[UgaBYTES] Fwd:telecentre.org Foundation Newsletter, March 2010

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TELECENTRE.ORG FOUNDATION'S MARCH 2010 NEWSLETTER

telecentre.org Foundation up and running

The telecentre.org Foundation officially opened its doors in the
Philippines with two global launches:  one that took place earlier
this month in Manila, the home-city where the foundation is now based,
and the second which occurred late last year in Sri Lanka, before a
crowd of international leaders in the field of information and
communication technologies for development (ICT4D). 
Philippine senator, Edgardo J. Angara, along with other dignitaries,
foundation funders and telecentre partners,  attended the recent
launch in  Makati City, Manila, where day-long ceremonies completed
the transfer of telecentre.org, from start-up program, grown and
housed at Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC),
to independent, non-profit organization, based in the Philippines.  
To mark the occasion, Sec. Ray Anthony Roxas-Chua III, Chairman of the
Philippine government’s Commission on Information and Communications
Technology (CICT) spoke about what telecentre.org relocation to his
country represents:  “To locate this global initiative in the
Philippines is truly an honour that confirms our nation’s status as an
emerging leader in rural informatics.  We welcome telecentre.org with
open arms”.
Earlier, this past December, at eAsia, one of the world’s leading
conferences on ITC4D, the President of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa,
was on hand to announce telecentre.org’s 2010 transfer before the
influential international  crowd of hundreds who had gathered for the
event.	This past year, eAsia was staged in Colombo, Sri Lanka , where
news of telecentre.org’s transfer  was greeted with the same
enthusiasm as in the Philippines.
Dr. Basheerhamad “Shaddy” Shadrach, the recently named executive
director of the foundation was at both launch events.  Shaddy, who was
named to head the new organization by the foundation’s Board of
Trustees last December, is now responsible for overseeing the
implementation of the global telecentre program.  Shaddy is well known
in the telecentre movement, having dedicated nearly two decades to
working on its behalf.	Most recently, he’s been IDRC’s Senior Program
Officer in Asia and lead for the telecentre.org  Academy initiative.
“Shaddy will be an asset to the new organization.  He is a link to
both our past and our future, “says Richard Fuchs, co-founder of
telecentre.org.  “His appointment represents a commitment to
furthering our global mission of increasing the impact of telecentres
on development around the world.”
In addition to Shaddy’s recruitment, the foundation’s board also
appointed seven members to its Advisory Council during an inaugural
meeting which took place at the margins of the eAsia event.  Council
members became familiar with their roles and responsibilities and
reviewed the business strategy for the next stage of telecentre.org’s
life, a strategy the foundation is now finalizing.  More progress was
made at the margins of the Manila launch, when council members met for
a second time.
The Advisory Council, made up of an international pool of telecentre
experts, partners and network leaders, is responsible for advising the
board and the executive director, based on their respective regional
realities, on matters pertaining to the telecentre.org program and its
implementation.
The new council members are: Aminata Maiga of Mali’s  Afriklinks
(Africa); Reshan Dewapura of Sri Lanka’s Information and Communication
Technology Agency (Asia Pacific); Ian Clifford of Telecentre-Europe
(Europe); José Avando Souza Sales of ATN in Brazil (Latin America and
the Carribean); Sherif El Tokali of the United Nations Development
Program in Egypt (Middle East and North Africa); Dr. Latha Pillai of
India’s Indira Gandhi National Open University (Telecentre Academy);
and Rebecca Masisak of Techsoup Global (Social Enterprise).  
Says Rohinton Medhora, Vice-President of IDRC, “We were proud to have
helped create and house the telecentre.org initiative.	And we are
equally proud to see it transferred successfully to the Philippines.”,
he adds.  “This is very much in keeping with IDRC’s mandate of
building capacity in the developing world by incubating and then
transferring programs when they are able to function independently.”
IDRC and Microsoft will continue to support and be involved in the
telecentre.org Foundation, as will the Philippine’s CICT.

