ICTD - Having Global Impact as a Technical Woman

Thanks for the clear definition of ICTD, Revi! I like the widening pie imagery and agree with the two separate definition areas. If we take it one step further and add in the notion of research, I think the definition narrows somewhat.

ICTD by itself is very encompassing and can be very interdisciplinary. When we add in research, I think we need to be careful on the "Information and Communication Technology" side. We need to remember that we are again qualifying a very large area, technology, with a smaller area. Information and communication in and of themselves are very important and necessary for development, but we, as researchers and computer scientists in ICT, need to remember the technology part. In the area of ICTD research, we work to develop novel technologies to enable information and communication flows. Since we define ICTD in the computer science area, if the technology is not novel in some way, I think we cannot define it as ICTD research. If the content of the information and communication is novel, we are looking into a different area of research, either education or policy or business.

Is this an overly harsh view? Is there room in CS research for ICTD that does not include novel technologies? Is it possible to have ICTD research as an area of CS or does the research need of novelty in the technology preclude defining sustainable solutions to development problems?