The 5th Meeting of the Expert Group on ICT Household Indicators (EGH) took place in Geneva, Switzerland, on 14-15 September 2017. The meeting was organized by the Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and hosted by ITU. The EGH meeting was held back-to-back with the 8th Meeting of the Expert Group on Telecommunication/ICT Indicators (EGTI), which took place in Geneva, Switzerland, on 12-13 September 2017.
The meeting examined the contributions received from members of the EGH online discussion forum over the current working period, with a view to finalizing the items under discussion. The outcome of the discussions will be presented at the 15th World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Symposium (WTIS), which will be held in Tunisia, from 14-16 November 2017.
The objective of the 5th EGH meeting was to explore and develop new ICT household indicators, and review and update existing methodologies to keep up-to-date with the evolution of technologies, services and user behaviour. In particular, the following topics were discussed:
- New indicators to better track
e-commerce.
- Improving the measurement of ICT skills using household surveys.
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A technical definition of smartphone and new indicators to measure smartphone adoption.
- Methodological issues in capturing the location of Internet use.
- Efforts to improve data availability and disaggregation of ICT statistics to ensure “no one is left behind” in accessing and using ICTs.
Countries also showcased their experiences in implementing household surveys.In addition, the EGTI and EGH meetings featured a joint session of the two expert groups that discussed two common topics: data dissemination/visualization and the use of big data for official statistics. Concerning the latter, an update of the ITU project ‘Big Data for Measuring the Information Society’ was presented.
EGH meetings are open to all ITU members and experts in the field of ICT statistics and data collection. All documents concerning the EGH meeting, including the agenda, background documents, presentations delivered during the meeting, and the meeting summary are available in the EGH online forum:
http://www.itu.int/net4/ITU-D/forum/expertgrouponhouseholds/forum/
