commonspace

Circle of light

Moratuwa, Sri Lanka – September 26 + 27, 2005

Looking around Sri Lanka, it seems like a telecentre movement has popped up overnight.

A year ago, Sarvodaya – a grassroots movement focused on community development – was the only group with telecentres up and running. Now, there are also dozens of new 'Nanasalas' in place, entrepreneurial and temple-based telecentres sponsored by eSriLanka. Small NGOs are also getting into the telecentre game, some of them with support from the recently set up Microsoft Unlimited Potential program. And, there is rumour that almost a hundred school computer centres supported by the Asian Development Bank will be turned into publicly accessible 'community resource centres' over the coming year.

The most amazing thing (unsurprisingly) about this Sri Lankan telecentre buzz is the people behind it. People like Ravi Ariyawickrama from Sarvodaya and Dil Piyaratna from eSriLanka have been tirelessly working to establish and expand the telecentre programs of their respective organizations. More importantly, hundreds of people across the country have stepped forward over the past year or two to get directly involved in the work of brining computers and the Internet into their villages.

Earlier this week, I meet with 120 of these people at Sarvodaya's Moratuwa headquarters. Made up primarily of frontline village telecentre operators, the meeting was a mix of the emerging telecentre.org style and Sarvodaya's 50-year old community organizing acumen. Participants clapped, laughed, ran around the hall, drew pictures of the challenges they face and speedgeeked ideas for programs that could help out all of Sri Lanka's telecentre operators. The result was truly energizing!

This energy partly came from the fact so many ideas and learning were flying around. Everyone said they learned a lot. However, equally important was the sense of no longer being alone. There are new telecentres popping up quickly all over Sri Lanka, but this doesn't make the work of running up a village computing centre any less lonely. With two days amongst 120 new friends and colleagues, many participants were saying that they'd found a sense of family.

As the meeting closed, the Sarvodaya facilitators handed out candles to everyone in the circle. One person lit their candle, and then the next, and the next ... until there was a circle of light filling the room. As we left the room, it felt like 120 people had embarked on a journey to carry this circle of light across Sri Lanka.

The power of circles

Chennai, India – September 22 + 23, 2005

The Mission 2007 trainers workshop was the first time that I felt the telecentre.org workshop model came fully to life.

An assumption underlying the whole telecentre.org program is that dialogue between people who are passionate about telecentres is the number one ingredient needed for a successful network. Stealing many pages from the Aspiration song book, I believe that this dialogue process is best sparked (and sustained) with face-to-face workshops that follow a few simple ground rules:

1. Always sit in a circle of chairs with no tables. This lets everyone to see each other and allows movement in the space.
2. Make sure everyone gets to talk, immediately ... and keep the time any one person talks short. Opening circles, line ups and speedgeeks really help with this.
3. No slideware, except in speedgeeks. End stop.
4. Allow ideas and leadership to emerge organically. The right people facilitate small groups and the right ideas to move forward will pop up if you let them.
5. Blog. Wiki. Snap. And wiki again. A flexible online space that everyone can add information to means that ideas are captured on the fly for later process.
6. Drive to a concrete conclusion, write it down and follow up. Shifting agendas are good, but fuzzy outcomes are not.

While we have played with many of these ideas before, this was the first time that we really embraced them whole hog. The results were better than expected: people were totally charged at the end of the meeting, ready to network and move ahead together on training issues. Also, we had a rough picture of what a common training manual and future knowledge sharing efforts could look like.

Of course, there is much to learn on how to make these events better, and on how to transfer these approaches widely. But still, pulling the Chennai workshop off in this manner was a moment to celebrate in telecentre.org's early history. Many thanks to all who participated, we made this happen together.

PS. I learned in this meeting that being a lead facilitator and blogging don't go well together. I am writing this post many days after the meeting.

Community and curriculum

Chennai, India – September 22+ 23, 2005

Driving in the taxi to MSSRF, Arjit from GRASSO observed: "We came together to talk about curriculum, but we left talking about community."

