Making Information Technologies Work at the End of the Road

Abstract

Remote and rural areas face many challenges, including the provision of telecommunications services. Regardless of universal service policies or other political promises, rural communities can be deemed unprofitable by service providers while government assistance is managed by faraway regulators who lack understanding of the affected communities and citizens. The authors assess these challenges in the context of the First Nations of Canada, via a decentralized “First Mile” framework. They find that these remote communities are capable of local innovation and can collaborate with intermediary organizations to build digital infrastructures, by bridging the gap between the public and private sectors.

Engaging Remote Marginalized Communities using Appropriate Online Research Methods

“…OCAP applied to digital networks is also called the 'First Mile' approach, a counterstrategy to the traditional Last Mile colonial solution that government programs use to fund private telecommunications corporations to develop and deliver the digital services in marginalized communities (McMahon et al, 2011). By using the First Mile approach, these communities at the end of the road are able to identify, develop and deliver a digital strategy addressing their needs, ensuring they receive the services they require (McMahon et al, 2014).…”

“…The focus of our collaborative research has been to document how the remote Indigenous communities are using ICT in interesting and innovative ways, including distance education, telehealth and a range of other online applications, services and activities. Our work has highlighted many community strengths but also how structural inequalities -particularly how public funding is disbursed for telecommunications networks in rural and remote regions of the country -have a significant negative impact on community efforts to use digital networks and ICT effectively (McMahon et al, 2014). More recently, we formed the First Mile Connectivity Consortium (FMCC) to work to change the government policies shaping telecommunication network development.…”

Co-developing digital inclusion policy and programming with Indigenous partners: interventions from Canada

“…Focusing on supply-side interventions in digital inclusion policy and programming, this section provides a case study of the First Mile Connectivity Consortium (FMCC), a national non-profit association of First Nations technology service providers focused on connecting rural, remote and Northern regions of Canada. The FMCC was established in 2012 by regional technology organisations that represent and are governed by groups of Indigenous communities (Carpenter, 2010;McMahon, Gurstein et al, 2014;O'Donnell et al, 2009). Its membership and board of directors consist of staff from First Nations technology organisations serving remote and rural areas across Canada, as well as university-based researchers including myself.…”

“…The diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples who reside in rural, remote and Northern regions have a long history of community-driven technology innovation (McMahon, Hudson, & Fabian, 2017). Countering the top-down 'last-mile' approach of technology transfer, some of these Indigenous communities have led local and regional community networking initiatives (see, for example, Carpenter, 2010;McMahon, Gurstein et al, 2014;Roth, 2013;Whiteduck, 2010). For example, the Swampy Cree community of Fort Severn, which is located on the shores of Hudson Bay, uses a community-owned satellite network to connect people to public services otherwise unavailable locally, such as telemedicine, e-learning, and video court proceedings (Gibson et al, 2012;Fiddler, 2019).…”

Making a community network legal within the South African regulatory framework

“…Other communities could replicate the model presented here and then federate themselves into a secondary co-operative that could be granted a similar exemption as the primary (not-for-profit, PECN). This would follow a similar structure used by indigenous communities in Canada [3], where a second level institution provides the services that primary co-operatives cannot provide for themselves e.g. technical expertise, aggregating demand, and advocacy.…”