[Telecentres] Forum for Telecenters of Asia

[partha]

Very good idea, Shahid.Glad to see this coming up... Would like to 
highlight few things that you've pointed out.

1. Yes, it needs to be as open and participatory as possible, so that all 
legitimate tele-centre groups with whatever focuses they have, can join the 
platform without hesitation. Probably, their participation needs to be 
ensured through the governance structure of this forum too. I mean when we 
talk about Asia, we've to take into consideration the confidence of 
majority tele-centre experiments in the region, otherwise it'd be difficult 
to represent them. Anyway, its probably a question of mechanism and we 
certainly can work on that.

2. Talking about Asia, there are so many diversified experiments going on 
and there should be a way to map those first. For example. Mission 2007 
plans to cover 100,000 village centres (and telecentre.org is also a 
partner to this initiative) in India, UNESCO has a strong focus on CMC 
projects (http://ictpr.nic.in) in Asia and had been working to this 
direction for quite a long time now, IDRC has a long background of 
partnering with different telecentres in the region, Nepal has a long 
tradition of setting up community radio stations, many of which may have 
turned into tele-centres as well. In South East Asia, particularly in 
Philippines, Cambodia many telecentres projects have been integrated with 
social entrepreneurship models. Obviously there are other individual 
streams in the region as well. So a study on mapping the initiatives would 
be important step to know who is doing what, how and where?

3.  We probably have to take the call beyond this list. Cause not all 
telecenter projects/initiatives are subscribed to this list, neither 
they're going to WSIS. So we have to initiate a process to reach them and 
to get them connected to a platform which is meant for them.

Anyway, this are my inputs for the time being. Will send more inputs...

Partha Pratim Sarker
Co-founder, Bytes for All network
http://www.bytesforall.net