<TITLE: Global Challenges of eDevelopment Conference 1
ACADEMIC DOMAIN: technology
DISCIPLINE: information sciences
EVENT TYPE: conference presentation
FILE ID: CPRE08C
NOTES: continuation of and continued in CDIS08A, session also includes presentations CPRE08A-B/D-F/H (CDIS08B and CPRE08I/L/P are part of the same conference)

RECORDING DURATION: 17 min 15 sec

RECORDING DATE: 14.3.2005

NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: circa 40

NUMBER OF SPEAKERS: 1

S7: NATIVE-SPEAKER STATUS: Finnish; ACADEMIC ROLE: senior staff; GENDER: male; AGE: 31-50>


<S7> so let me take you <COUGH> to the south pacific and erm , <PREPARING POWERPOINT> and er let's see if i can , get this thing to this mhm-hm , it's not reacting to it <P:09> yeah so there's the title and i'm going to be addressing some of these issues of of empowerment as well from the standpoint of rural solomon islanders and rural solomon islands basically means anything outside the capital city of honiara here and er most solomon islanders er live in in rural environment in in somewhat semi-traditional settings er er whe- in a situation where er there is no basic electricity or er any say communal er infrastructure at all so it's really basic life in there and the er years since the solomon islands independence from 1978 have seen er er very uncontrolled er er internal migration where these rural dwellers have been moving er to honiara taking hold of er increasing lots of plants building their own say urban villages in there and er er then in the year 1998 the local landowners in guadalcanal they got fed up with this and they established a guerrilla army to chase away these migrants and civil war or ethnic crisis as it's labelled broke up it went on until er august of 2003 when australia and new zealand led er er p- er pan-pacific peace-keeping force occupied the country the whole archipelago and since then er the say civil society structures er business structures and say normal situation has slowly been recovering the situation has been centring on er this ethnic crisis on the island of guala- guadalcanal where especially these malaitans have been migrating so it's been very much a local ethnic conflict that's taken place in there but as the result the country is still at ruins er very little is functioning in there nevertheless even throughout these conflict years certain information technology services have been more or less functional which is a true surprise here we have a statement er which i'm not going to read aloud it's taken from the main page of this people first network website <FOREIGN>  pipolfastaem </FOREIGN> as they say in solomon islands pidgin and er er this er website and the whole people first network project began in the year 2001 oh here i have some sort of a summary of things going on within the project so it started as an NGO project but the government and several international agencies and bodies quickly realised oh this is functioning this is interesting they want to be part of this so er it has gained support increasing support and also increasing international attention throughout these last two years it's been er presented in several ICT international er competitions er it's been a finalist in this stockholm challenge competition in 2002 and then later on 2003 four and also competed for this UNESCO prize it's it was presented in this WSIS convention in geneva and currently there are replica projects planned for the neighbouring countries of vanuatu and er papua new guinea which closely resemble the situation in the solomons not not in that ethnic crisis situation as such because there hasn't been such violent outbreaks but nevertheless the ethnic er sort of set-up is pretty similar to the solomons in the solomon islands some 400,000 people are divided into 87 different language languages and er represent different ethnic groups in papua new guinea they have what more than 700 languages er among four million people and vanuatu basically resembles the same situation so it's a ethnic mosaic really a situation where when you move from one village to another the language changes the culture changes it's an altogether different set-up so this is the basic cultural environment i'm talking about but this is how it looked to the outsider oh sorry and here we can take a closer look at the PF net er there are three essential components in the whole project first of all er there is this internet centre these days it's called the internet centre it was usually called the internet cafe for several years but it's been upgraded so this is the heart of the whole thing and it's like a central e-mail post office or hub of the whole country and er they also er provide all sorts of seminars workshops training and so on in there and er then the second and of course for the rural populus the more important component is this er continuously growing network of these rural e-mail stations where er limited i- internet services are provided this functions through a small laptop computer connected via a special modem to a high-frequency HF radio which transmits the stuff to honiara to this internet centre which has a proper internet connections to the rest of the world so the e-mails run through that system and er er it's all locally owned locally managed and er all the support persons are from the villages so that people who don't know how to read or write how to use computers they can still access the e-mail stations and their services the people who write letters on behalf of them print le- er incoming letters on their behalf and so on these are read for them if needed and all sorts of other micro services offered by interested locals especially the unemployed youth are provided around these e-mail stations so this is true empowering thing in villages it brings er er er er all sorts of opportunities these er local villagers they can start building up their micro businesses for example crafts businesses er er and er even any kinds of businesses and they can use these e-mail services which are basic but nevertheless they exist