Fwd: [LINK] Making governance and education accessible to remote indigenous communities via the web

[Janet Hawtin]

On 7/20/07, Tom Worthington <Tom.Worthington at tomw.net.au> wrote:
> I will be speaking at the 4th Annual Web Content
> Management for Government "Harnessing the power
> of new technologies to build citizen-centric
> websites and encourage online activities", 17-18
> September 2007  in Canberra
> <http://www.marcusevans.com/events/CFEventinfo.asp?EventID=1261>.
> My talk is on 17 September 11:10 am:

This sounds like a useful discussion thanks Tom.
Here are my probably predictable questions =).

> Making websites accessible and functional for a diverse community:

Accessibility in the sense of multiple skills?

> · Communicating and engaging diverse cultural
> audiences in Australia and worldwide

- languages and training?
- implementation and ongoing costs?
- participation .v. subscription
Would these be technologies that the communities would be trained in
the underlying workings of or would they be users of other peoples'
systems in the IP and support and ownership sense?


> · Providing sufficient and accurate information
> for people who with limited English
> · Using the information and digital technologies
> to support users with special requirements
> · Integrating web content to wireless and mobile devices
> · Testing the accessibility of websites to different citizen segments
>
> When I was approached to speak at the conference,
> the suggested outline I was provided with
> included "aboriginal audiences". I changed this
> to "diverse cultural audiences", as I thought
> explicitly mentioning indigenous issues would be
> too controversial for government staff. However,
> the recent declaration of an emergency by the
> Prime Minister in response to a report on
> Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual
> Abuse will require responses from many government agencies.
>
> Governments can provide access to information and
> services via the Internet in an accessible format
> to help address the needs of remote indigenous
> communities. This could allow the communities to
> govern themselves, with central oversight. Mutual
> obligation arrangements could be implemented in a
> more efficient and less intrusive way than by
> having temporary outside government staff rotated
> through the community
> <http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/06/internet-to-empower-indigenous.html>.
>
> New remote housing could have reliable digital
> communications built in
> <http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/07/modules-for-indigenous-housing.html>.

I would be interested in whether there are ways that training can be
provided to people in Aboriginal communities in housing, building,
green power, and that these skills can enable the communities to build
their own housing and to generate power locally. Solutions which are
subscription based seem to me to continue the habit of applying a fix
at a community rather than building skills and opportunities on site
which enable people to see themselves as innovative and able.
The idea that aboriginal people will shift from owning their land to
99 year leases for which they will pay a commercial house price and
loan for is disappointing because it provides them with less long term
security and all the problems of debt on a property which is remote
and not related to urban realestate opportunities.
We do not seem to embrace the opportunities of the differences in
these communities and apply solutions which do not generate skills and
opportunities on site. What kind of building techniques and power
generation and peer to peer networking and open technologies would
help these communities to build skills on site. Their access to their
lands is often talked about in terms of whether they have managed to
stay on site. Our solutions are generally related to whether they have
found employment or high school education on locations which are not
at the communities but which are hundreds of kilometres away.

I would be interested in hearing more about these projects and
specifically how they will be able to shift the power and
understanding of the digital and physical architectures to the
communities.

ie interesting work and hope that we do things differently this generation =)

> New schools could have computers and
> telecommunications built in for flexible
> learning, using the same techniques which MIT
> developed for teaching university physics,
> combined with the technologies in the Indian
> Simputer for use in villages and the $100 laptop
> for education of children in the third
> world
> <http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/07/flexible-learning-modules-for.html>.
>
> Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
> Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
> PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
> Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml
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