Dear Colleagues, I wish I had the time and money to be with you in New Delhi at the end of the month.
100,000 telecenters is progress, but how much depends on the architecture of the information and the infrastructure of the communication component. How do the content providers know what information is going to be the most valuable in the community where the kiosks are to be located? In the main, we choose from afar (I am in New York) and decide what information a villager needs, and when it comes to local information what we know is rather a small subset of what the village already knows. I was in Afghanistan about 12 years ago, and British World Service was planning an agriculture education services to help tell farmers what best to do. I was at a meeting where content was being discussed, and I believe the idea was dropped when local people pointed out that there were significant differences on farming practices from the north side of the valley to the south side of the valley. Bluntly put, how the hell were the experts wherever going to get planting dates right? Local people know a lot more than we give them credit for. The Transparency and Accountability Network (Tr-Ac-Net) database has a different information architecture than the British World Service idea .. Tr-Ac-Net seeks to help get key information from the community onto the record so that this information can help the community attract the resource assistance it needs for socio-economic progress. When there is "management information" available about community progress, and the various activities that have gone on to get this progress, then there can be efficiency improvement in the use of resources. Will the 100,000 telecenters being planned make it possible for villagers and community leaders to communicate with a web enabled database system like the one envisioned by Tr-Ac-Net, or will the information flow merely be "top-down". I will argue that information flows in both directions, as well as horizontally between local communities and local people, is several orders-of-magnitude more valuable than the simple top-down approach. I would be very interested to have other people's views on the OneWorld / Mission 2007 project, and the Tr-Ac-Net vision for a community database. Sincerely, Peter Burgess ____________ Peter Burgess Tr-Ac-Net in New York 212 772 6918 [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Transparency and Accountability Network With Kris Dev in Chennai India and others in South Asia, Africa and Latin America http://tr-ac-net.blogspot.com On 6/17/2005, Veronica Peris wrote: > OneWorld South Asia's (OWSA) <http://www.oneworld.net/> under the aegis > of Mission 2007 <http://www.mission2007.org/> would like to invite you > to a "Content for Community Needs" Programme meeting (30 June and 1 July > 2005; India International Centre, New Delhi.) > > OneWorld will introduce the concept of 100,000 Telecentres and the > opportunities that exist for content developers/providers in the > immediate future. > > One of the practical ways of using ICTs, we feel, is to set up > Telecentres (Rural Advocacy Centres/Information Kiosks) that contain > information relevant to the needs of the rural/urban communities. Such > Telecentres would facilitate Communities' access to > information/facilities/services without their having to waste any time > in procuring/accessing the same. To the worker at the community level, > having to procure such information would mean in real terms, having to > drop out of work for at least a day -- often forgo a days wages -- and > the resultant food for him/her self and the family. For this purpose > there is an urgent need to digitise a content repository for community > needs to reach out to rural/urban India at large, as well as tailor the > data to the respective needs of the communities. ..snip... ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