telecentre.org Foundation @ eAsia

December’s launch of the telecentre.org Foundation at eAsia by Sri
Lanka’s president was just one high profile example of why Colombo
became the unofficial capital of the global telecentre movement late
last year.  In addition to serving as the backdrop for the
announcement about the foundation, we also led and participated in
important telecentre discussions that took place during the event and
we co-organized a resource mobilization workshop (one session of which
was dubbed “telecentre idol”) that occurred at its margins.
 More specifically, Florencio Ceballos, Shaddy Shadrach and Meddie
Mayanja, long-time telecentre.org leaders, presented at various eAsia
sessions.  Among these:  training for networks, mobile telephony, and
the future of the telecentre movement itself. Florencio, Shaddy and
Meddie also facilitated and participated at other sessions.  
In total, 1000 telecentre champions from across Asia and around the
world participated at this year’s event.  eAsia will be hosted in the
Philippines next year.
Who wants to be the next telecentre idol?
telecentre.org, in cooperation with the Asia Pacific Telecentre
Network (APTN), staged a resource mobilization workshop for telecentre
networks on December 1st, 2009 in Colombo. One of its more memorable
sessions was the “telecentre idol” competition – a session that proved
to be a fun way to learn more around important telecentre topics like
fundraising strategies and business models for sustainability.	Twenty
participants were divided into teams to compete in challenges that
ranged from crafting a compelling business model to planning a winning
fundraising event – all in under an hour’s time.  Prizes were awarded
to the winning teams thanks to Microsoft, one of our funders.
In addition to idol, the workshop offered three other interactive
sessions. These were:
•	‘Ask the Experts’, a talk-show like presentation given by
Murray Culshaw, a fundraising consultant from India and Marianne
Quebral, a resource mobilization trainer from the Philippines;
•	 Open Clinic, simultaneous consultations, 10 minutes in
length, given on various topics by participant experts; and,
•	the ‘Seven Minutes of Fame” presentation by telecentre leaders
who participated in the workshop in 2008 and shared their resource
mobilization experiences.
Judging from the feedback, a good time and lots of information sharing
took place.  

telecentre.org’s online consultations

>From November 12-30, 2009, you talked; we listened.  Over 200 people
participated in telecentre.org’s online consultations about the move
to our new base in the Philippines.  Online and in moderated
discussion groups, you provided your thoughts on how to make us
stronger, better, and more relevant to the people and organizations we
serve.	Your input – along with that of our partners and other
stakeholders – was important to us. So much so that we presented it at
the first Advisory Council meeting for the new foundation in Colombo,
Sri Lanka this past December. Your input is helping to inform the
business strategy the foundation is currently finalizing. That
strategy is designed to map out the future priorities of the
telecentre.org Foundation from 2010-2015 including:
•	Making the initiative more relevant, particularly in regions
around the world,
•	Increasing the participation and engagement of our 200+
partner networks and organizations, and,
•	Exploring potential new program offerings.
Thanks to all of who got involved in the consultations and who have
helped make a difference.
 To view the consultation summaries, go to:

New LAC regional network a hub of activity

In the last issue of our newsletter, we told you about the launch of
the Latin American telecentre network.	Since then, there’s been lots
of activity with respect to finalizing the network’s governance
structure; its programme activities; as well as finding a home for its
secretariat.
Among the first orders of business was the election of an advisory
council. Late last year, five inaugural members were voted in by the
network membership:  José Avando, of ATN, Brazil as new council
president; and, Angélica Celedón, of ATACH, Chile; Olga Paz, of
Colnodo, Colombia; Ethel de Kuri, Conexión, El Salvador; and, Maicu
Alvarado, of CEPES, Peru, who complete the council and, together,
reflect the network’s geographic and linguistic diversity. 
Also announced was the network’s future program focus which takes in
knowledge sharing, networks, and policy influence (i.e. representation
of network interests at national and international policy
discussions). Voces de Telecentres
http://cts.vresp.com/c/?IDRC/3198aad9e5/aad3b70d93/6a108120c5, a
Spanish and Portuguese-language publication about the telecentre
movement in Latin America, will serve as one of the key tools for
communicating between and among the network members.
Finally, last month, a call for proposal went out to network members
for help in determining the future home of the network’s Secretariat.
The council is about to hire an executive director to lead the
day-to-day operations, and, it is finalizing a business plan to
present to the telecentre.org Foundation.
Meanwhile, other activities of note that LAC networks are doing in
their own right include:
•	New online training cycles were launched by the telecentre.org
academies in Chile, Peru, and
Colombia. Trained instructors lead courses aimed at telecentre
operators and cover such topics as telecentre programs for children,
seniors and the disabled and fundraising.  900 people have registered
so far.
•	In Colombia, a project to map telecentres in the country has
logged over one thousand telecentres and counting.  You can view this
work in progress at:
http://cts.vresp.com/c/?IDRC/3198aad9e5/aad3b70d93/ca713c0914 
•	Six Latin American networks benefitted from a resource
mobilization project that was supported by one of telecentre.org’s
funders, the International Development Research Centre.  The project
aimed to improve the following networks’ abilities to fundraise: Red
Nacional de Telecentros in Colombia; Conexión in El Salvador;  
Infodesarrollo, Ecuador; Red TIC, Bolivia; ATACH, Chile, and ATN,
Brazil.

