12 December 2014
The IST-Africa Workshop at ICTer 2014 Conference (10 - 14 December, Sri Lanka) took place at the University of Colombo School of Computing from 08:30 - 13:00 on 10 December 2014.
Focused on "Living Labs and Socio-Cultural and Technical Considerations of ICT4D", this workshop facilitated by Paul Cunningham, Coordinator of IST-Africa, attracted 23 participants. While there were two or three graduate students including one Post-Doc based in Germany, there were also lecturers from three universities - KOP, Ruhuna University and UCSC (University of Colombo School of Computing) and private sector representation from Sri Lanka Telcom and Samath Bank.
While Sri Lanka has experienced the challenges associated with urban, rural and deep rural environments, ICT4D and particularly Collaborative Open Innovation and Living Labs were new concepts to the participants. Following an introduction to the goals and objectives of IST-Africa, discussion focused on ICT4D related issues and the socio-cultural and socio-economic contest for that will influence the introduction of Collaborative Open Innovation across IST-Africa Partner Countries.
There was a high level of interactivity during the morning, with a series of group exercises exploring concepts such as stakeholder roles to better understand the motivations, expectations and contributions that different stakeholder groups. This created significant levels of interest and discussion, particularly related to how IST-Africa has successfully leveraged these concepts in African partner countries to identify common research objectives and promote Entrepreneurship support and training.
Paul chaired a Session entitled "ICT for Development and Ontologies" on 12 December and presented a paper entitled "Baseline Analysis of 3 Innovation Ecosystems in East Africa" sharing results from the IST-Africa study on Innovation Spaces.