By eliminating the mouse they made famous and hiding the keyboard, Apple brought us to the age of the real personal computer. Let’s call it the Symbiotic Computer for its symbiosis with us humans... Apple gave us the new technology, but it was Google who steered it towards an open-source model, quickly grabbing market share with the Android platform while delivering free- to low-cost applications in a server-based technology management solution, just like the one I proposed for telecenter networks...The telecenter shared-access model needs to be updated to leverage the realization of the Symbiotic Computer. Digital inclusion can now be understood to occur in two distinct stages: digital literacy and professional capacity-building. The first is to be accomplished with the help of the Symbiotic Computer, the second with the Personal Computer...
Marco Figueiredo - December 29, 2011
In November 2010, Community Communicators (Com2) graduated 81 new community reporters from rural regions in Colombia and the Dominican Republic.
Twenty-eight students from the Magdalena region and 24 students from the area of Sucre participated in online and on site classes held by the Corporación Politécnica Nacional de Colombia, who simultaneously linked students and facilitators in Florida, Rhode Island, and four separate locations in Colombia.
Our Community Communicators Program concluded their pilot workshop in Dominican Republic on May 2010. The first 26 graduates learned how to create community media using written, electronic, and audiovisual resources. The workshop provided an overview of basic notions of traditional print, broadcast, and electronic journalism, as well as legal and ethical notions that participants must take into account when creating and reporting community news to a worldwide audience.
The Brazilian NGO Gems the Earth Rural Community Telecenter Network is expanding its services to reach 62 remote rural communities, mostly in the state of Minas Gerais. GEMS Brazil entered in an agreement with the Ministry of Agrarian Development, through its Digital Territories program, to participate in the TelecentrosBR program, funded by the Brazilian government.
The Brazilian President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva has signed this year the National Broadband Plan which includes the creation of one hundred thousand public community telecenters by 2014.
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