Telecentre Leaders’ Forum (TLF)–MENA Region  


Telecentre leaders from across MENA gathered in Cairo last January in
Smart Village, Egypt’s answer to Silicon Valley, to take stock of
network building and sustainability in the region, efforts that have
been supported by telecentre.org and the telecentre.org Academy in
Egypt.	About 60 participants, drawn from Syria, Palestine, Morocco,
Algeria, Sudan, Yemen, Jordan and, of course, Egypt, as well as
Germany, took part. They were joined by Munir Thabet, the Regional
Director of the United Nations Development Programme and
representatives of development organizations, the Islamic Development
Bank and the private sector.
 At the forum, Eng. Hoda Dahroug, Deputy Director of the ICT Trust
Fund, confirmed that it would continue supporting network-building
activities in that country, and across the region, and would also open
lines of communication with the telecentre.org Foundation about how
best to work together in the future.
The forum was organized by Egypt’s Ministry of Information and
Communication Technology, with the support of the telecentre.org
Foundation and the UNDP.

Read all about it!

The telecentre.org library, a public, web-based repository made up of
hundreds of knowledge resources on all things telecentre in now online
in English. This one-stop shop of valuable training materials and
other telecentre resources can be found at
http://cts.vresp.com/c/?IDRC/3198aad9e5/aad3b70d93/26b76b8601 or
http://cts.vresp.com/c/?IDRC/3198aad9e5/aad3b70d93/f47b34d011 . 
Spanish- and French-language resources will be added and the entire
library will eventually be available through the telecentre.org
Foundation’s four-language community websites soon.  The library was
developed in collaboration with UNESCO’s Open Training Platform. 
The telecentre.org Foundation will also continue to partner with
Development Gateway, a non-profit organization that originally housed
our library, in order to promote our offerings, library and
activities. 

telecentre.org Foundation announces network guide now live on
Wikipedia 

telecentre.org’s Network Management Guide, a step-by-step how-to on
creating and building strong and sustainable telecentre networks, is
now live on Wikipedia in English, with Spanish and Arabic soon to
follow. 
 The guide, written collaboratively with network leaders from across
our global family, represents the best of what we are all about: 
people and organizations working together to share experiences and
best practices from across the globe in order to make telecentres
better and to increase their impact on development.  
 Based on the practical experiences of some of the most successful
telecentre networks, the guide focuses on areas such as business
planning and management, fundraising, alliance-building,
communications, advocacy, service development and delivery, among
others. 
We want to thank our partners at the Bangladesh Open Source Network
who wikified and uploaded the guide on our behalf; the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP) that has offered to translate the guide
into Arabic; and, Meddie Mayanja, the Senior Program Officer
responsible for networks at telecentre.org who led this project to its
successful completion. 
The guide is now a living document, available for constant updating by
and for the members of our global telecentre community. 

Other events 

Telecentre.org Support Team
The telecentre.org support team, based at IDRC headquarters in Ottawa,
wish to thank everyone involved in making telecentre.org a success
over the past five years.  We welcome the new Philippine team, who
will be publishing the next issue of this newsletter, along with all
the other aspects of the telecentre.org program, through the
foundation, and we wish them much success in the future.  We’ll be
supporting them every step of the way!

Get Online Day
Europe, 4 March, 2010
Through our partner, Telecentre-Europe, at least 20 European countries
sought to bring Europeans who have never accessed the Internet online
for ‘Get Online Day’ scheduled for March 4th.  The event was part of
eSkills Week 2010 in Europe and was aimed at raising awareness of the
benefits of digital inclusion. 500 telecentres were expected to
participate.



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