Barriers to Community-Based Computing in the Philippines

Community-based computing is a popular trend among the frontiers in social computing opened up by advances in information technology. Also known as Crowdsourcing, derived from the terms "crowd" and "outsourcing", it depends on the collective intellect of a large group of people from which to derive information, experience and, eventually, knowledge. But despite the advances in technology since the birth of the world wide web, and the ubiquitousness of mobile devices in today\´s modern society, there are still surprisingly high barriers to community-based computing in developing countries such as the Philippines. This paper presents the barriers to community-based computing discovered during the development of use cases for eBayanihan, a multi-platform crowdsourcing system for disaster response being developed by a team from the Ateneo De Manila University sponsored by the Philippine government through the Department of Science and Technology. It is hoped that this will promote greater study and development of solutions to barriers to community-based computing in the future and in other developing countries.