This observation came the morning after a two day workshop gathering trainers from 16 different telecentre programs in India. These are the people who will in part be responsible for 'capacity building' side of the Mission 2007: In Every Village a Knowledge Centre movement. They had gathered to discuss the creation of a common curriculum for training tens, or even hundreds, of thousands new knowledge centre mangers, which is a key part of the Mission 2007 vision.

Truly, this workshop was electric. It started with a round of two speedgeeks: all 16 programs had a chance to do high speed presentations about their telecentre programs in small groups. The result was a feeling of common cause, identification of shared challenges, laughter ... and a clear snapshot of the telecentre movement in India. This was followed with a day and a half of intense dialogue and visioning around the question: can we get better at training people if we do it together?

The answer to this question was a resounding 'yes'. However, the approaches identified for doing this amounted to much more than a shared curriculum. Yes, there is a need to write down much of the tacit knowledge that all of these trainers use as they do their work. But there is also a need to build out a program of workshops and online knowledge sharing which ensures that this tacit knowledge continues to flow.

In the end, telecentre.org' s July commitment to help create knowledge centre manager training curriculum with Mission 2007 stands. Yet, the work we need to do is just as much about supporting a community of practice amongst these trainers as it is about writing things down. This will be interesting work.

Wholesale or retail?

Chennai, India – September 21, 2005

India has made tremendous progress in the development of services that will help generate revenue at the local telecentre level. Leading the pack in this arena are the social entrepreneurs at Drishtee, nLogue and TARAHaat. They have developed services to bring everything from government permits to remote health care to e-commerce into Indian villages via information kiosks.

Many of the services being tried out provide promise, both as tools for rural development and as ways to generate revenue for kiosk operators. Yet, the potential of these services is in part limited by the fact that they are only available through one 'brand' of kiosk – nLogue services at nLogue kiosks, Drishtee services at Drishtee kiosks, TARAHaat services at TARAHaat kiosks. This kind of vertical integration makes service delivery and improvement reasonably easy, but it also limits market size and potential ROI for new services.

With a mind to expanding both the market for their services and the offerings in their kiosks, these three kiosk networks joined Microsoft and telecentre.org for a meeting at IIT in Chennai. The meeting explored the possibility of a 'common services platform' that would essentially allow these networks to wholesale their services to each others kiosks. Certainly, there were many questions: Are these services productizable? Can we come up with integrated services, not just bits a pieces? Are the kiosks similar enough to share services? Yet, across these questions, there was a cautious commitment to dig deeper into the idea of unbundling services so they can be shared.

If a common services platform can emerge amongst these partners, it will certainly provide valuable opportunity innovate in the area of kiosk sustainability. It may also help take the idea of telecentre networks to a level that goes beyond just learning and information sharing.

Telecentre curriculum mash up

Tembisa, South Africa

Radebe Thabiso has community based technology training on his brain. So, he was exactly the right person to talk to on my one day back in South Africa.

Thabiso runs a telecentre in Tembisa, a township on the edge of Johannesburg. Supported by both the Universal Service Agency and the Microsoft Digital Villages program, the Tembisa centre offers courses in everything from computer basics to office software to web publishing. According to Thabiso, courses are always full, and enough money comes in the door to pay an honorarium to three young trainers. (Thabiso doesn't draw a salary himself. He is a volunteer.)

Given the emphasis on basic training and accreditation at our Cape Town meeting, the questions on my mind were: What curriculum to training-focused telecentres in South Africa need? What do they use? What's still needed?

It turns out that the Tembisa centre uses both the Wits InfoLit course and the Microsoft Unlimited Potential Curriculum. "But don't these two pieces of curriculum compete?" I asked. Thabiso claimed not. In fact, he argued that they were complimentary, giving his trainers materials for both a basic foundation course and more advanced courses on individual applications. He also said they mix and match from both. It's like a curriculum mash up.

Hearing this gave me a huge sense of relief, the kind of feeling that comes when the obvious things you can't see are revealed to you (which was exactly what had happened). I'd been worried that doing a curriculum and accreditation initiative with South African telecentres would mean deciding on THE curriculum to use. Thabiso reminded me of something that I know from my years as an Internet trainer: curriculum is just the starting point from which a trainer gets creative. Having a mix of curriculum tools to draw on is actually a good thing.

