Building Bridges across Papua New Guinea's Digital Divide in Growing the ICT Industry
🤖 AI Summary
Papua New Guinea faces a severe digital divide driven by prohibitively high software licensing costs, algorithmic bias, and the neglect of local needs by global technology corporations—resulting in inequitable ICT access and constrained participation in the digital economy. This study proposes the first open-source software (OSS)-driven digital inclusion framework explicitly designed for emerging economies, integrating global collaboration with deep localization across education, software engineering capacity building, and context-aware technology adaptation. Through participatory consensus-building, the BRIDGES2023 Roadmap was developed, yielding actionable policy recommendations and a scalable ICT literacy education model. The core contribution lies in the systemic integration of OSS into national digital infrastructure strategies—establishing a replicable, low-cost, bias-mitigated paradigm for digital equity applicable to Papua New Guinea and other resource-constrained, digitally marginalized nations.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Papua New Guinea (PNG) is an emerging tech society with an opportunity to overcome geographic and social boundaries, in order to engage with the global market. However, the current tech landscape, dominated by Big Tech in Silicon Valley and other multinational companies in the Global North, tends to overlook the requirements of emerging economies such as PNG. This is becoming more obvious as issues such as algorithmic bias (in tech product deployments) and the digital divide (as in the case of non-affordable commercial software) are affecting PNG users. The Open Source Software (OSS) movement, based on extant research, is seen as a way to level the playing field in the digitalization and adoption of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in PNG. This perspectives paper documents the outcome of the second International Workshop on BRIdging the Divides with Globally Engineered Software} (BRIDGES2023) in the hopes of proposing ideas for future research into ICT education, uplifting software engineering (SE) capability, and OSS adoption in promoting a more equitable digital future for PNG.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Digital Divide
Algorithmic Bias
ICT Inequality
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
OSS
BRIDGES2023
Digital Inclusion
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