aggregation initiatives. It is better to work with experienced Internet entities — NGOs that believe in the transforming effect of the technology. They are committed to making it work, and thus the chances for a successful outcome are higher. It is also easier to promote a successful initiative that other less progressive institutions will buy into later once they see they are not benefiting from it. The door should simply always be open for the stragglers to join later. Conversely, embarking on projects that well-placed institutions or individual team members are not brought into at the outset is a recipe for disaster and very often the reason projects fail.
Some NGOs have excellent initiatives but aren't ready to partner with others to leverage them. They may seek funding for their own projects in order to monopolize a leadership position or channel limited funding to their organizations. Funders should encourage NGOs with similar proposals to collaborate on joint initiatives before being funded. Funding should not be provided to one institutional proposal over another similar one unless clear qualitative differences or focuses between institutions are found and collaboration is really impossible.
Finally, support should be given to NGOs who deliver successful technology solutions and work in the arena of the digital divide. The Internet society has done an excellent job of providing training to developing countries starting out on the information highway. I can state from firsthand experience that most countries in the developing world began on the Internet by sending delegates to this highly effective, intensive training program. A number of important policy organizations and associations are also involved in insuring that NGOs and individuals have a say in Internet governance, as well as advocating for various desirable Internet policies. The Center for Democracy and Technology, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and Global Internet Liberty Campaign are just a few of the entities that occupy this important space.
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