Information and communication technologies (ICTs) as a common-pool resource: coordination, competence and the digital divide in eight municipalities of Oaxaca.

AutorChávez-Ángeles, Manuel Gerardo
CargoArtículo en inglés

Las tecnologías de la información y comunicación (TIC) como recurso común: Coordinación, competencia y brecha digital en ocho municipios de Oaxaca

INTRODUCTION

The importance of digital technologies to human development has been under attention of international cooperation since the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society in 2003 (Kummer, 2007). The Geneva Declaration of Principles states that:

Our challenge is to harness the potential of information and communication technology to promote the development goals of the Millennium Declaration, namely the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger; achievement of universal primary education; promotion of gender equality and empowerment of women; reduction of child mortality; improvement of maternal health; to combat hiv/aids, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and development of global partnerships for development for the attainment of a more peaceful, just and prosperous world. We also reiterate our commitment to the achievement of sustainable development and agreed development goals, as contained in the Johannesburg Declaration and Plan of Implementation and the Monterrey Consensus, and other outcomes of relevant United Nations Summits. In this regard, the information society has thrown up new challenges for the study of governance of telecommunications and cyberspace. The paradigm of common-pool resources has been of great use in the analysis of problems of handling information and knowledge. In the last decade a wave of intellectual and legal exploration, known as the "new commons" or "information commons", which studies problems of overuse, parcelization, lack of cooperation and contamination of common-pool resources related to digital technologies has emerge (Hess and Ostrom, 2007, 3-21; Kranich, 2004).

Research into common-pool resources (CPRs) has shown how different social actors are capable of communicating among themselves and establishing agreements, rules and strategies that improve their joint outcomes. By setting up institutional arrangements, individuals in possession of common-pool resources have overcome significant social dilemmas of common action, such as the "tragedy of the commons" or situations like the prisoner's dilemma (Ostrom, 2010).

This article undertakes a review of the most important literature on the information and knowledge commons from different perspectives. It discusses the concept of information commons used by social activists, legal experts and economic historians. Then, IT introduces the concept as used by researchers of the CPRs before discussing the need to conduct research on the information commons in developing countries. Through a case study on rural telecommunications connectivity, the article discusses the use of IAD and game theory to analyze the digital divide. Lastly, IT looks at field evidence for eight practical cases in the state of Oaxaca. The data obtained from the cases in Oaxaca is presented as an initial approximation to guide future research.

THE INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE COMMONS

The discussion on the information and knowledge commons has been in the public and academic debate of the United States for more than a decade. In spite of these discussions, little attention has been paid to what happens in developing countries. In Mexico, in particular, research into the commons has been limited to natural resources, with an emphasis on forest issues on the one hand, organizations such as the Mexican Civil Counsel for Sustainable Forestry (Consejo Civil Mexicano para la Silvicultura Sostenible, CCMSS) have fostered the CPR paradigm for the community management of forests, while researchers like Leticia Merino and David Bray have done much the same but from an academic perspective. On the other hand, the federal government, through the National Forest Commission (Comisión Nacional Forestal, Conafor) has taken up some of the ideas of CPR management in its programs. However, very little has been done or written in the area of information commons (Bray, 2007).

In the United States, questions about Internet Governance intensified after the attack on the Twin Towers of September 11, 2001. The ghost of surveillance and control of electronic media by the United Stated circulated the halls of government and North American universities. In response, different groups of activists, such as the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union issued press releases and statements, and set up actions to defend "freedom in cyberspace". Nancy Kranich (2004) gives an extraordinary account of the best practices in the area of information commons and formulates the need to create a movement (similar to the environmental movement that arose during the last two decades of the twentieth century) to protect the public domain. Karnich analyzed the commons known as Open Democratic Information Resources, which include the software commons, particularly Linux and the free software movement; General Public Licenses (GPLS) and Creative Commons; open access academic communications and electronic repositories for scientific research; institutional commons safeguarded mainly by universities and libraries; and some specific projects, such as the BBC Creative Archive and the Galiwinku Knowledge Centre.

Each of the examples of information commons analyzed by Kranich (2004, 30) have similar characteristics: they are collaborative; offer shared spaces (real and virtual) where persons with shared interests and concerns can meet; they use network technologies to build communities and benefit from positive external influences created by the network; they are interactive, which encourages exchange between participants; many are free or low cost; participants contribute content while benefiting from access at the same time; they strengthen social and human capital of participants; they govern through shared rules which are defined and accepted by their members; they incorporate democratic values where freedom of expression and intellectual freedom predominate.

Along with the actions of cyber-activists, we can identify works by legal experts who specialize in information law. Yochai Benkler (2006) proposed the idea of three different layers in which communication systems are immersed and make IT possible to transmit messages: 1) the physical devices and networks needed to communicate; 2) the information and cultural resources from which new content can be created; and 3) the logistical resources, software and standards required to translate what human beings want to say into signals that machines can process and transmit. Lessig (2001, 2006) also asks whether there should or should not be an architecture that is commonly governed and therefore available to any who wish to participate in social networks outside the markets. One of his proposals is the Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization whose main objective is to offer intellectual property licenses that make the distribution and use content easier. The Creative Commons fill the gap between the specter of absolute protection of authors' rights or "all rights reserved" and the public domain or "no rights reserved". (1)

Lastly, from an economic and political science perspective, we find a third body of literature dedicated to the study of common-pool resources (CPRs). CPRs are defined as resources shared by a group of persons subject to social dilemmas. We can summarize these social dilemmas in three ways: 1) the well-known tragedy of the commons proposed by the biologist Garret Hardin; 2) the prisoner's dilemma; and 3) the problems of free-riding. CPRs are also defined as goods of high subtractability and difficult excludability (Ostrom, 2010).

Initially devoted to natural resource problems, such as forests, fisheries, water, etc., with the advent of the so-called information society, this research has expanded to telecommunications and cyberspace. The problems of overexploitation, parcelization, lack of cooperation, contamination of common-pool resources linked to natural resources began to appear around 1995 in areas like the Internet, and the administration of information and knowledge. This has sparked a wave of intellectual and legal exploration known as the "new commons". Whether labeled digital, electronic, information, virtual, communication, intellectual, Internet or technological commons, all these concepts address the new territory of globally distributed information (Hess and Ostrom, 2007, 3-21). Particularly in sciences, such as genomics, and industries that have been severely impacted by digital technology like the pharmaceutical, publishing and music industries, information management has encountered significant dilemmas on intellectual property, free exchange and commercialization.

Recently, some economists that are attempting to create knowledge using an evolutionist approach have joined the CPR study community. Paul David (2001) has defined concepts as open science which refers to the way knowledge was organized during the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. David proposes analyzing current institutions dedicated to scientific and technological innovation (particularly in Europe and the United States) by comparing them to the institutions that allowed the arts and sciences to flourish during the sixteenth and seventh centuries. Joel Mokyr (1998, 2000) on the other hand, has studied technological change from the evolutionist perspective placing emphasis on the free transmission of knowledge in what is characterized as a "market of ideas". To Mokyr, the standard neoclassical economic model gives a very poor explanation of technological development and therefore proposes, in its place, the principles of evolutionary biology to account for scientific and technical innovation. In this regard, the economic...

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