3.1. Queries to the Telecenter Help Desk

We’ve been going through a nationwide consultative process focusing on the national ICT strategy in the past couple of weeks. As part of this, yesterday I facilitated a small brainstorming session with colleagues representing a broad range of stakeholders in this process. Our goal was to articulate key questions to be addressed in the design stage. The next step is to start looking for answers to these questions. We hope you can give us some direction.

• We know that the local context is important, but what is it exactly within the local context that we need to pay most attention to? What are the key elements of a community profile for a telecenter initiative?
• Should we be concerned about how the information is collected and analyzed? Is it as important as what is collected and analyzed? What are the most appropriate methods for engaging the community and collecting data at the community level?
• Local communities don’t exist in a vacuum. What other information do we need to collect to understand the broader context within which telecenters operate? What macro-level factors influence local realities—in terms of both how they have shaped local realities and how they may constrain or enable future opportunities?
• How could we handle not just the analysis of one community, but the analysis of thousands of communities? How can we develop data collection/community engagement methodologies that are scalable?
  (Facilitator, national ICT strategy planning workshop)

3.2. Telecenter Ecosystems and Local ICT Environments

In Chapter 2, we pointed out that a key lesson of past projects has been the need to design initiatives based on a good understanding of the local realities and to engage the community in designing the initiative.

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