TELECOMMUNICATIONS IN THE CARIBBEAN

For reasons I won’t go into, I was following a line on the web, and came across:

OECS Telecommunication Reform & Modernization Project
The Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) through this project seeks to analyze the issues and options for Information & Communication Technology (ICT) to become a lead sector of the economies of its member states: Grenada, St Vincent & The Grenadines, St Lucia, Dominica and St Kitts & Nevis. The project website has the project documents, including those describing plans to develop e-government. The website also provides a number of online regional studies, plus many online country studies. The “Links” section provides an extensive set of links to ICT for development sites in the countries of the Eastern Caribbean as well as links to materials on e-commerce, e-learning, regional organizations and programs, and reports.

And look at some of the resources I found there:

Cultivating Technological Innovation for Development
Abstract: “This paper essays the viewpoint that the development or innovation in society of technologies, such as information and communication technologies, should be self-cultivated rather than imported. Ideas are drawn from multiple research disciplines to inform the elaboration of this perspective. A behavioral notion of development, based on the notion of structural conditioning of behaviors of social units, is discussed and adopted. Concepts of change from cybernetic theory are then delineated, to be used analogously later on for illustrating behavioral aspects of technology adoption and societal development. Subsequently, current theoretical formulations in the economic literature on technological change are reviewed, to muster key insights for furthering an understanding of the behavioral notion of development. The paper then recruits principles and ideas from current developments in sociotechnical systems (STS) theory. The applicability of these ideas for promoting understanding of macro-phenomena in national development systems is discussed. Finally, the paper integrates these various strands of theoretical formulations into the assertion that it is more important to invest in the cultivation of the patterns of behavior that underpin the various technological innovations of modernization than it is to invest in the pervasive uptake of information and communication technologies. By Stephen Corea, date not given. (PDF, 16 pages.)

Telecommunications in The Caribbean
“Revolutionary changes in information technologies have left few economic sectors untouched and the much-touted global information village has brought the earth's inhabitants closer. Access to, and control of, information is replacing access to natural resources as a determinant of the socio-economic position of nations. Although this holds great promise for eradicating poverty and under-development, the dichotomy between rich and poor, the metropolitan and the peripheral, the developed and the underdeveloped instead could be widened by these same technologies.” (quoted from the OECS site) By Felipe M Noguera, undated. (HTML)

And from there:

Virtual Institute of Information
V.I.I. is an on-line research facility for independent research in telecommunications and mass media. Its website has archives of papers, events, and publications, news, and industry information. The website is at Columbia University.