E-Collaboration for Capacity Building in the Community of Persons with Disabilities of Québec

Catherine Roy
W3Québec

Introduction

Greetings everyone. I am very pleased and honoured to be participating in the 2nd Global Forum on Disability and the Information Society, before such knowledgeable and distinguished actors in the field.

Today, I will present a pilot project that has been realised over the last year to build a virtual community of practice within a network of organisations for persons with disabilities in Québec.

Outline

In today's presentation, we will look at :

• The context of the project, its objectives and the partners involved
• A brief overview of the process
• The challenges and outcomes of the project
• And finally, future directions.

Context

First, I would like to give you a little background information to understand the context of this project.

Québec is a province of Canada, and although the rest of the country is English, our principal language is French. It is a very big province geographically, with a population of about 7 million people.

Of those 7 million people, over 1 million are classified as having a disability. So over 15% of the overall population has a disability. The ratio may seem high but we have to consider that we have an ever-increasing aging population, many of whom to varying degrees have physical or health problems.

The socioeconomic profile of Québécois with disabilities is overall similar to most other industrialized countries, that is to say, progress having been made in the last 30 years or so to facilitate their participation in society (legislation, programs, services, etc.). However, persons with disabilities in Québec are greatly behind the rest of the population, whether in areas of education, employment, access to independent-living services, revenues, etc. In short, persons with disabilities are the least educated, the least active on the job market and the poorest of all marginalized populations in Qc.

Many organisations work to ameliorate the lives of persons with disabilities in Québec. There are literally hundreds of these organisations, whether working on provincial, regional or local levels or on specific themes. Not surprisingly, these organisations are under-funded, overworked and understaffed and are usually dealing with very basic needs (home care services, access to transportation, barrier-free architecture, education, etc.). A lot of the work done by these organisations depends on partnership, communications, collaboration, and access and sharing of information.

Many of these organisations are technologically behind, their use of ICTs is very limited, mostly e-mail, and the majority do not have a website. Their involvement on issues related to accessibility of ICTs is even less developed, they do not have the resources and the time to appropriate these issues and find it daunting due to the complexity. Limited support and documentation in French can also be a problem.

The PHARE project sought to give organisations for persons with disabilities the technological means to work more closely and efficiently together. The project decided to focus on a particular network of regional organisations, l'AQRIPH (acronym for Alliance québécoise des regroupements pour l'integration des personnes handicapées), working in the different administrative regions of the province. This network is organised as an inverse pyramid, its administrators basing their decisions on needs expressed by persons with disabilities to the 350 local member organisations. These in turn transmit this information to the regional coalitions who determine AQRIPH's orientations through a provincial board of directors.

This network depends on collaboration and sharing of information and faces big challenges because of the geographical distances that separate the member organisations.

Objectives

The acronym PHARE means Personnes Handicapées et Accessibilite aux Ressources de la E-collaboration (which translates as Persons with disabilities and access to e-collaboration resources). And in English, "phare" means "beacon".

This project's main objective was to build a virtual community of practice for organisations for persons with disabilities of Québec. This community of practice could therefore help these organisations to :

• Overcome practical issues (distance, cost, difficulty to travel, etc.);
• Better communicate and manage information by having a dedicated platform to discuss, produce, collaborate, share and disseminate information;
• Facilitate decision making and collective actions;
• So an overall better support of their work as these are partnership organisations;
• Also, a better grasp of ICTs and Web resources in general;
• And hopefully, help educate this community of organisations on issues related to accessibility of ICTs.

This project sought to implement a collaborative platform that could be used by all the employees and resources of the network, therefore also by employees with disabilities.

Partners

The promoter of the project is CAMO pour personnes handicapées, a labour adjustment agency for persons with disabilities in Québec, whose main mission is to develop strategies to facilitate the integration of persons with disabilities on the job market in Québec

Communautique is an organisation working in Québec to promote the appropriation of ICTs within voluntary sector organisations and active on various issues related to the digital divide, e-governement, social innovation through ICTs, etc. In light of their vast expertise in the field of training non-profit organisations on the use of ICTs, Communautique was mandated to ensure all the training of the participants throughout the project.

L'AQRIPH was the experimentation field, mandating participants from the 19 regional coalitions to participate in the project and to promote its use through its network.

M3K Solutions, a Québec ICT firm specialized in collaborative technologies, provided the platform for the project, worked with consultants to adapt it and provided technical support throughout.

Finally, this project was funded by the Fonds national de la formation de la main-d'oeuvre which is a Ministry of Employment fund dedicated to capacity building and qualification of the Québec workforce. The Fonds national created a pilot fund to experiment e-learning strategies. 9 projects were funded, including the PHARE project, which was awarded 250,000$ for this experimentation.

