| Frederick Noronha on 20 Sep 2000 19:00:57 -0000 |
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| <nettime> bYtES For aLL: SEPTEMBER(II) 2000 EZINE |
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_/ B y t e s F o r A l l --- http://www.bytesforall.org
_/ Making Computing Relevant to the People of South Asia
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SEPTEMBER * 2000 (2ND FORTNIGHT) ISSUE * FOCUS:THE OUTSIDE WORLD
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n o n - p r o f i t s
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Benton Foundation is interested in providing nonprofits with
practical guidance in helping evaluate the opportunities and
risks of e-commerce in a thoughtful way. Nonprofits should make
e-commerce also work for philanthropic goals.
Email benton@benton.org
FAHAMU is dedicated to the strengthening not-for-profit
organisations through the development of computer and internet-
based learning materials.
http://www.fahamu.org
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h e a l t h i s s u e s
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UN ECONOMIC COMMISSION for Africa, as organiser of the African
Development Forum 2000, is to hold a global online discussion on
AIDS from July 2000 till before the forum meets in October.
The African Development Forum (ADF) is an initiative to position
an African-driven development agenda. In October 1999, the meet
was on the theme "The Challenge to Africa of Globalisation and
the Information Age".
See the ADF web site at http://www.un.org/depts/eca/adf2000
To join the list, please send a message to:
join-adf2000-l@lyris.bellanet.org
Or view messages posted at http://www.un.org/depts/eca/adf2000
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e d u c a t i o n
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FOR EDUCATIONISTS wishing to join the 'Learning Communities'
mailing list, just send an email to
LearningCommunities-subscribe@onelist.com
Check out http://www.Distance-Educator.com
Suggestions regarding content? Would you like to contribute
something to this site? Email vanessa@distance-educator.com.
THE JULY-AUGUST 2000 ISSUE OF TechKnowLogia has been posted on
the web. The thematic focus of this Issue is on Technology and
Vocational & Technical Training.
http://www.techKnowLogia.org.
GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT LEARNING NETWORK (GDLN)
The GDLN is a telecommunications network that connects distance
learning centers (DLC) in cities across the globe. It harnesses
the latest learning tools -- interactive video, electronic
classrooms, satellite communications and the Internet -- to help
break down the digital divide.
* It provides decision-makers and agents of change with access
to partners who face similar challenges in other parts of the
world.
* It harnesses expertise in a wide variety of disciplines and
connects knowledge centers around the world.
* It enables people to learn in their home environments without
costly travel or work disruptions.
E-mail: distance_learning@worldbank.org
http://www.worldbank.org/distancelearning/gdln/
http://www.worldbank.org/gdln
http://www.gdln.org
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d e v e l o p m e n t
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GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE FOR DEVELOPMENT mailing list. To subscribe to
GKD-Digest, send the command: subscribe gkd-digest
in the body of a message to "majordomo@mail.edc.org".
"The Global Knowledge Partnership" site offers interesting
discussion on issues of people-before-profit uses of IT in South
Asia and elsewhere.
http://www.globalknowledge.org
SOME SEATTLE-BASED techies are dreaming up an ambitious
initiative to fight global poverty. And they plan to use the
Internet to do it. Digital Partners says it wants to change
the definition of philanthropy. The group will not give food,
clothing, or shelter to the poor. It will offer them online
content instead.
One of the main reasons Digital Partners picked India as its
first target country is the presence of a large Indian community
in the United States. It's a community that is closely knit,
highly skilled, and financially sound reports Lakshmi Chaudhary
for WIRED.
http://www.digitaldivide.org/
INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR Eradication of Poverty of Canada in
cooperation with Africa Canada Development Initiative and other
NGOs, will be observing the International Day For the
Eradication of Povertyn on 17 and 18 of October 2000 at Metro-
Toronto City Hall. Although poverty affects people from all over
the world, its intensity and extensity is more pronounced in
developing countries than others for variety of reasons. Chief
among them is lack of human resources development as pointed out
by Nobel Laureate Professor A.K. Sen. In order to speed up the
process of their development, we have decided to hold a two day
conference on lHow to integrate Information and Communication
Technologies into Eradication of Poverty in Developing
Countries.
