ICT for Good: Opportunities, Challenges and the Way Forward

• Published in: 2010 Fourth International Conference on Digital Society pp. 14 - 19
• Main Authors: Eshete, B., Mattioli, A., Villafiorita, A., Weldemariam, K.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.02.2010
• Subjects: (digital) society; Cultural differences; Electronic government; Electronic voting systems; environment; ICT4G; Information technology; Large-scale systems; Medical services; Nominations and elections; Psychology; public administration; scarce resources; Social network services; Welding
• ISBN: 1424458056; 9781424458059
• DOI: 10.1109/ICDS.2010.58

ICT seems well understood as a tool and an infrastructure for delivering information and services for the society and for allowing communications through interactions among the service users -mostly, the digital society. Using ICT for ensuring better life requires far more than good infrastructure, ICT know-how and the various techniques and tools in place. If ICT has to address the real problems of the society, it should be at a rescue being environment-friendly, with real and tangible impact, sustainable, seamless, down to the grass-roots and above all with reproducible experiences. In this paper, we introduce a different perspective of looking into and using ICT, which we call ICT for Good (ICT4G). It is about using ICT for addressing problems of societies with low ICT penetration and changing a society's life for the better. More specifically, based on our observation of current promises ICT gives to society, we discuss ICT4G's distinguishing aspects, opportunities it offers, challenges it imposes along with preliminary roadmap for its realization. A high-level correlation of what we pointed out with a relevant case study (i.e., the eGIF4M1) is presented.