[Telecentres] Introduction

[Laurent Straskraba]

Hi everyone,

my name is Laurent Straskraba, I'm working as a scientific researcher at 
the ICT&S(ociety) Center at the University of Salzburg, Austria 
(http://www.icts.sbg.ac.at). Beside that I'm supporting the World Summit 
Award (http://www.wsis-award.org) and am honored to be the Information 
Society Representative of the UN Youth & Student Association of Austria 
(http://www.afa.at). More directly I'm in contact with a telecenters 
networking partnership among European countries (http://www.erde.lt/).

I'm on this list since during the past 6-7 years I thought a lot about 
ICTs&sustainable development. I graduated from the University of Linz, 
Austria in 2001 and went on a very interesting research trip to the USA for 
my Master's thesis in 2000. I learned a lot from some of the best 
professors in the area of ICT&Society and tried to integrate their 
experience into a broader development concept for my thesis. Also the work 
of various UN agencies, esp. UNDP and UNESCO was very helpful for me to 
understand the basic layers of development. Finally, I met people from 
Austria and other places around the world to talk about an integrated 
information & development approach. Among them is Franz Nahrada, a friend 
of mine who was dealing with the "Global Village" idea for many years and 
held conferences about this concept in the 1990s in Vienna, Austria 
(http://members.inode.at/give/home_a.htm). Combining my personal research 
focus on Asia-Pacific with the work of UNESCO Bangkok 
(http://www.unescobkk.org/education/ict/v2/info.asp?id=11028) and Roger 
Harris (http://rogharris.org), I think I found the proper tool for my 
approach: Community-based Information and Development centers with a global 
ICT infrastructure as a catalyst function (in short "telecenters", 
"community technology centers", "e-villages" and so forth).

This is what I found most appropriate to my research so far:

http://www.greenstar.org/operating.htm
http://www.jhai.org/jhai_remoteIT.htm

I'd be very happy to exchange ideas and experiences with this list since I 
think this tool is not only to talk a lot but also to spread working models 
- especially for the very low income communities. It's also my intent to 
establish a small Information & Development Center in a Cambodian village.

Best regards,

Laurent


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Mag. Laurent Straskraba
Information Society Researcher
http://www.icts.sbg.ac.at

Information Society Representative at UN Youth & Student Association of Austria
http://www.afa.at

post: Ontlstrasse 3, A - 4040 Linz, Austria / Europe
mobile: +43.650.7711861 (GMT +1)
e-mail: laurent at straskraba.net
web: http://www.straskraba.net
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