Holistic ICT for EcoLiving

09.09.09 Review Meeting for OVF Ecotour 2009
Attended by OVF Team | NTHU Student Affairs | NTHU Students

Jeff Buderer | Hsinchu, Taiwan – On Wednesday Sept 9^th,the  “OVF Taiwan” Team (which includes OVF Exec Director Joy Tang, Cherry Wang, Scott Carbaugh and Jeff Buderer) team took the Taiwan High Speed Rail System and traveled from Taipei to Hsinchu, Taiwan, where the beautiful campus of the National Tsing Hua University is located. At NTHU, we met with students and staff involved with oneVillage Ecotour Service and Learning Program.

EcoTour Summary

Taiwan National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) Students: Field Agent Report on Open Source Deployment – Recently 10 National Tsing Hua University students traveled to Ghana for one month to get service learning experiences focusing on Information Development and Digital Philanthropy. Their activities included basic ICT training for junior high school students and their teachers as part of the New Academic Year IT School which took place at Winneba Open Digital Village, a human capacity training and innovation & incubator center.

The NTHU youth also went into rural villages of Jukwa, Okurase and Accra:

• Producing a digital archive for Denkyira Kingdom.
• Showing how the Jukwa Farmer’s Coop can further develop the palm oil process facility to improve their economic conditions;
• Documenting the production of the African drums and to study region’s forestry habitat at Okurase.
• Attended Maker Faire Africa, an event that promotes grassroots innovations in appropriate technologies, which was held at the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT in Accra.

The above efforts combined further builds the bridge for effective Information & Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D) that’s empowered by Open Source collaboration between Ghana/Africa and Taiwan.

Administrator/Faculty Meeting

The team first met with the administrators working on the International Volunteers Program at the NTHU Student Affairs Department at the Socrates Café on the NTHU campus. Administrators present included Prof. Chen, who is the Head of Student Affairs and Prof. Wang, the Director of Student Extracurricular Activities. The instructors for the student groups were also there and presented an overview of how their trip as well as several students from last years program.

While at NTHU the OVF team had a chance to meet Prof Hung Chao-Kuei , a Taiwanese Open Source expert on ICT, teaching at Chaoyang University of Technology (CYUT) (also a www.ofset.org member). Prof Hung has experiences designing USB configurations for deployment in the field. This includes training students to set up USB Linux Installs in emerging markets (see his blog and website for more info).  In addition to the NTHU team, he also trained a group of high school volunteers from Taiwan who went to Swaziland. It was his experiences with them that inspired him to write this article: “Tux USB Keys Can Make Your Donated Computers Greener, Cleaner, More Ethical, and More Educational.”

The OVF Team also met with Apple Jia of the Bamboo Community University who is also a NTHU Service Learning team coordinator for E-Mate. His effort has focused on the Aceh region of Indonesia where they’re working with the Gayo people on the Gayo E-Learning and Informatika (GELI) Project to deploy open source solutions there that promote more sustainable development.

After the administrative meeting, the OVF Team met with the Ecotour students at NTHU at what is to be the International Studies Student Center . The students who traveled to Ghana included: Becky Hsin, Betty Lee, Jin Hsueh, Joyce Tsao, Julian Chu, Karina Sun, Lexie Fang, Okis Lin, Olivia Cheng and Tina Wang.

Student Presentations

• Lexie did the film on the Horizon Orphanage in Jukwa. She talked about how the students brought 300 books to the orphanage in Jukwa that houses 12 children. They also spruced up the room where the books are kept. Possibly the most important thing for the children is seeing people from another part of the world that care enough to help.
• Kweku Jin’s presentation was on the Jukwa Farmer’s coop palm oil press and how it can be improved. His report was comprehensive and well researched. We discussed how the paper he wrote can be used to move the work being done in Jukwa forward including uploading to Kiva.com.
• Karina Sun did a film on OVF Ghana and the WODiV and local officials at the Efuttu Assembly office with very good footage of the WODiV and also the larger Winneba community.
• Julian presented her work on Denkyira Kingdom Artifacts and stressed the importance of documenting this under-recognized tribe’s history and artifacts, especially considering the rapid decline of indigenous culture under the pressure of modernization.
• Tina presented the Film on the IT School which showed the students assembling PCs and also learning how to use the computers.

Joy went over the task list sheet with the students estimating how much work was left. A final report completion date was set for Sept 13^th and a final video completion date for the Sept 20^th.

Evaluation

Students went over some things that can be improved for next years group, including communications and going over the plans for each video so that the time is used well. Also it was mentioned that the Internet outages affected communications and the rate at which some projects were completed.

Online Documentation and Posting of Student’s Reports

The need for posting the content on the web was discussed at the meeting. Several options were discussed including the OVF WODIV wiki site and wikipedia as two possibilities. WODiV wiki should be used for all locally relevant content such as the Denkyira Kingdom historical artifacts and also the plan for the further development of the Palm oil press.

Videos to be posted on YouTube

The 1Villlage (1VDG) YouTube Channel was created for video uploads. This channel will be used to post videos on YouTube relating to oneVillage’s work. This is a way of using ICT to give the student’s involved in the program an opportunity to use their developing multi-media skills to empower oneVillage so our joint efforts reaches out to a larger audience in a unified way.

Upcoming Events

Several events were discussed that were coming up in the next month or two that the students will be able to present their work to:

• 09.27.09 ICOS OVF Community Day – Provide report on Ecotour with a focus on the IT School training and their experiencing in using Open Source in particular Prof Hung’s USB Linux system.
• 10.01-31.09 Friday Movie Night @ Ecole Cafe – For the month of Dec., Friday night movie nights at Ecole Café will be dedicated to chronicling NTHU student experiences in Ghana and will include inviting sponsors and supporters to these video showings.
• 10.16-17.09 TEDx Taipei – Joy has been invited to speak at the local TED conference TEDx Taipei which is taking place. We are still considering how the students experience will be presented at that event.

Planning for 2010

The trip overall was a success and OVF is grateful for the effort these students put into the 2009 project. Plans are underway for the 2010 project. This includes efforts to improve the communications and planning so that students can the most out of their experiences before, during and after the trip to Ghana. One thing that was discussed was having more opportunities for past students enrolled in the program to act as consultants to coach the current students. A notable addition to the program will be funding for a student who has completed the program to travel back to Ghana and aid in efforts to plan the trip from the field.

More photos from the OVF 09.09.09 Ecotour Review Meeting are here.

Online Resources related to this Program:

• OVF EcoTour Overview Wiki Page: http://wodiv.opendigitalvillage.net/index.php?title=OVF_Ghana_Ecotour
• Updated and preliminary report on 09 Ecotour: http://wodiv.opendigitalvillage.net/index.php?title=OVF_Ghana_Ecotour_09
• OVF oneVillage Ecotour Flickr Page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/1village/collections/72157622331840536/NTHU
• NTHU Ghana Ecotour Student Blog (in Chinese): http://ghanaeco.blogspot.com/