Programme includes: October 17, 2000 -- Morning: Opening
session, Topics for plenary session: 1) Overview of IT and
poverty eradication in developing countries; 2) how to set up
IT; what resources are required; how to obtain those resources;
3) role of multi-lateral agencies and multinational
corporations; 4)) role of local governments and local community
groups; and 5) CIT and gender related issues.
Afternoon: Three sessions, either three workshops or three
plenary sessions. Topics: 1) How to use IT for agriculture and
rural development, 2) How to use IT for educational and skills
development, and 3) How to use IT in the areas of health.
Morning: Workshops--Case studies Use of IT in India (in
agriculture, rural development, education & health); Use of IT
in Africa (in agriculture, rural development, education &
health) Use of IT in Latin America and Caribbean (in
agriculture, rural development, education & health)
Contact: Dr.Bhausaheb Ubale, Tel. 416 494 4763, Fax 416 494
2185, E.Mail: bubale@pathcom.com
Website: http://www.eradicatepoverty.com
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a f r i c a
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WHY ISN'T NIGERIA ONE OF AFRICA'S BIG INTERNET PLAYERS? Nigeria
is an obvious candidate to become a large internet market but
barely seems to have started down this road. NEWS UPDATES
focuses on issues such as this. If you want to subscribe to News
Update, simply send a message saying I want to subscribe to
southwood@boyden.demon.co.uk.
INTERNET GROWTH IN AFRICA is rapid, but it's important to note
that it starts from an "incredibly low baseline", says NEWS
UPDATES. The cost of internet access remains a serious barrier,
with charges ranging from $10 to $100 a month. The average
monthly cost of using a dial-up account is $240 for 20 hours of
access, compared with $29 or less in the US.
THE TALKING Africa Open Directory is a useful source for African
web sites. Talking Africa is a one hour radio programme
broadcast from London.
http://talkingafrica.szs.net/directory/index.html
News Update is a free e-letter covering African
internet content and infrastructure developments
published by Balancing Act. The latest issue and all
previous issues appear on the balancing Act web site
(http://www.balancingact-africa.com). To subscribe
to this free e-letter, simply send a message saying
subscribe to info@balancingact-africa.com. Future
issues will cover: the internet in Namibia, South
African telecommunications policy, an assessment of
telecentres and the internet in Senegal. The
Telematics for African Development Consortium is
pleased to be working with Balancing Act, another
initiative focusing on providing free information on
Telematics and Development to e-mail subscribers.
KENYA'S "POOR MAN'S" ISP (Courtesy News Update): Wancheri.com
named after the Swahili word for citizens is drawing attention
with its low-price tariff. With internet connection fees usually
costing about 10,000 Kenyan Shillings a month (more than $150) ,
Wananchi.com offers full internet access for a tenth of the
price at any time of day.
