A confessional account of the community entry phases of a critical ethnography: doing emancipatory ICT4D work in a deep rural community in South Africa

In this paper I reflect on the community entry phases of doing critical ethnography in a traditional Zulu community in a deep rural part of South Africa. I present my reflections in the form of a confessional account on community entry and on how an ICT4D project was introduced in the community. The primary research question that guided my engagement in the project is: In what ways should I achieve self-emancipation, in order to ensure the on-going emancipation and empowerment of the people I engage with? I thus argue that the emancipation of the researcher is a precursor for the emancipation of the researched. The paper is practiceorientated in that it demonstrates how community entry was established in a particular situation, how community entry encounters informed followup work, and how cultural interpreters empowered me to do community entry successfully. Through confessional writing I reflect on the beginnings of criticality in fieldwork practices and how I recognised, exposed, and articulated my own inabilities, social entrapment, and need for emancipation in ICT4D work. The paper concludes with guidelines for ethical community entry conduct in situations similar to what I encountered and for doing critical research at the grass-roots level of practice

Demonstrating Critically Reflexive ICT4D Project Conduct and ICT Training in Rural South Africa

The problem with many ICT4D projects and policy designed for African developmental contexts is that there is a tendency towards deterministic assumptions in that arguments and implementation guidelines are often presented a-contextually. The reality is, however, that ICT4D discourses and practice in the African context often imply cross-cultural working and worldview collisions. Therefore, simply adopting Western values and advice wholesale without deep and adequate reflection, may lead to a design reality gap, disruptive and oppressive ICT transfer, and ultimately failure. In addition, identifying, understanding, and representing cultural context and local development realities may present challenges, because it is interwoven with the assumptions and prejudices of those identifying and representing context or distorted with ethnocentric assumptions about ICT and its developmental role. This paper contributes by offering a case of how a particular ICT4D implementation framework with a developmental agenda was appropriated respectfully and ethically for the development realities of a traditional Afrocentric community in South Africa. The author reflects on a number of issues related to cross-cultural dynamics and power relations as it evolved during a particular case of ICT training and project introduction. Narrative examples, representing both method and phenomena, are used to demonstrate a number of interrelated reflexive themes for ICT4D project conduct and context understanding

Higher education cloud computing in South Africa:towards understanding trust and adoption issues

This paper sets out to study the views of key stakeholders on the issue of cloud information security within institutions of Higher Education. A specific focus is on understanding trust and the adoption of cloud computing in context of the unique operational requirements of South African universities. Contributions are made on both a methodological and theoretical level. Methodologically the study contributes by employing an Interpretivist approach and using Thematic Analysis in a topic area often studied quantitatively, thus affording researchers the opportunity to gain the necessary in-depth insight into how key stakeholders view cloud security and trust. A theoretical contribution is made in the form of a trust-centric conceptual framework that illustrates how the qualitative data relates to concepts innate to cloud computing trust and adoption. Both these contributions lend credence to the fact that there is a need to address cloud information security with a specific focus on the contextual elements that surround South African universities. The paper concludes with some considerations for implementing and investigating cloud computing services in Higher Education contexts in South Africa