This is great news that they are considering rolling out broadband in your country. It is also to their credit that civil society organizations are being consulted; too often these things are populated by business and government exclusively. When this is allowed to occur, the programs take on the smell of technology subsidy at best and corporate welfare at worst.
Don't get me wrong; the connection is important, but after the connection is made, then the sustainability questions kick-in. One report I read which was commissioned by Canada's Broadband Task-Force was called "Access to What? First Mile Issues" and it advocated for community economic development to sustain the demand for the connectivity. The report is kind of long, but the gist of it is that there needs to be a simultaneous push to develop the community to take advantage of the Internet connection at the same time it is rolled out. For example, after a connection is made local artisans can try selling their wares on eBay or some other artisan web site; however, educating the artisans on how to do this is where corporate driven connectivity plans fail. The push to develop community capacity should be made at the same time or before the connection is installed. The report used to be available online, but I think that Industry Canada was unhappy with it and removed it. It is only available via the Internet Wayback Machine; the link is provided below. Reference Civille, R., Gurstein, M. and Pigg, K. Access to What? First Mile Issues for Rural Broadband. Industry Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, January 2001. Available at: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://broadband.gc.ca/english/resources/ac cess_to_what.pdf TinyURL version of the link: http://tinyurl.com/5agl5 Kelvin Wong Department of Computer Science University of Victoria Personal Blog: http://nativetech.blogspot.com/ -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Al Alegre Sent: January 17, 2005 1:55 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; gkd@phoenix.edc.org Cc: commrights-asia list; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [DDN] broadband strategies for developing countries: civil societyviews? _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
