Colleagues may be interested in a paper where I've suggested an alternative meme to the Digital Divide... "Effective Use: A Community Informatics Strategy Beyond the Digital Divide" I'll be presenting the paper in a few weeks at a conference and it will be published on line around the same time... **excerpt** "There is a need now to distinguish between an approach to the "Information Society" and to ICT's which "stresses access/the DD" and one which stresses "effective use". "ICT's when used effectively provide significant resources/tools for transforming one's condition--economic, social, political, cultural-whether through obtaining the means for effective use of information and communications capabilities and tools; reaching new markets for small and micro-enterprises; providing the means to bring together dispersed diaspora linguistic communities; giving amplification and the means for global distribution to unheard minority (or majority) voices; facilitating informed participation in remotely managed political and other decisions; and obtaining the services (if remotely) of skilled practitioners and so on. "The key element in all of this is not "access" either to the infrastructure or the end user terminals (bridging the hardware "divide"). Rather what is significant is having access and then with that access having the knowledge, skills, and supportive organizational and social structures to make effective use of the technology to enable social and community objectives. "Access" is something that all can support--better markets for AOL and Microsoft if nothing else; "effective use" is the real goal (and the perceived risk to those who only see ICT's in the context of E-Commerce) in that it means the on-going reshaping of how individuals and communities interact with their information/organizational/commercial/governance environments." I'll be pleased to forward a draft to anyone who is interested. Best, Mike Gursteini Michael Gurstein, Ph.D. Visiting Professor: School of Management New Jersey Institute of Technology Newark, NJ