[UgaBYTES] sustainability & social enterprise & social entrepreneur

[Peter Burgess]

Dear Colleagues

I believe there is a huge amount of knowledge in the telecentre
community as a whole ... but the mechanism for sharing this knowledge
is very primitive (nobody should take offence at this ... think of the
complexity of a tree, an animal, the human brain, etc). The next step
is probably some sort of datastore where information can easily be
retrieved.

But the datastore should not be somewhere where all old information is
dumped, never to be seen in a useful form again, but organized and
structured to be useful. This is what accounting information does ...
and the technique can be expanded to certain items of key information
that are useful in managing a telecentre or group of telecentres.

There is also another issue ... and that is that most people do not
want to share their information. If it is valuable information, it is
going to stay secret. This is a real problem, and quite a reasonable
position for people to take where competition is a challenge.
Sometimes this is solved by an industry association collecting certain
statistics that are then shared with the ID of the individual
organization kept secret. An independent organization could also do
this ... I offered to do something like this with Tr-Ac-Net some time
ago, but did not follow up on it. Maybe this should be reconsidered.

Peter Burgess

On 10/23/07, ahmed digital <ahmed22digital at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear friends
>
> Thank you for this wonderful discussion we miss Sekiku Joseph and Issa where
> are they? and I think we really need African Telecentres association as
> mentioned in the discussion (Hilton, Loic),   and we have to see some how to
> link it to countries like India, Australia and Canada…etc  who have good
> experience in Telecentres and I agree with Damas Ogwe (A social enterprise
> is a business with primarily social objectives ..etc.) in addition to
> exploring  Social enterprise also we should think about other factors
> affecting sustainability.
>
>   A social enterprise & social entrepreneur are very important and both
> enterprises should have driven to some extent the profit to get Telecentres
> continue according their goals. and they are very important for
> sustainability and we should think about how we can run these Telecentres to
> the maximum and how we can be self dependent and how to run these Telecentre
> with a minimum resources available. We have a good example in Gedaref
> digital city organization (GDCO) in Sudan where we have strong partnership
> with Digital city of Eindhoven (DSE) in Netherlands and they provide GDCO
> only with computers and we use them for establishing Telecentres on   social
> enterprise and we have to work very hard to get money for the operational
> of these Telecentres. Although we train the disabled, orphans and poor
> student for free(social enterprise), we  train the government staff ,
> businessmen and private sector employee (social entrepreneur) for a price to
> cover the cost of both group (social enterprise & social entrepreneur ) on
> the other hand we train our community with a price just to cover  the cost
> of training. Beside this we make Telecentre for every group of 10 to 15 deaf
> or blind student to help them sustain the life and be self dependent and
> know we are going to replicate this project in Khartoum the capital of
> Sudan.
>
>
>                             thank you
>
>                          Ahmed M. M. Eisa
>                     Chairman of GDCO - Sudan
>                          www.gedarefcity.org
>                           www.gedaref.com
> _______________________________________________
> ugabytes mailing list
> ugabytes at lists.ugabytes.org
> http://lists.ugabytes.org/mailman/listinfo/ugabytes_lists.ugabytes.org
>
____________
Peter Burgess
The Transparency and Accountability Network: Tr-Ac-Net in New York
www.tr-ac-net.org
IMMC - The Integrated Malaria Management Consortium Inc.
www.IMMConsortium.org
917 432 1191 or 212 772 6918  peterbnyc at gmail.com