Here comes our contribution to e-STAS – Symposium on Technologies for Social Action – next month in Malaga, Spain. I will attend the symposium and will meet great people and make new friends, all of them ruling ICT4D. Adrien Mangin which is co-organizing the event invited us to attend, so we just said yes and we spontaneously made up this article. It is only the first draft but kind of stable. Enjoy:

How do Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) influence society in Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs)? In our opinion, ICTs are the most promising tools that can shift the power balance between the rich, the poor, the institutions and the people to be offered in decades. In areas such as democracy, journalism or the business/financial sector, new and innovative movements are emerging, empowering the poorest of the poor. The first part of this article attempts to express our views on how this is being accomplished and provide examples demonstrating the enormous power of Information and Communication Technologies for Development, known as ICT4D. The second part of this article suggests a research approach and methodology that we use to evaluate how people in LDCs interact with ICTs using a User Centered Design approach, which what we also call UCD4D.

Full text: Article: ICTs for the empowerment of citizens