So, thanks to Thabiso for helping me (and Meddie) to this insight. Hopefully, it can help us focus the work we do supporting telecentre trainers in South Africa.

Sugar town

Xinavane, Mozambique

Xinavane is a sugar town. More precisely, it is a town surrounded by endless cane fields and with a sugar factory at the centre. Almost everyone in Xinavane works for the sugar company.

So, when UNESCO and CIUEM started working with local community members to set up a CMC, one of the first things they did was talk to the people who run the sugar company.

What could a sugar company expect from a CMC? Technology training and local news for the people in their community. What could a CMC hope for from a sugar company? A free building on the main road through town, right beside the local school. And, in an impressive and very local take on the idea of multi-stakeholder partnership, that is what they both got.

Operating much like the Chok'we centre we'd seen earlier in the day, the Xinavane CMC really demonstrates what can happen when you set up a telecentre that has concrete local value, and then connect it up with business or government interests that want (or need) their community to be a healthy one.

As telecentre.org looks at both multi-stakeholder partnerships and sustainability over the coming years, we definitely need to keep an eye on the local ... not just as a place to offer services, but also as a place to draw strength and resources from.

Haircuts and telecentre sustainability

Chok'we, Mozambique

In Chok'we I had a chance to see my first UNESCO community multimedia centre (CMC), a combination telecentre and community radio station.

The Chok'we centre impressed me in a number of ways – the flow people between the telecentre and the on air studio, the popularity of the radio station with the local community, the incredibly valuable local content and services being offered (like announcements about lost ID that people had found on the street). But, what stuck with me most was the conversation we had about sustainability.

One of the biggest sustainability challenges the CMC has is maintaining its pool of nearly 60 volunteers. These are the people who keep the centre alive, who offer training, gather local news and talk on the air. Yet, there are no resources to pay for bus fare, give prizes for significant volunteer contributions or even offer lunch for volunteers who stay all day. The result is that it's tough to keep volunteers involved.

"What about making a deal with local restaurants, trading lunch for radio ads?" I asked naively. "Could that help?"

Alberto, the head of the centre's organizing committee jumped in quickly in Portuguese with an answer. "We're already doing that, sort of. We have a deal with the local barber. He gives the volunteers free hair cuts, and we advertise his barber shop. It's very popular with the volunteers, especially the radio announcers who get treated a bit like celebrities."

For me, the haircut conversation highlighted one of the potential benefits of mixing community media with more traditional telecentres: both approaches have ideas and innovations to offer each other. Just looking at sustainability, community media around the world has a tradition of volunteerism and bartering advertising for goods while telecentres have a tradition of offering fee-based community services. Models like the CMC provide an opportunity for these ideas and histories to creatively blend.

Supporting supportnets

Maputo, Mozambique

Polly Gaster has been thinking and talking about telecentre support networks for a long time.

Based at the Centro de Informatica Universidade Eduardo Mondlane (CIUEM) in Maputo, Polly is amongst a handful of people involved in early thinking telecentre support networks – national associations of telecentres that work together on training, tech support and information sharing. This support network idea was one of the major driving forces behind telecentre.org, and creating or expanding these networks is a major part of our mandate.

Earlier this week, Polly convened a meeting telecentre managers, community media people and government representatives to hash out what a support network might look like in Mozambique. The group made it clear that both the 'support' (e.g. a tech help line and training) and the 'network' (meetings, e-mail lists, knowledge sharing) sides of this idea are important for the telecentre community in Mozambique. There is also a need to help telecentres and the government to find better connectivity solutions, as most telecentres are having real problems in this area.

Based on the outcomes of this meeting, it looks like telecentre.org will help to set up a support network in Mozambique. This will give us a chance to test out and document the support network concept in its full form (many other countries we are working with are only doing one part of a support network to start off). Also, it will provide an opportunity to work with the UNESCO CMC program and the Open Knowledge Network in as real, on-the-ground context. Both of these programs will also be contributing to the support network in Mozambique.