Inclusion, exclusion and social media: IT-based initiatives and future opportunities

This paper focuses on IT-based and more specifically social media-based initiatives for inclusion. It presents a state-of-the-art overview of existing initiatives that was based on a review of scientific literature, interviews with practitioners in the field and a thorough internet search. The initiatives were sorted in eight main categories: providing access to computer and the internet, increasing skills, cooperation with others, changing attitudes, providing a sense of belonging, increasing visibility, adapting to personal wants and needs and digitalising content. Moreover, a separate category was created for initiatives incorporating social media. Based on this overview, it was concluded that the majority of initiatives still focuses on providing access to computers and the internet and IT-training, whereas only a minority aims at improving empowerment by actively involving users. Secondly, many existing initiatives contend with communication issues. It further appears that social media initiatives mostly use a bottom-up approach, whereas more classic IT-based inclusion initiatives employ top-down approaches. Finally, growing decentralisation makes overlooking the field difficult and finally results or evaluations are rarely available. Recommendations for future initiatives and future research are discussed in this paper.