A PROJECT IS UNDER WAY TO create maps that will help illustrate
what's happening with national network development in several
African countries. The link to the maps that have been done so
far can be found at:
http://www.nsrc.org/AFRICA/africa.html
KABISSA IS A SPACE on the Internet for the African non-profit
sector. To learn more about Kabissa and to set up a free
membership account for your organisation, please write to
info@kabissa.org or visit http://www.kabissa.org
SOME OF THE ORGANISATION WHICH can be viewed at
http://www.kabissa.org/wougnet/wo_dir.html
- Akina Mama wa Afrika-Uganda (AMwA-U)
- Association of Uganda Women Medical Doctors (AUWMD)
- Council for Economic Empowerment for Women in Africa (CEEWA)
- Eastern African Sub-regional Support Initiative for the
Advancement of Women (EASSI)
- Forum for African Women Educationalists-Uganda (FAWEU)
- Hope After Rape (HAR)
- Isis-Women's Int'l Cross-Cultural Exchange (Isis-WICCE)
- National Association of Women Organisations in Uganda (NAWOU)
- Safe Motherhood Initiative in Uganda (SMIU)
- Uganda Gender Resource Center (UGRC)
- Uganda Media Women's Association (UMWA)
- Uganda Private Midwives Association (UPMA)
- Uganda Women Tree Planting Movement (UWTPM)
- Women and Children's Crisis Center (WCC)
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a c c e s s a t s l o w - s p e e d s
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INFO ON SURFING THE WEB VIA E-MAIL: When the telephone system is
too slow or unreliable to allow you to surf the web directly,
you can do so via e-mail. For full instructions for a searching
the web tutorial page go to
http://www.teledyn.com/help/Internet/whatsnew.html, but the
essential information can be downloaded from
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/gb/gboyd/wsintro.faq
WWW4MAIL -- Web Navigation and Database Search by E-Mail. The
Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
in Trieste, Italy www4mail software allows navigation and search
of the entire Internet via e-mail, using any standard web
browser and a MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Exchange)-aware
e-mail program. At first glance, it may appear similar to one of
the several web-to-mail software interfaces; but the www4mail
program introduces new features not previously available. In
short, e-mail messages containing filtered HTML pages are
automatically passed to the www4mail server when links to other
web sites are selected while browsing.
Written in modular Perl, the program allows retrieval of web
pages, searching of arbitrary databases, filling out of web
forms (GET and POST conduct web database searches) and following
of links (on-line browsing), all by e-mail. It is multi-lingual,
easy to manage and supports current Internet standards (MIME,
HTML 4.0, etc.).
Developed from scratch on the Linux platform, www4mail has been
used successfully on the BSD platform and contains some optional
optimisations that are Linux-specific. For example, www4mail can
monitor the system load average, directly from the Linux /proc
file system and, at high load averages, queue requests for later
processing.
Read complete article at:
http://www2.linuxjournal.com/lj-issues/issue75/3825.html
ROBERTO VERZOLA <rverzola@phil.gn.apc.org> ON THE commonman's
Internet (August 2, 2000):
I thought I'd share how I use intermediate technology to have
email access and join mailing lists:
I have no Internet connection at home or work. In fact, Email
Center, the server I run that provides email services (no Web)
to NGOs, has no Internet connection either. The server uses an
intermediate technology called uucp, one that precedes the
Internet and is optimized for dial up connections instead of
dedicated lines. When I occasionally want to do some Web
searching (which *needs* Internet access), I go to a nearby
Internet cafe. I find I can meet most of my information wants,
including joining lists and accessing URLs, with uucp-based
email, in a way consistent with my own principles.
The best recent example of a successful uucp operation I know of
is the SDN-Pakistan operation which boasted of some several
thousand users.
Uucp can provide universal email service at a much lower cost
per mailbox than ISPs, because any uucp user can offer as many
mailboxes (and email addresses) as will fit his/her machine.
Probably for this reason, ISPs would rather sell POP instead of
uucp accounts. In the Philippines, for instance, out of more
than a hundred ISPs, only one supports uucp, and they are also
phasing it out soon. That is Schumacher's "disappearing middle"
in action.
In fact, in villages where outgoing phone calls are possible,
uucp-based email can be used to implement at very low cost what
used to be known as telegraphic services, which would be a huge
improvement to a village with no such previous service. Where no
telephone facilities are even available, a government can
quickly set up a network for universal access to telegraphic
services with packet radio.
Public libraries, low-power radio, public telephone stations,
uucp-based email, packet radio -- these are some of the
intermediate technologies which can be deployed at lower cost,
are more affordable to the people, and can provide or
approximate the services offered by much more expensive full
Internet facilities.
I am even inclined to argue that in our case, a fax-in-every-
village is a more important immediate objective, because it can
not only provide telegraphic services, but also serve as the
backbone of a quick-report freeze-the-count system during
elections, which is very important in the Philippine context.
