Dear Peter, We are delighted to note the importance you also give to the focus on the architecture of the information as well as the infrastructure of the communication component.
OWSA sees content providers merely as facilitators who would never attempt to replace the traditional wisdom and practical knowledge communities have. Sharing of knowledge between communities would complement the bottom up approach. The information which would flow from the top would reflect the needs expressed/sought by the community. Your practical example amply justifies reality. As a matter of fact, we all could learn a lot from Communities and that is exactly how we want to proceed by recording this information. This would in turn help the community to attract further resources which would hopefully lead to socio-economic progress as well as a sharing of knowledge/information between communities. To reiterate, the information flow will not be top-down, precisely because their knowledge is more realistic and practical. Despite the distance between you and the venue of the meeting, your comments absolutely reflect the reality of the situation. OWSA would be very interested to have TR-Ac-Nets vision for a community database. Sincerely, Veronica Peris On Friday, June 24, 2005, Peter Burgess wrote: > 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.... > > 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. ------------ ***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/>