and there are expectations to er er get this broadband functioning at some point in the near future there is this school net distance learning initiative er under preparation at the moment so er this is also er something to look forward to so the third component of the project is this er internet website people first , net website and the portal which is er quite big website and also a little bit complicated it's sometimes hard to locate information in there but nevertheless it's there and there are there are the basis of funding sources er projects er one can tap into and and of course there are local news international news discussion forums er the regular portal stuff what these days can be found from the websites so it's a good and quite well maintained website , and here we can see from the map the situation from last september how how these , <SIGH> e-mail stations were located so they are all over the archipelago and they are in these rural rural places where er solomon telecom services don't reach so there is no any other means of communication basically apart from this and occasional shortwave radios that might still be used in some provincial headquarters but another thing with this map you may notice that all these different e-mail stations are located in in er within different ethnic communities so no one community has two e-mail stations but they all relate to different ethnic communities which makes them somewhat unique each of them they have different procedures er different profiles for example of their users and er very different ratio of women and men using them and so on so there are differences between the stations , and here's a brief listing of of er PF net's own statistics from ninet- 2003 and we can see here the main reasons for people sending e-mail from the rurals rural stations i'd like to oh what's that , i'd like to point out that er er the profiles user profiles and the reasons for communicating are a little bit different er in the honiara internet cafe and the nowadays internet centre than what they are in the rural e-mail stations but the main thing is to communicate with family members relatives mhm mhm the er family and kinship it's still central thing in the solomon islands societies in all of them all these communities are very social and very communal there isn't much privacy there isn't much individualism in our western european sense of the term it's really communal way of living in there but these also er relate to this maintenance of community and i i will come to this conclusion which will relate to this issue but er er this er i'd still want to sort of emphasise that until this e-mail system when somebody left their village in the rural areas so it was bye bye you wouldn't hear about him or her anymore until five or ten or 20 years when er this person might return or something like that especially if the migrant went abroad but these days these overseas migrants they are participating in the everyday activities of of their home village no matter they live in copenhagen or new york or wherever they they they are again part of their home community through this e-mail system which is i think this is revolutionary and it has given me some ideas er theoretically as well but before going to that i'll point out a couple of impacts this is not a comprehensive list you can all see that i'll just point out a few things so even though it's NGO managed it's in practice directing the whole ICT development in the solomon islands and the effect already has a functioning communication system which is a new thing in the solomon islands there hasn't been such anytime before so this is really , an important thing and as stated in here the e-mail stations they routinely emphasise women's participation they organise special courses workshop special training they tend to hire women as er support persons and er e-mail station maintenance personnel and this is really er er women targeted project from the beginning on so this is really influencing the whole social structure in the solomons and some somewhat er sometimes in a very pronounced ways but er i don't have time to go into details i just want to point out certain theoretical ideas that have arisen from these observations from mine i've been developing them in a recent article of mine this translocalisation er is at least to me it's a theoretical attempt to sort of grasp this changing social sort of a er situation er which is caused by the impact of ICT so that these days a locality is not bound with geography anymore locality is more it can be extended there ICT and all sorts of things and in technologies we can expand our sort of sense of locality and also o- our attachments to certain localities and mhm mhm mhm this is what i call translocalisation this kind of process which happens not only in one place but also in the other end it also influences and affects the migrant society there are processes taking place er not only in the home community but also elsewhere where the migrants live it influences the local system there but it affects also the home home base and , this it's about establishing presences through technology making yourself felt er having a proximity without er being actually there so this is the basic idea i i thought it sort of resembles certain ideas er mark granovetter the american sociologist used to be developing in the 1970s and 1980s when he er was working on these models of strong and weak ties that er sort of er er er characterise the social networking and people's mobility and er people's a- agency er when they try to for example granovetter was st- studying situations where people were trying to find a job and these weak ties ended up being quite important in that sense but this internet er provides also er certain new dimensions to this say social networking and especially in in er this kind of a er ethnocultural contexts like in the solomon islands but i think i've had my share already so thank you very much if there are questions </S7>
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