But this is another story.
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d i g i t a l - d i v i d e
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THE DIGITAL DIVIDE between rich and poor countries is readily
apparent. Some 90 percent of Internet host computers are in
high-income countries with 16 percent of the world's population.
http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/07/06/un.it.conference.reut/index.html
UN VOLUNTEERS TO BRING the world's poor on-line. The United
Nations Information Technology Service (UNITeS) website to aims
mobilize volunteers around the world to help bridge the
technological divide between developed and developing countries.
United Nations Volunteer programme (UNV) http://www.unv.org/
UNITeS http://www.unites.org/
The latest brief from The Century Foundation in its Ideas2000
series offers an innovative plan to help close the digital
divide.
See Century Foundations Idea Briefs
http://www.ideas2000.org/IdeaBriefs.html
direct link to *.pdf of entire report
http://www.ideas2000.org/Issues/Education/DigitalDivide.pdf
WHAT PRESIDENT THABO MBEKI of South Africa, President Ricardo
Lagos of Chile and Prime Minister Goran Persson of Sweden have
to say: "Until a decade ago, the three of us were partners in a
struggle for freedom and democracy in Chile and South Affica.
That victory was won in Chile in 1989 and in South Africa in
1994. Today our countries are all led by social democratic
governments. With the same spirit of solidarity and decisiveness
as we struggled against and defeated dictatorships, we are now
joining forces to enhance development and alleviate poverty. Our
present challenge is the new economy of knowledge and
information. With information technology, the concept of global
solidarity has been given a new thrust..."
http://www.iht.com/IHT/TODAY/THU/ED/edlagos.html
GLOBAL PARTNERSHIPS HAS BEEN WORKING for 2 years in Brazil to
help develop and disseminate a completely sustainable model of
community-based technology access and education. It is a cross
between a telecenter and small computer school, teaching
marketable computer skills and civic education to poor urban
youth in most cases. The centers are located, in most cases, in
donated space in community centers, and are equipped with
donated, used equipment and furniture.
Contact: Max Savishinsky, Global Partnerships Seattle, WA
Email: msavvy@mgnco.com http://www.globalpartnerships.org
LONE EAGLE CONSULTING has a new "Cross-cultural Self-directed
Learner's Internet Guide". You can download and print it from a
link at the top of the page at http://lone-eagles.com/guide.htm
Also available is a new "Good Neighbor's Guide to Community
Networking" at http://lone-eagles.com/cnguide.htm
Lone Eagle's best listing of resources and articles for
'Building Learning Communities" is listed at http://lone-
eagles.com/teled.htm
Two online courses for educators are included, with all lessons
freely accessible.
Email Frank Odasz <frank@lone-eagles.com>
Web: http://lone-eagles.com
WEB PAGES BY LANGUAGE: English, the official language of nearly
70 percent of the Web's pages, is still the most popular
language of Web pages around the Net. Japanese runs a distant
second, according to a study by Vilaweb.
http://cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/demographics/
print/0,1323,5901_408521,00.html
OneWorld, the organisation behind the world's leading portal on
the Web for human rights and sustainable development, has
launched an online campaign on the global digital divide
http://www.oneworld.net/campaigns/digitaldivide
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r e c y c l i n g - h a r d w a r e
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DON'T THROW OUT THAT old 486! It could be saving lives in a
hard-up hospital half the world away. Four years ago at a
medical ethics conference in Dallas, emergency room nurse from
Chicago Zina Munoz thought: "Why shouldn't older-model computers
that people throw away in America be shipped out to Third World
hospitals to hook them up to the Internet? There's nothing wrong
with the systems except they are slow, and the hospitals need
access, not speed."
In June 1998, and thanks to funding from the ISN, Munoz and a
team of doctors arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal, along with eight
second-hand computers donated by Toshiba Corp and upgraded and
refurbished at home by her four cybernaut children and their
friends. The team spent 2-1/2 weeks in Nepal, installing the
computers and conducting training and clinical lectures with
local renal specialists.
