The work is done... so far...!

Its been a long time since you have heard from us but the reason is simple; we have been really busy finishing our thesis. We have had some challenges on the way but the result are very satisfying in our humble opnion. We feel confident that we have done some good and proper research in the field of ICT, literacy and development and come up with interesting insights, findings and contributions. Time will tell in the thesis comittee agrees with us :-)

The examination with the thesis comittee is scheduled for some time in August so until then we are on vacation enjoying the lovely weather in Denmark right now.

If you want a copy of the master thesis write us an email and we will send you a pdf version right away.

We wish you all a good summer. We will return with the results in August...

Working, working, working...

Yes, we are!

We sincerely apologize for not posting anything on the blog for months but we must admit that the excitement for blogging disappeared a little after the cancellation of our trip to India/Bhutan.

This has not stopped us from proceeding with our master thesis. For months now we have been working on our data collection and analysis and are now the phase of writing our case. The case is a narrative presentation of our experience with our data. Sounds very funny, but it is also hard work. All your own ideas must be kept away while doing this. Only the data itself must speak. This can be challenging but we seem to be on the right path now.

After this we simply have to wrap up the complete master thesis with theory, methodology, case, analysis and synthesis... And yes, we are busy, so don't expect to much of blogging anymore...

Hopefully we turn in our master thesis before deadline July, 5th...

Our office at the institute of informatics

Just two photos from our little office at the institute of informatics at CBS. We are of course working very hard all the time :-)

Interviews ongoing

The speed of new entries on our blog is hopefully not overwhelming for you. But the speed on our master thesis project is still very high. We have now finished all of our Danish interviews. These interviews have been very insightful, and we feel that a lot of different perspectives on our subject of study has been given. Tomorrow we will begin doing interviews with our Indian contacts. These interviews will probably also bring new and insightful knowledge.

Last week was used to transcript all of our danish interviews. As each interview lasts about an hour, this process was extremely boring and time consuming. Right now neither of us hope, that we have to go through such a mindless process again. In the end the result is approximately 100 pagers of text and our hope is that we will be able to actually use this going forward with our analysis, and hence haven't spend all this time in vain.

When the Indian interviews have been conducted and also needs to be transcripted, one thing is for sure. We will try very hard to find a solution, where we can pay somebody for doing the actually transcription. Let's see where it ends.

Our timeline has slipped a bit, as we should have ended our interviews in early February and are still missing the Indian interview, but we still hope to turn in the master thesis in the spring.

A new hope

First of all Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of our readers. We have been on a long vacation but are now back stronger than ever. As the title claim we have recovered our motivation and full of new hope for our project.

We have had 1½ week now for full speed and lots of good news. Even though the field trip for India was canceled we still have contacts for some NGO's there and we expect to interview them remotely by video conferences. Furthermore we are in contact with some NGO's, academics, public organisations etc. here in Denmark also for interviewing and possibly a work shop. In general we have been met with open arms and interest for our work which have help us back on track.

Right now we are finishing up on our methodology which of course has change quite a lot since we didn't end up with direct observation and interviews of our specific target group. Our data will now come from 2rd tier interviews with people involved in the areas of development, knowledge, literacy and ICT.

All the data will be collected during late January and early February so we are going into a busy period. We will of course try to keep you updated as we go along.

It's a No-Go...

This Friday will not be remembered as the best day of our master thesis. Today we had to bury the last hope of going to India or Bhutan next year to do our empirical data collection. Arrangement had been made to meet and cooperate with a NGO focusing on ICT4D in Delhi for at least two weeks and other things were planned but the nail in the coffin simply became lack of appropriate funding. We haven't been able to raise enough money to realise the trip in a acceptable manner where the output would become beneficial to our master thesis.

We are of course utterly disappointed but just have to accept that we couldn't fight a financial crisis amongst other things. Maybe our theoretical proposition were to abstract as well for benefactors to understand and we definitely were too naive to expect funding to come easy. It has proven very difficult to gain economic support from both governmental, non-governmental and private organisations. There are many reasons for this but I won't go into this. I will just end up saying a lot of angry things :-)

So what now? Well, besides disappointment and a bit of demotivation right now, that we need to overcome, it's actually good to finally be back on a single route. It's been very stressful and confusing not to know what would actually happen.

We are already in the process of figuring out a different angle to our data collection. We will now most likely try to collect data more indirectly and initiate contact with some Danish NGO's working with ICT4D and instead of talking to the indigenous ourselves, get their viewpoint. In the end the results of our research will be different of course but not necessarily worse. Our ambitions is just the same as five months ago. We won't be stopped that easily :-)

The good news are that we have parked our theory and framework and feel very confident about it. We have moved on to the methodology and since our data collection now will change we will work on this before Christmas and until mid-January. Hopefully data collection will be conducted, now in Denmark, during late January and early February and then analysis, synthesis and further reflection will come along.

Another good news is that we'll now be in Denmark in whole January enjoying the nice cold dark winter here. Yes, our sarcastic humor is still intact... :-)

Conference on microfinance

Last Wednesday we attended a conference hosted by the student organization Develop and the Centre for Business and Development Studies at CBS. The conference was called "Is microfinance a solution to end poverty?".

When Kenneth and I took the course ITI, the course where we met our supervisor, we actually wrote an assignment on microfinance. Therefore we actually felt that we had a good understanding on the subject, and would be able to engage in the discussion, with questions and comments.

We ended up not engaging in the discussion, not because we didn't think we had anything to offer, but because the discourse for the conference was narrowed to only the economic aspect. Because of our background we would have broadened the discourse and looked at other things such as a successful application of ICT to facilitate microfinance, but also on how the microcredit could or should be spend, e.g. the use of indigenous knowledge. Instead the conference took these things for granted or made a reduction and simply discussed the optimal company size that should be granted loans, in order to actually create new jobs and not only improving one persons life.

I guess this post can be seen as a reminder of how one’s own background encapsulates and determines the things you see and find interesting. At least the attendance made Kenneth and I discussed why we didn't use more economic theory in our own framework.