ICTs and indicators

Note on the sudden flurry of activity: I’m cleaning up on my desktop and finding a few things that I should’ve posted a long time age. So, there’ll be a few entries today, and probably over the next couple of days.
One of the many informative documents I’ve been reading that the WSIS has been producing recently is Core ICT Indicators, produced by the UN’s Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development. It’s an interesting document for its lofty ambitions, but something of a let-down for its predictability. One of the stated objectives, in addition to developing effective ICT indicators for developing countries, is “to develop a global database on information society indicators.” (p. 3). This is the interesting part, i.e. not just indicators on ICT, but on ICT and the information society. But, as is usually the case, it doesn’t say what the “information society” is. Perhaps as a consequence of the ill defined scope, the proposed indicators fail to identify societal factors, in terms of an “information society” or the immediate society. There have been, and are, several more ongoing projects to develop ICT indicators that are subject to the same criticism.
ICT indicators need to consider more than access to ICTs. What people are doing with ICTs is much more interesting and relevant. The most important factor related to the Internet that almost all indicators ignore – is content being produced? If so, how, by whom, and for who? The number of computers, Internet connections, and number of web servers in a region don’t tell us that.
A Pew/Internet study from last November shows that this sort of data is at least not beyond reach.