The world summit awards: a critical analysis

Best practice case studies have become very popular within commercial information systems and information and communication technology (ICT) for development discourses. Best practices claim to offer a way to quickly become as good as the leaders in a particular domain, without making their mistakes. An initiative that promotes the sharing of best practices is the World Summit Awards (WSA), which, through a global contest, identifies and promotes best practices in local e-content and applications. The paper explores the process whereby organisations apply and are judged as winners, in addition to conducting a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of selected WSA-related texts, to determine the underlying assumptions and beliefs of WSA regarding the concept of " best practice ". It holds up the findings against two principles that are fundamental to effective best practice promulgation. Ultimately it finds the WSA falling short of its intended goals because of the way in which it chooses and presents best practice cases. 1 INTRODUCTION ICT has become an important aspect of the modern era. " ICTs are revolutionising the way in which societies interact, conduct their businesses, compete in the international market, and set their national economic and human development agendas " and they " present – at least theoretically – a promising potential to lead developing countries into the 'highways' of development " (Morales-Gómez & Melesse, 1998). There is much political and practical discourse around the role of ICT for development (ICT4D). An important event related to this issue has been the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). At the first phase of WSIS, held in Geneva in 2003, all UN member states committed to " build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create, access, utilise and share information and knowledge " (ITU 2003). The second phase of the Summit was held in Tunis in November 2005. While no universally accepted definition for the Information Society exists, it can be described as a society in which " the creation, distribution, and manipulation of information has become the most significant economic and cultural activity. An Information Society may be contrasted with societies in which the economic underpinning is primarily Industrial or Agrarian " (TechTarget 1999). Parallel events are held aside each Summit that provide a space for government agencies, civil society organisations, private sector companies, donor agencies and intergovernmental organisations to showcase their best practice initiatives, network and form partnerships. …