OK. So, I'm not an academic, but consider myself a decent researcher. During some work a few years ago on the digital messaging practices of immigrant and refugee-serving organizations and newcomers, I came across some really interesting research that just struck me as a great model. It was in the form of a Master's degree (which makes me want to write a post about the importance of community, student, grey area, and other non-academic (read: PhD's) research, but that's for another time): ‘As Important to Me as Water’: How Refugees in Rome Use Smartphones to Improve Their Well-being (2017).
St George's research introduced me to the Capability Approach, really interesting work on technology use among refugees, some of their models/frameworks, and her own version of this, the Smartphone Evaluation Framework.
Building from this Smartphone Evaluation Framework theory, I proposed a similar Digital Messaging Evaluation Framework. Each section is outlined and explained below, incorporating useful components of other researchers' ideas and approaches.
In this post, I'm sharing my half-baked idea, which I honestly wish I had shared pre-COVID. It could have generated some interesting conversations. Any way, here you go. You can also access this post as a PDF.
"The paradox is this: ICTs and particularly the internet are widely regarded as groundbreaking inventions that have changed the way millions of people live their lives, and yet researchers and practitioners in the field of ICT and development often struggle to prove specific impacts of the technology to funders." Dorothea Kleine, ICT4What ?— Using the Choice Framework To Operationalise the Capability Approach To Development
Digital messaging is simple, on the surface, but is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to digital capacity:
The following framework comes out of this research (which I'll add to this site soon, when I have a bit more time):
These researchers started with economist Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach and combined it with McClure's notion of informational capabilities to create a useful framework for the immigrant and refugee-serving sector to build and evaluate settlement agencies' capacity to use technology to serve clients.
McClure's informational capabilities concept refers to:
These capabilities include the skills, knowledge and attitudes of the Settlement worker. All of these capabilities exist within an Information and Communications Ecology or environment, much of which is outside the control of the individual. This includes agency structure, policies, and even further external forces, such as funding, government policies, and includes the informational capabilities of these actors, as well as those of clients.
Informational capabilities are a person‘s capability to transform their existing informational capital, such as level of access to ICTs (their opportunity structure) into real opportunities to achieve the things they value or need to to. In our case, to serve clients effectively. In our framework, informational capabilities refer to front-line worker's freedom and ability to use ICTs within the institutional and socioeconomic setup of their agency. It is important to emphasize the significant differences between informational capital, ICT capabilities and informational capabilities.
All of this occurs within stages of adoption. It is important to acknowledge that different agencies are at different stages of capability and adoption. Usefully, a couple of researchers have created a model of three phases of adoption of technology (in their case social media) in government. The three stages, are “experimentation, constructive chaos, and institutionalization” of new technologies.
I believe this model, and how it can flow from one stage to the other, is an accurate portrayal of how digital messaging technologies are currently being adopted within Settlement agencies, and can be useful for our analysis.
“In the experimentation phase, individual innovators who have some experience with technology from other work or non-work settings begin using it in the workplace, and the use spreads from worker to worker and thus may be used in a variety of informal ways. In the constructive chaos stage, workers begin to recognize both benefits and risks of the
technology use, which may create tensions within the organization, and organizations respond with attempts to standardize the technology use through practice or policy standards. Often in this stage organizations seek answers that other similar organizations use, or draw upon their past policies related to ICT use to drive current standards. Sometimes reactionary standards are developed in response to misuse, or concerning use, of technology.
Finally, in the institutionalization stage, the agency has developed a set of standards, processes, and enforcement measures to control the use of the technology. Agencies that know about their workers' use of social media are grappling with how to move from the first two categories to the later given the perceived benefits of social media use, while also grappling with the risks and challenges related to social media use.” Mergel, I., & Bretschneider, S. I. A three-stage adoption process for social media use in government.
