[Telecentres] Welcome to the Telecentres Working Group!

[Partha Pratim Sarker]

Dear All,

Greetings from Bytes for All !

Glad to see this initiative from Andy and be subscribed to it. I hope it'd 
produce a lively and fruitful discussion on tele-center and relevant issues.

This is Partha and I worked to co-found Bytes for All network 
(www.bytesforall.org) that has particular interest on issues related to ICT 
for Development. An APC member to South Asia, Bytes for All has already 
published different Online portal issues including ICT for Public Health, 
ICT for Mass Education,  ICT for Disaster Mitigation, Non-English 
Computing, E-governance, Rural Connectivity etc. and researched as to how 
tele-center as a community access points can work on those issues.B4All
is also in a process to re-develop the website on open source CMS and to 
make it more community-driven. B4All is running a content summary project 
with major print media based publication groups in South Asia, so that the 
content of our lists can go directly to news papers where many millions are 
subscribed to.

Apart from that, I'm also involved with UNESCO New Delhi to assist 
coordinating few of its Community Multimedia Center (CMC) projects across 
South Asia (Please see: http://ictpr.nic.in). CMCs along with community 
radio are an important area of focus for UNESCO and it has already 
developed an Ethnographic research model to assess and to map the social 
needs of functionalities to tele-centers. These CMCs are working in 
different conditions and some of these initiatives have already made 
considerable impact.

I look forward to hearing others in this network. Best wishes,

Partha