Further small-scale projects followed in Nigeria and rural
Argentina, and by this time the operation had been formalised as
the Renal-Tech Donation Project, reports Reuter.
http://www.brecorder.com/story/S0011/S1103/S1103101.htm
COMPUTERS-FOR-STUDENTS is at Fairlington Presbyterian Church, at
3846 King St., in Alexandria, Virginia. Computers-for-Students
is a Northern Virginia offshoot of Computer Reclamation and
Training Center http://www.crtc.org (headquartered in
Beltsville, Maryland). It has a mission to get donated computers
into the hands of students who don't have them. And it funds its
mission by selling some of the donated computers it receives.
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e r r a t a
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In the BytesForAll homepage (from BytesForAll June 2000 issue), the correct
URL of the site below should read as corrected below:
"FROM NEPAL WRITES, MAHESH KUMAR MALLA who is Project Coordinator/Research
Assistant in Information Communication and Outreach Division of the
International Centre For Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD),
Kathmandu. He is involved in a team that is preparing for E-conference on
the Asia Pacific Mountain Network and also trying to identify relevant
information on ICTs with a special focus on mountain development and help
develop a focussed section on the Net.Please contact Mahesh Kumar Malla
at mahesh@icimod.org.np "
http://www.icimod.org.sg
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*
* Roberto Verzola <rverzola@phil.gn.apc.org> on
* improving access with low-cost Internet appliances
* (July 21, 2000):
*
* After reading about the Indian Simputer on GKD, I
* had a chance to browse around our local electronic
* shops once more. I found VCD players selling for as
* low as US$ 65 and saw at least one 12-volt
* monochrome TV receiver selling for $35.
*
* If the VCD player can be made to browse html files
* on CDROM, here's the possibility of a truly low-cost
* (sub-$100), stand-alone (no recurring connectivity
* charges) information appliance that can even run on
* 12-volt car batteries. Any Taiwan, Indian, or Korean
* manufacturer listening?
*
* The Philippines has 40,000 villages (and 73 million
* people). Providing each village with this appliance,
* for a 100% reach, would cost US$4 million. Some of
* our past presidents have probably spent this much on
* a single junket abroad. We have spent many times
* this amount just to host one image-building APEC
* meeting, which is of course another junket.
*
* With such an appliance, all that would be needed are
* the VCDs and CDROMs. I have no doubt that these will
* simply materialize out of nowhere, as if by miracle.
*
* My worry is that, like "pirate" radio stations, such
* an appliance might be prevented from being fully
* deployed, and we will be pushed and pulled right
* back into the maw of the Internet.
*
* How come a high-cost medium like the Internet is
* foisted on us, but once truly low-cost approaches
* like low-power radio and CDs are discovered by the
* poor, they are hounded like pirates?
*
* My other worry is the law of unintended
* consequences: that our villages would be flooded
* with VCDs of Hollywood junk and few CDROMs, in which
* case this suggestion will come back to haunt me --
* unless the government, NGOs, and development
* agencies step in to provide the CDs with development
* info and educational content.
*
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bYtES For aLL is a voluntary, unfunded venture that, for the
purpose of spreading its ideals, seeks the involvement and
support of all who agree with its goals. Contact us at
bytes-admin@goacom.com * Compiled in public interest * CopyLeft
bYtES For aLL ezine volunteers team includes: Frederick in Goa,
Partha in Dhaka, Zubair in Islamabad, Archana in Goa, Arun-Kumar
in Dortmund, Zunaira in Karachi, Shivkumar in Mumbai, Rajib in
Kathmandu, Daryl in Chicago and Sangeeta in Kathmandu.
Partha Sarkar is webmaster of http://www.bytesforall.org
This ezine may be freely circulated provided entire message is
left intact. If you wish to reproduce in part, please write to us
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