Building Bridges across Papua New Guinea's Digital Divide in Growing the ICT Industry
Marc Cheong, Sankwi Abuzo, Hideaki Hata, Priscilla Kevin, Winifred Kula, Benson Mirou, Christoph Treude, Dong Wang, Raula Gaikovina Kula
TL;DR
The paper investigates how Papua New Guinea can bridge its digital divide and grow its ICT sector by leveraging Open Source Software (OSS) and targeted ICT education. Using Bridges2023 as a lens, it identifies four themes—education, affordability, local governance, and OSS adoption—and outlines future research directions such as curriculum alignment, OSS-based teaching, and inclusive AI auditing. It highlights PNG's unique context, including significant OSS activity with $7{,}547$ developers contributing to $6{,}130$ repositories in Q1 2024, and severe rural–urban disparities that demand local voice in global tech discussions. The discussion argues that OSS and community-driven initiatives can empower PNGeans, reduce dependence on Big Tech, and tailor digital technologies to PNG's languages, safety standards, and governance needs. Overall, the paper offers a roadmap for researchers, educators, and policymakers to advance an equitable digital future for PNG.
Abstract
Papua New Guinea (PNG) is an emerging tech society with an opportunity to overcome geographic and social boundaries, in order to engage with the global market. However, the current tech landscape, dominated by Big Tech in Silicon Valley and other multinational companies in the Global North, tends to overlook the requirements of emerging economies such as PNG. This is becoming more obvious as issues such as algorithmic bias (in tech product deployments) and the digital divide (as in the case of non-affordable commercial software) are affecting PNG users. The Open Source Software (OSS) movement, based on extant research, is seen as a way to level the playing field in the digitalization and adoption of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in PNG. This perspectives paper documents the outcome of the second International Workshop on BRIdging the Divides with Globally Engineered Software} (BRIDGES2023) in the hopes of proposing ideas for future research into ICT education, uplifting software engineering (SE) capability, and OSS adoption in promoting a more equitable digital future for PNG.