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Multiple interests or unified voice? Online communities as intermediary spaces for development

  • Research Article
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Journal of Information Technology

Abstract

While the uptake of online communities toward development purposes continues to grow, many are characterized by an unresolved tension. On the one hand, they benefit from participation of heterogeneous stakeholders in their efforts to strengthen their expertise. On the other hand, these stakeholders represent highly diverging interests, which makes collective strategic action very challenging. To understand how online communities cope with this tension, we conducted a longitudinal, mixed method case study of an online community focused on development transportation. We argue that online communities are uniquely equipped, through their fluidity and open-endedness, to enable knowledge creation and agenda-setting. In so doing, online communities afford an ‘intermediary space’ that simultaneously accommodates both convergence and divergence of interests. Our study strengthens the bridge between information systems research and development studies, by highlighting the potential of ICT uptake toward ‘remaking participation’ in development debate, while including the perspectives of heterogeneous interest groups.

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Notes

  1. In September 2000, the United Nations General Assembly initiated a global partnership toward eight key areas for development, known as the ‘Millennium Development Goals’ or MDGs (see http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals). Transport remains implicit as a priority theme, but underlies all eight MDGs (see the World Bank report on ‘Transport and the Millennium Development Goals in Africa’, available at http://www4.worldbank.org/afr/ssatp/Resources/PapersNotes/transport_mdg.pdf).

  2. We used fulltext.exe, a text analysis tool to identify word frequencies and correlations (Leydesdorff, 1995; Leydesdorff and Welbers, 2011), removing stopwords based on standardized lists. This helped us compile complete (parsed) lists of the most-used words for each of the four vignettes, which we used as a basis for the semantic analyses. To more clearly demarcate the core frames emerging from clusters of words with high correlations, we conducted factor analyses with Oblimin rotation, deleting items with factor loadings of less than 0.60, or with high cross-loadings on other factors (Hinkin, 1998). Our reliability analyses of each of the factors yielded Cronbach’s alphas between 0.72 and 0.97 (included in Appendix B), thereby meeting the standard research requirements (Hinkin, 1998). We visually conveyed the results by combining Pajek (Batagelj and Mrvar, 2004) and VOSviewer (Van Eck and Waltman, 2009), open source programs used for analysis and visualization of social and semantic networks.

  3. PRSPs or Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers comprise strategic development plans, composed by member countries of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. For more on PRSPs, see http://www.imf.org/external/np/prsp/prsp.aspx

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge Marleen Huysman, Ed Sleebos, Wouter van Atteveldt, Tim Unwin, Shirin Madon and three anonymous reviewers, and of course, the research participants and ‘GRIT’ online community.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Organization Sciences, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Julie E Ferguson

  2. Department of Information, Logistics and Innovation, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Maura Soekijad

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Appendices

Appendix A

Table A1

Table A1 Interpretive codes, descriptions, and example quotations
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Appendix B

Statistical analysis semantic networks

Table B1

Table B1 Factor analysis vignette 1
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Table B2

Table B2 Factor analysis vignette 2
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Table B3

Table B3 Factor analysis vignette 3
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Table B4

Table B4 Factor analysis vignette 4
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Table B5

Table B5 Reliability statistics factor analyses of core frames
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Ferguson, J., Soekijad, M. Multiple interests or unified voice? Online communities as intermediary spaces for development. J Inf Technol 31, 358–381 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.25

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