Social Network Analysis and Mining to Monitor and Identify Problems with Large-Scale Information and Communication Technology Interventions

The published literature reveals several arguments concerning the strategic importance of information and communication technology (ICT) interventions for developing countries where the digital divide is a challenge. Large-scale ICT interventions can be an option for countries whose regions, both urban and rural, present a high number of digitally excluded people. Our goal was to monitor and identify problems in interventions aimed at certification for a large number of participants in different geographical regions. Our case study is the training at the Telecentros.BR, a program created in Brazil to install telecenters and certify individuals to use ICT resources. We propose an approach that applies social network analysis and mining techniques to data collected from Telecentros.BR dataset and from the socioeconomics and telecommunications infrastructure indicators of the participants’ municipalities. We found that (i) the analysis of interactions in different time periods reflects the objectives of each phase of training, highlighting the increased density in the phase in which participants develop and disseminate their projects; (ii) analysis according to the roles of participants (i.e., tutors or community members) reveals that the interactions were influenced by the center (or region) to which the participant belongs (that is, a community contained mainly members of the same region and always with the presence of tutors, contradicting expectations of the training project, which aimed for intense collaboration of the participants, regardless of the geographic region); (iii) the social network of participants influences the success of the training: that is, given evidence that the degree of the community member is in the highest range, the probability of this individual concluding the training is 0.689; (iv) the North region presented the lowest probability of participant certification, whereas the Northeast, which served municipalities with similar characteristics, presented high probability of certification, associated with the highest degree in social networking platform.