Using an information ecology approach to identify research areas: Findings from Chile

Abstract

This report presents the main conclusions of the case study about Public Access to ICT (PAI) venues that was developed as part of the first stage of the project entitled The Global Impact Study of Public Access to Information and Communication Technologies. The study was developed between June and September 2008 in Chile.

The objective of this study was to characterize the infrastructure, of the public access venues, their users, their main activities and their role in the community in which they are immersed. Based on these results, the aim was to generate plausible hypothesis about the impact of the public access to ICT and design feasible research projects to test these hypothesis during the second stage of the project.

The report describes the method used in the study, and then it presents the results. Based on them, it describes possible research projects and finally discusses its implementation.