Additional researchers have taken these approaches and focused on the importance of acquiring informational capabilities — the ability to transform access to ICTs into real opportunities to achieve the things one values. In our case, to serve clients using technologies that they are using or have indicated a preference to use to communicate with service providers. This approach was recently applied to the use of ICT and, more specifically, smartphones among refugees. Vivienne St George, T. (2017). ‘As Important to Me as Water’: How Refugees in Rome Use Smartphones to Improve Their Well-being (2017).
This is the environment within which front-line workers and managers within are attempting to use digital messaging to serve clients. This structure addresses contextual factors influencing settlement agencies' smartphone use to serve clients. These are conceived of as structural influences which impact on people’s opportunity to use ICTs to expand their capabilities to serve clients.
“Technology is embedded in the wider set-up of institutions, policies, programmes, norms and discourses. As such they need to be analysed as firmly and historically engrained.” The sense of choice vs the use and achievement of choice is heavily influenced by agency capability to see potential of tech and to integrate tech within existing policy, practice, management and human resource frameworks. That in turn is heavily influenced by funder ability to recognize this potential. These are the work, agency and funder information, communications, and funding environments that front-line workers exist within.
Agencies:
Workers
Funders:
In the second box, personal assets and resources are made up of the informational capabilities:
In the case of settlement agencies, this is mainly in the form of the existence or lack of personal and agency assets and resources, or that may be hidden, informal and ad hoc. There are many assets that agencies and workers have, but many more challenges and barriers when it comes to using technology to serve clients.
Agencies and Funders:
Workers:
The third box, in the centre of the diagram, refers to the kinds of interventions or support that may be required from government to support agency technology integration, management and use, and agencies to support worker technology use.
Within the levers for change there should be an analysis and recognition of the different stages of technology adoption and where a particular agency is. This will guide what they need to do and supports required to move ultimately to institutionalization of of digital messaging (and other technologies) in service delivery.
Agencies, funders and workers:
In the fourth box, we focus on the informational capabilities most appropriate for the settlement sector.
Affordances are neatly organized by the informational capabilities model:
(Technology affordance analysis is about unpacking the different attributes of a technology so you can determine its suitability for a particular goal, such as serving newcomers.)
Kleine's “degrees of empowerment” idea is also useful here. Kleine writes: "Individuals were aware of some possibilities the new technology offered them, like email and online chat, but not of others, like Voice over IP. This was precisely because their educational resources (including computer skills) and the dominant discourse… stressed some usages over others. For any piece of research focused on a technology which is new to the respondents, the dimension of 'sense of choice' will play a significant role. The 'use of choice' dimension refers to whether or not an individual actually makes the choice and the 'achievement of choice' refers to whether the outcome matches the choice expressed." For workers and agencies, capabilities are impacted by the actual existence of choice, a worker's or
agency's sense of choice, use of choice and achievement of choice. This is an important dimension to explore within settlement agency context.
The sense of choice vs the use and achievement of choice is heavily influenced by agency capability to see potential of tech and to integrate tech within existing policy, practice, management and human resource frameworks:
Access to possibilities, or the sense of choice, is essential.
In the sector:
Overall, we're measuring increases in:
over periods of time and where the agency is at in their digital journey.
The outcomes for workers, agencies, funders are ultimately related to better outcomes for clients. They can be broken into immediate, medium and long-term outcomes, or into the stages of technology adoption: Intrepreneurship and Experimentation, Constructive Chaos, Institutionalization.
Immediate (Intrepreneurship and Experimentation):
Medium (Constructive Chaos):
Long-term (Institutionalization):
There are likely a number of capacity frameworks out there that can be researched to tease out the specific and actual skill development needed by workers, management and funders. One that has much promise is Nethope's Center for the Digital Nonprofit. Their Digital Nonprofit Skills (DNS)™ framework and Digital Nonprofit Ability (DNA)™ framework expand on the technology adoption for nonprofits, rounding out the specific capabilities agencies and workers need in the digital era.
The the Digital Nonprofit Skills™ (DNS) Assessment which establishes a solid baseline for skills across roles and across organizations. The Digital Nonprofit Ability™ (DNA) Assessment looks at a nonprofit's digital transformation journey to assess their digital readiness.
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