community networks

In this fourth and last episode of the series, we discover the perils of social activism in India and whether learning how to use Microsoft Notepad and Paint is digital literacy.

“There is so much potential in rural South Africa, and with a little bit of capacity building, a lot of things could happen around affordable internet access,” said Carlos Rey-Moreno of APC's Local Access Networks project at the end of a workshop with the Technology Innovation Agency.

In this third episode, we visit the ancient city of Chanderi, home to four and a half thousand weavers, we are inundated with terrifically bad smells, and we find a pirate radio broadcaster living a few hours drive from where the Buddha had first meditated.

Welcome to the tenth monthly round-up of developments impacting your local access networks.

What are the most relevant changes in the telecommunications landscape and their implications for achieving universal, affordable access to communication in Africa? This was the focus of a workshop in Durban organised by APC and the Communications Regulators’ Association of Southern Africa.

The HERMES (High­-frequency Emergency and Rural Multimedia Exchange System) project by Rhizomatica is the winner of the Mozilla NSF-WINS grand prize in the Off-the-Grid Internet Challenge.

In this fourth column on gender and community networks, Nic Bidwell looks closely at the processes and difficulties of research on the social and gender impact of community networks in rural places, and focuses on some issues encountered in the nitty-gritty of such research.

Welcome to the ninth monthly round-up of developments impacting your local access networks.