Aggregating the findings: organizational, sectoral, cross-sectoral, and societal impacts
Goal #1: Understand the experiences of Central American CSOs in adopting the Internet
Goal #2: Assess the impact of the Internet on an organization's mission performance
Goal #3: Assess the impact of the Internet on internal organizational capacities
This project proposes to address three applied research goals: (1) to examine and understand the experiences of Central American CSOs in adopting the Internet; (2) to assess the impact of the Internet on an organization's mission performance; and (3) to assess the impact of the Internet on organizational capacities. The project will document organizations' experiences for research purposes, with results aggregated to the sectoral, cross-sectoral, and societal levels, and will produce impact assessment methodologies and technology adoption manuals in Spanish to help CSOs improve their effectiveness. As well, the project will establish a panel of academic and CSO representatives from all Central American countries to promote dissemination of the results of the project and to develop regional research capacity.
The project will use survey and case study methodologies and will carry out activities in all six Central American countries over a planned duration of 26 months. This research is envisioned as the beginning of a long-term area of work which will form an integral component of Fundación Acceso's future operations.
In order for CSOs and other stakeholders in Central American development (including target populations, governments, and donors) to make more effective use of the Internet, make better policy and management decisions regarding its use, and allocate resources more effectively, it is important for them to be able to assess and predict its impacts on the ability of organizations to carry out their missions and on the development of their internal organizational capacities. Furthermore, once the impacts of the Internet on CSOs are better understood, the aggregation of these impacts will allow a better understanding of the impacts of the Internet on society as a whole. Developing an understanding of the broad social benefits of investments in Internet services and infrastructure is essential in order to make good decisions about such investments.
This paper describes a research project which aims to enable CSOs in Central America to understand how they can use the Internet to their greatest advantage, how the Internet can be expected to affect and change the organizations adopting it, and how the adoption of the Internet in the region can be expected to affect society as a whole.
Finally, there is little information available about the how impacts on individual organizations combine at the sectoral level and at the societal level. Gómez (1998, p.218, 231) calls for research to bridge the gap between organizational, sectoral, and societal impacts by saying, "although there is much debate and speculation about its possibilities, there is extremely little literature describing or analyzing concrete uses and meaning of CMC [computer-mediated communication] in virtual communities as part of civil society. We cannot assume that advances in communication infrastructures alone necessarily constitute a strengthening of civil society... More research is needed if we are to put the role of NGOs into perspective, and to understand more of the possibilities offered by CMC to civil society at large."
This project will produce results which are different from those currently available in five ways: (1) they will be specifically focused on Central America, a region where experiences in the adoption of the Internet are not well documented; (2) the primary focus at the organizational level will not be on the process of diffusion of Internet infrastructure or on sheer quantity of use, but on the effects that the adoption of the Internet has on organizational performance and capabilities; (3) the project will produce specific impact evaluation methodologies and tools which can be used by organizations and stakeholders to evaluate the effects of the Internet on the organizations themselves or on groups or sectors of organizations, (4) the project will produce manuals for implementing Internet services, to enable organizations to make better use of the Internet to optimize its impacts; and (5) the results will be aggregated beyond the organizational level to the sectoral, cross-sectoral, and societal levels.
The initial stages of the project will focus on organizations in Costa Rica, which has the oldest and best developed Internet infrastructure in Central America. In later stages, the methodologies developed in Costa Rica will be expanded to other countries in the region.
Participating organizations will be selected and classified in two ways. They will be classified both according to the thematic sectors in which they operate (such as human rights, gender issues, health, environment, and others), and according to their function or mandate (such as training, technical assistance, research, public awareness, and others). Organizations which operate in the same thematic sector, or which perform similar functions, tend to have missions, structures, and practices which are related, making it easier to recognize patterns of experiences.
Organizations will also be selected which are at various stages of adoption of the Internet, such as those which only use e-mail, those which have simple web sites, and those which use a wide variety of Internet services. As well, organizations which do not use the Internet will be examined to discover their reasons for non-adoption of the Internet, and to discover how non-adoption has influenced organizational performance and behaviour relative to their Internet-using colleagues.
In addition to the sectoral impacts, one cross-sectoral study will be undertaken to examine the use of the Internet in facilitating interactions between organizations in sectors which do not ordinarily work together. A good current case study exists in examining the recent impacts of Hurricane Mitch: organizations from across Central America, working in all sectors, faced the crisis together and used the Internet to facilitate communication and co-ordination of activities. The situation also presents an opportunity to examine differences between organizations which were able to participate in both live and electronic meetings, and those which participated in only one or the other.
Finally, the impacts which are observed at the sectoral levels will be aggregated to obtain an insight into how the Internet can affect society as a whole when used by civil society organizations.
The primary audience for the results of this research will be Central American CSOs and their stakeholders, including donor agencies and target populations. The reports, methodologies, and manuals produced will be published in Spanish. The outcomes will be applicable not only to the individual organizations studied, but also to other organizations and stakeholders within the various sectors of civil society. In the later stages of the project, results at the societal level will be produced, which will be useful to high-level social policy makers.
In addition, general background information about each organization will be collected in order to classify organizations and their experiences according to organizational size, type, mandate, functions, activities, location, and other basic characteristics.
Outcome #1: The experiences, opinions, and ideas of the individual organizations studied will be documented for use as an input to the remaining two goals, and aggregated to the sectoral, cross-sectoral, and societal levels in order to establish broader patterns in Internet use.
Specific indicators of organizational performance will be developed within the following general areas:
Outcome #2b: Impact assessment methodology. The research team will produce a methodology and a set of assessment tools which can be used to evaluate the impact of Internet services on an organization's effectiveness in carrying out its mission and can be easily and quickly applied by individual organizations.
Outcome #2c: Manual for the adoption of the Internet for enhancing mission performance. The research team will produce a manual instructing organizations in the adoption of the Internet to improve their performance in delivering on their missions. The manual will be based on the sectoral analysis and the impact assessment methodology, but will be designed specifically as a "how-to" manual to aid organizations in developing policies and practices for the effective adoption and use of the Internet, and to guide them in selecting technologies appropriate to their missions.
Adaptive capacity
Human resources: staff and board of directors
Management
External co-ordination
Financial sustainability
Outcome #3a: Analysis of sectoral impacts on organizational capacity. The research team will analyse sectoral patterns in the ways that the Internet develops organizational capacities, in order to establish the overall impacts of the Internet on organizational capacity and structure for the CSO sector being studied.
Outcome #3b: Impact assessment methodology. The project will produce a methodology and a set of assessment tools which can be used to evaluate the impact of the Internet on the development of organizational capacity.
Outcome #3c: Guide to organizational capacity development and the Internet. The research team will produce a report for use by CSOs which (a) describes the ways in which the Internet can be used to develop organizational capacity, and (b) describes the ways in which organizations can develop their capacities and change their structures in order to make the most effective use of the Internet.
Lanfranco, Sam. A Meta-Level Conceptual Framework for Evaluating Projects Involving Information and Communication Technology (ICT). 1997. Online: http://www.bellanet.org/partners/ldia/lessons/evalfram.htm.
National Research Council, USA. Internet Counts: Measuring the Impacts of the Internet. Offices of International Affairs. National Academy Press, 1998.
Press, Larry. A Framework to Characterize the Global Diffusion of the Internet. Notes for presentation at INFO '97, Havana, October, 1997. Online: http://som.csudh.edu/cis/lpress/articles/fmwkpres.htm
Robson, Colin. Real World Research: a resource for social scientists and practitioner-researchers. Blackwell Publishers, 1993.
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