09.27.09 Taipei Taiwan: ICOS09 oneVillage Community Day
The International Conference on Open Source (ICOS) 2009 oneVillage Community Day on Sept 27, 2009 at the Technology Bldg in Taipei, Taiwan. The event was a chance for us to consider collaboration based on the original Community Day concept that brought Joy Tang’s Taiwan network together in July in support of the oneVillage Ecotour Service and Learning Program.
We had spent several weeks preparing for the event which took place in the morning on the 27th and ran into the afternoon. This included working on the:
- Presentation about Community Day and the overall values and vision of our work as well as actual deployment in relation to the Winneba Open Digital Village in Ghana;
- Press Release which we sent to the local media including the Taipei Times;
- 3 Page Overview document that states the general concept of our work as it related to Community Day;
- OVF Blog Post about Community Day July Launch Event: http://blog.onevillage.tv/?p=1298;
- OVF Holistic ICT Blog Post about Upcoming Event: http://blog.onevillage.tv/?p=1377
Joy Tang’s discussion about OVF was the first and due to technical difficulties we started a few minutes late just after 10am. The presentation gave an overview of our work particularly in relation to what the 1st Community Day event was about in July supporting the oneVillage Ecotour Service and Learning Program. As part of this program, 10 students from National Tsing Hua Univ traveled to Ghana for the month of Aug. During their time in Ghana, they shared experiences with each other and the local people, while aiding in various development efforts organized by our affiliate OVF Ghana. We see this as a model development effort that links projects and people with ICT and in many cases supports the development of Open Source solutions in the field.
Zulfikar Ahmad talked about some of the challenges of working as a government official promoting ICT in a region of Indonesia called Central Aceh. The region is beautiful 1,200m high above the mountains and is home to Gayo people. He talked about how they hoped to use ICT to enable the development of ICT skills. Some of the long term goals of Gayo E-Learning and Informatika (GELI) Project that he is involved with is to promote more effective coffee planting processes as well as rain forest conservation. In particular, he pointed out some of the challenges of working in region where absolute poverty was such a fact of life.
As we were running behind, Illya Eric Lee of Taiwan’s Academia Sinicia did his presentation on the role of Web 2.0 in transforming the way we work in the digital age. He identified IDEO as a design development consulting firm that was pioneering an innovative way to use ICT to advance cutting edge designs of all sorts. The discussion centered on how we might use this approach to support and advance our work in the field. The develop their work they pioneered the Human Centered Design Toolkit.
Next, the NTHU students did their presentation on their experiences preparing and then going to the Ghana trip. It was very well done and included one of their videos on Nana EK’s feedback on their work of the students to document to local tribal (Denkyira) kingdom’s artifacts . You can see more of the video they did at our YouTube Channel.
Closing the Community Day presentations was Ahmed Haris who talked about some of his work and his experiences working with Bamboo Community University on the GELI and the Emate Programs. This included his candid explanation of how he in his younger days used other people’s credit cards to finance his books so he could learn about ICT. He also discussed his efforts to develop BlankOn Linux which is a distro designed especially for Indonesia. He also mentioned his work in designing “cantennas” for a local wireless network set up in his region of Indonesia.
Later, we discussed the role of Collective IQ in relation to our work. Joy discussed some of the background in relation to our network in the Bay Area which revolves around Doug Enbelbart and his work pioneering the net and the personal computer as well as this idea of Collective IQ. One of the things we discussed as follow up is the premise for using ICT for boosting collective IQ in a network and why this is important. An upcoming contest called Program for the Future is an opportunity we are considering in terms of considering how Collective IQ as concept could be practically demonstrated in the field through our work.
Finally, we meandered through central Taipei towards a bar/restaurant to celebrate OVF “System Integrator” and ICOS lead organizer Andrew Lee’s b-day. What was memorable about this part of the day was that it was a chance to unwind and enjoy some of the highlights of the day and weekend regarding Debian and Community Day.
B-day Boy Andrew Lee in center
