Community technology centres: A proposed framework for sustainability

The effectiveness of Community Technology Centres (CTCs) in meeting many of the challenges presented by the digital divide invites a closer scrutiny of factors that contribute to their sustainability. The success of CTCs appears to be related to the way in which these initiatives are able to respond to the multifaceted nature of the digital divide problem. However, more systematic approaches are required to enable the identification of common factors that contribute to sustainability in different contexts. The paper responds to this challenge by initially reviewing recent contributions on the digital divide debate. From a more refined understanding of what constitutes the digital divide the paper extends Kling's [6] two-part portrayal of the digital divide into a framework that captures both technical and social factors that contribute to sustainability of CTCs. The purpose of this proposed framework is to enable further research into the sustainability of CTCs for indigenous people of Australia