Harnessing Community Resources in Public Policy

Canberra.
The next paper at ANZCA 2010 is by Jocelyn Williams, who shifts our interest to the question of opinion leaders online. This is in the context of a qualitative study of free Internet access for low-income school-based families, which also pointed to other difficulties and barriers for Internet uptake by low-income families; what can account for differences in uptake even between different case studies in this research project?

One likely explanation is the role played by key individuals who had influence on their peers and may have acted as role models in taking up Internet usage. What needs to be considered as a framework here is the study of the social dimensions of knowledge or information - society plays a central role in the knowledge formation process. Knowledge is socially constructed by people in relation to one another, within specific contexts; research therefore also needs to consider multiple realities, stakeholders, and angles on the research problem.

Different stakeholder agendas in particular can create problems, and very different outcomes. In New Zealand, for example, responses to the digital divide focus on a tripartite solution involving government, business, and the community; further, stakeholder agendas can be exogenous (top-down) or endogenous (bottom-up), and this can also influence the outcomes. Grassroots agency and ownership tends to be seen as desirable as it is often more successful, while externally imposed solutions may create a deficiency focus (a focus on what is missing in the community), which overlooks that there are also considerable assets in the community that interventions may draw on. In particular, a dependence on experts from the outside may be problematic and create resistance to outside impositions.

The NZ digital strategy relies on government, business, and community partnerships, then, and aims to generate connections between government and community, confidence between government and business, and content between business and community - but in practice, government components well outweighed business and even community participation and attendant stakeholder agendas.

How may the relationship between free home Internet access and social cohesion be assessed? Jocelyn studied this against the backdrop of the Computers in Homes project and studied two community sites in two waves over two years; she used surveys as well as interviews and observation, and was thus able to draw on quantitative as well as qualitative data.

What recent research has shown is that in understanding new technologies, people tend to draw especially on guidance from their interpersonal networks, seeking out those people whose opinions they respect and on whom they may model their own behaviours. In the Computers in Homes project, there was clearly uncertainty amongst notive users lacking confidence, and to combat this, peer mentoring was overlaid as an institutional initiative (e.g. by CiH administrators attempting to orchestrate such mentoring through instructors and mentors at school) - but this may not be the appropriate approach for going about things; in the CiH setting, notices needed opinion leaders from their own networks to work with.

In the study, a number of key figures who were highly neighbourly and networked clearly featured in the data; they were confident technology and Internet users, as well as substantial consumers of other media; they had communicative confidence, were marked by public individuation, engaged in volunteerism, had interpersonal influence, and were engaged in mobilising others and leveraging their own skills in constructive ways. So, those already engaged were especially active here as well, and appear to be pivotal in the two-step flow of innovation diffusuon, passing on to others the skills and knowledges they have acquired. People showing high levels of engagement, sociability, and trust tend to be the high connectors and function as opinion leaders.

Individual-level dynamics between opinion leaders and opninion seekers seem to override some of the more systemic issues in tripartite top-down approaches, then. A grassroots agenda can tap into such dynamics more effectively; outside agencies may be able to facilitate such processes, but could also be seen to appropriate what should be happening organically, and this could also be a problematic intrusion. At any rate, there may be an opportunity to better redesign projects such as Computers in Homes to better harness grassroots dynamics and use the available funding more effectively. Policy must harness practice - the social resources, networks, and leaders already present in the community - and must reject a deficit model that focusses only on what is lacking in a community.

Technorati : ANZCA 2010, Internet, community, innovation diffusion, opinion leaders, policy, two-step flow
Del.icio.us : ANZCA 2010, Internet, community, innovation diffusion, opinion leaders, policy, two-step flow