[Telecentres] self introduction

[Enzo Puliatti]

Hello to everybody!

My name is Enzo Puliatti. I am Italian and I am presently working with the
United Nations Development Programme in Cairo, Egypt, on an ICT for
Development joint initiative with the Egyptian Ministry of Communication and
Information Technology.

I was personally involved with "preliminary" telecentres initiatives
connected with the early stage of the Internet deployment supported by UNDP
in several Latin American countries at the end of the '80s beginning of
'90s, such as the case of the "youth centers" in Cuba and later the "Cabinas
Publicas" initiatives in Peru after the establishment of the Peruvian
Academic Network (Red Cientifica Peruana).

Right now we are working in Egypt at the deployment of a project that, from
our perspective, will be the next generation of telecentres. This
initiative, based on the evolution of the more than 600 IT Clubs established
by the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and information Technlogy is
called "Franchising of ICT Postal Outlets" and it will integrate the
traditional telecentre concept with the franchising model and a new
generation of ICT based postal services provided in collaboration with the
National Postal Authority: financial services, delivery of goods, etc.

Additionally I am personally involved on a different initiative aimed to
reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of high density installations such
as school labs and telecentres both for software and hardware. The software
side using Open Source solutions, while for the hardware we using a very
innovative approach (multihead computers) that allows to reduce the hardware
cost by 50-60% by sharing a single CPU for four or five independent users.
Each with its own monitor, desktop environment, keyboard and mouse. This is
done both under Linux, in a joint development with Hewlett Packard or under
Windows using a solution developed by a small US/Korean company.

We will install in October three school labs, that will operate as
telecentres based on the multihead concept, in Siwa, a small oasis in the
Wester Desert of Egypt.

We are also working on several multilingual, open source software for
administrative and remote technical management of telecentres. This may be
another field of collaboration with other similar initiatives.

I will keep you posted on these developments.

Regards,



Enzo Puliatti

Head of the Technical Assistance Unit

UNDP/MCIT ICT Trust Fund

Cairo, Egypt

enzop at undp.org

epuliatti at itsyn.com

Tel.: +51 1 1708470




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