The profound social exclusion and polarization processes, rampant in Latin American and Caribbean societies, may even deepen under the effect of the digital divide caused by unequal access and inappropriate uses of ICTs in the region. Sustainable development is portrayed as a sine qua non condition to nurture current and future needs for society at large. If positive social change is sought in that context, then what is urgently needed is to support collective work that proposes alternative visions for ICT uses, create a common set of indicators that properly assess the social impacts of such new technologies, and promote a widespread participation of different social actors who effectively explore the transformative potential of ICTs.

OLISTICA is then proposed as an original venue of research oriented into action that will build upon MISTICA’s contributions. Based upon a participatory action-research network, OLISTICA will conform a set of national observers in the LA&C region, supported by a larger network of researchers and practitioners, who will create, validate and make use of a set of indicators to properly assess ICTs from the participant’s perspectives, accordingly national and regional contexts. The project aims at enhancing the dialectical capacity and networking capabilities of its participants to obtain data relevant to ICTs uses and their social impacts in the LA&C region, interpreting and analyzing this data (cleaning it up from the outside and inside biases), articulating a pro-active judgment, and disseminating the results in order to support further action geared towards building an alternative vision for ICTs in the LA&C region with a social mandate.

MISTICA: OLISTICA’s building blocks

The lessons learned by MISTICA will become OLISTICA’s building blocks and it is very likely that the accumulated experience will provide fertile ground to support the synergy of other actors (among them, other PAN Program recipients in the region):

• MISTICA provided with a solid knowledge base about the social impacts of ICT in LA&C, publicly available in their website.
• MISTICA experimented with and validated novel methodologies of high added value for virtual community management.
• MISTICA facilitated South-South synergistic interactions geared towards collective action. Therefore, it created the conditions for social actors to better effect changes in the policy environment at a local level for positive and socially oriented uses of ICT and development.