Process

This project was realized from January to beginning of November 2005. Member organisations and the AQRIPH head office each delegated 1 or 2 participants for training. So overall, about 40 people participated in the training. Of those, 3 had visual impairments using assistive technologies, 3 had severe physical disabilities and 1 had an auditory disability. I wish I could say that more persons with disabilities were reached through the initial phase but as we know, employees with disabilities are greatly under-represented in their own organisations, which is another issue altogether.

Two trainers were assigned to follow the participants throughout the project. Two face to face meetings were held, one at the beginning to introduce the platform and the basic workings and one at the end to obtain feedback on the overall process. Participants with disabilities also benefited from one to one training on introductory notions.

On-line learning modules concerning the various features were experimented (common calendar of events, task management, document management, discussion forums) by the participants. A "real life" practical exercise was also experimented to demonstrate the usefulness of e-collaboration. The network was asked to decide what real life task they wished to accomplish and decided for this exercise to collaborate on a platform of requirements that it needed to prepare for the International Day of Persons with Disabilities.

Challenges

One of the biggest challenges for this project concerned the organisational culture of the AQRIPH network. As stated earlier, these organisations are used to working almost exclusively with e-mail and many have hardly ever heard of, let alone worked on collaborative platforms. Also, employees presented different levels of skills regarding the use of ICTs though most have rather basic skills on this aspect.

They have limited time and resources to learn new skills and new working environments. They have a high roll-over of personnel due to funding through temporary government programs. It should also be noted that due to limited funding, most of these organisations close up for the summer so training had to be interrupted for about 2 months which meant trainers had to re-motivate and refresh training notions for participants when activities started up again at the beginning of the fall.

Finally, l'AQRIPH, being a voluntary sector network, is quite different from the commercial sector where tools such as this platform are mostly used. So in short, they have become accustomed to working this way, mostly by necessity and changing their way of communicating and collaborating with each other did provoke some resistance.

In response to this, the project targeted features and specific applications that valorise the usefulness of this platform as opposed to simple e-mail. The project also called upon Communautique who has vast expertise in training voluntary sector organisations in the use of ICTs.

The other major challenge concerned the collaborative tool chosen for the project, the SynkroTM platform, developed by Québec ICT firm M3KSolutions, based on IBM technology. The reasons behind using this platform concern the two following main issues.

• The wish to bring in a local firm and sensitise them to issues related to accessibility of ICTs and obtain their collaboration in the project, reflecting thus a multi-stakeholder partnership (which had significant impact in obtaining funding).
• An ambitious wish to adapt a mainstream platform to W3C accessibility standards (in order to experiment and adapt a tool used in regular employment settings by all employees, thus looking at issues of employees with and without disabilities working in the same environment and with the same tools).

The platform itself had no accessibility features to start with and relied heavily on JavaScript. It was unknown how adaptable it wo

To respond to these challenges, the project brought in consultants with accessibility expertise to assist the firm in adapting the platform. And although it was not possible to make it WCAG compliant, it was possible to make the platform usable by all participants, including those using assistive technologies, in order to meet their practical needs. But truth be told, hard choices were made.

Basically :

• Textual links were used over graphical links;
• As it was not possible to create accessible content directly in the interface, the import feature was used to import content from Microsoft Word documents;
• Very specific instructions were given to participants with regard to using headings, tables and image descriptions for the Word documents to be imported.

Outcomes

For us in Québec, this represented a very innovative project in the field of ICTs, bringing together partners from public, voluntary and private sector to help organisations for persons with disabilities become more efficient and competitive with regards to information management and therefore contribute to better serve our community.

And, as we saw earlier, although it was not possible to adapt the platform to meet all W3C standards, it was possible to adapt it sufficiently to be usable by all participants without any significant compromises on what they needed to accomplish in terms of work objectives.

The platform is used by the network and, through the training sessions and the use of the tool, it has helped to bring the member organisations closer together.

The project also permitted Communautique to broaden its expertise with regards to training strategies for persons with disabilities and this will be a valuable resource for our community.

Organically and spontaneously, mentoring was developed by certain organisations to other employees not in the initial core group trained through the project and some of the local organisations have started to contribute to the platform (which validated our objectives for future directions).

The implementation of this virtual community will not be an obstacle to future disabled employees to be hired by the network.

Finally, the project helped these organisations to have a better understanding of issues related to accessibility of ICTs.

Future

A 3-year grant application has been submitted to the Office of Learning Technologies of the Government of Canada. If accepted, we will start the second phase which concerns deploying the virtual community throughout the 350 local member organisations where we hope to reach more employees with disabilities.

We are debating whether to change platforms, perhaps going with A-Collab but questions remain on whether this network can sustain an open-source platform since these organisations have limited resources and technical knowledge to take on the responsibility of maintaining it on their own. However, already they are thinking of creating a working group comprised of a few of the more technologically advanced employees to support the network on this level.

So in short, despite certain obstacles, I think it is safe to say that the future looks bright for this virtual community and there is certainly potential to go further.

Contact

Catherine Roy
Consultant
http://www.catherine-roy.net