The Conecta Joven (or Youth Connect)(7) project provides the opportunity for youth to work together with telecenters to offer ICT training in various community access points such as neighborhood groups, schools, or cultural centers. This has two benefits: a new community service is offered, and youth have the opportunity to gain work experience, starting with helping others to write that first line of a CV.
7.11. Case Study: Sri Lanka Telecenter Family—Peer Learning and Knowledge Sharing
In most cases, innovation is not about coming up with a brand new idea; it is about taking something you see others doing and making it a little bit better. Typically, this process of innovating—and of spreading innovation—is very social. People learn new practices and techniques not from books, but from friends and colleagues who share ideas with them. Telecenter networks can be a powerful tool, not only for service delivery, but also for this kind of learning and innovation sharing.
The Sri Lanka Telecenter Family project is a good example of a peer learning environment. The initiative started with a series of large-scale, grassroots workshops to discuss the challenges and potential of telecenters. Building on 50 years of community organizing experience from Sri Lanka’s largest NGO, Sarvodaya, the workshops were designed specifically to create social connections that would promote the transfer of ideas, practices, and innovations. The workshop included daily opening and closing circles with more than 100 people, drawing exercises showing how people are using telecenters in rural Sri Lanka, and skits in which people acted out their visions of the role telecenters will play in communities in 2010.
While these techniques may sound process-oriented at first, they showed immediate results in terms of knowledge transfer. For example, one of the drawings included the simple idea of using handbills and posters that explained the value of ICTs to villagers. Dozens of telecenter managers started asking the group that made this poster questions such as: How much did it cost? How effective is it? Can you help me do this? The idea of “postering as marketing tool” hadn’t been obvious to most of the operators at the workshop, most likely because they were so focused on ICT as their main communication tool, which can be limiting if you are trying to convince people to use ICTs in the first place. The simple group drawing exercise served as an important catalyst for further action.
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