Session
Digital Divides & Inclusion
Skills Building for Basic and Advanced Technologies (Meaningful Access)
Organizer 1: Pranav Bhaskar Tiwari, Internet Society Foundation
Organizer 2: Sylvia Cadena, 🔒
Organizer 3: Ndunge Kiundi, 🔒
Organizer 4: Carlos Francisco Baca-Feldman, Rhizomatica Communications
Speaker 1: Roxana WIDMER-ILIESCU, Intergovernmental Organization, Intergovernmental Organization
Speaker 2: Adrian Wan, Technical Community, Asia-Pacific Group
Speaker 3: Neo Magoro, Civil Society, African Group
Speaker 4: BERNABEL AMANDA , Government, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Speaker 5: Nils Brock, Civil Society, Intergovernmental Organization
Carlos Francisco Baca-Feldman, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Pranav Bhaskar Tiwari, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Ndunge Kiundi, Civil Society, African Group
Round Table - 90 Min
How can the development of public policies, that take into account communities’ particular needs and ways of life, enable the consolidation of capacity building and knowledge sharing processes in rural, indigenous and marginalized urban territories?
What are the relevant aspects for the design of public policies to enable the environment for capacity building processes for the development of local meaningful access solutions?
How can digital knowledge sharing between people from diverse communities and telecommunications specialists be encouraged?
What mechanisms are needed to strengthen the networks of community technicians, ICT managers and communicators that have been created through these training initiatives?
What will participants gain from attending this session? By participating or attending the session, they will have the opportunity to join an informal international learning community among organizations that carry out capacity building processes aimed at developing community communication and telecommunications projects.
Likewise, thanks to the sharing of diverse digital learning experiences and tools, they will be able to access and incorporate offline and online tools and learning resources to strengthen their own training and knowledge sharing processes.
Finally, participants will be able to gain clarity on some of the fundamental elements in the design of public policies that enable the implementation of community capacity building processes.
Description:
Capacity building to enable people living in rural, indigenous or marginal urban contexts to develop their own community solutions for meaningful access or local content creation is fundamental to achieve the objectives of digital inclusion that have been proposed at the global level. There is a long history of initiatives in the Global South that have sought to address the challenges of capacity building in community contexts, where it is necessary to rethink pedagogies and ways of transmitting knowledge to adapt them to those of the communities.
In recent years, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, many of these community-driven capacity building initiatives have changed, giving way more rapidly to the development of online and hybrid training processes. This has allowed the creation of projects for access to telecommunication services and the creation of local content, thanks to the generation of self-learning and online interaction that go beyond the geographical limitations of face-to-face training. However, while generating many benefits, this kind of training also presents challenges and limits that are important to discuss and analyze.
In this workshop, based on practical and diverse experiences in developing community-driven knowledge-sharing platforms, we will seek to contribute mainly, but not only, to the discussions related to this year's sub-theme on Digital Divides & Inclusion. We will focus on the type of public policies and the basic elements of an enabling environment that community-driven training initiatives need in order to make a significant contribution to closing access barriers and promoting inclusion based on the communities' ways of life and communication needs.
Multistakerholder and multiregion approach is key for this enabling environment, so the participants of this workshop include people from local communities, institutions and agencies of government, as well as international organizations, focused on communication development and digital access in the Global South.
A set of public policy recommendations for the development of hybrid or online capacity building processes that respond to the needs and expectations of the targeted communities.
Strengthening of a learning community on capacity building in indigenous, rural and marginalized urban communities for the creation of their local meaningful access solutions, through a space for the exchange of this knowledge in the Community Networks Learning Repository (https://cnlearning.apc.org/).
Exchanges of documents and pedagogical materials among participants and shared in the various learning spaces that they drive.
Creation of a blog article or social networks posts of the main results of the panel, which will be shared in the communication channels of the organizations that will participate in the session.
Hybrid Format: 1. Organizations that impulse community capacity building efforts, and other key stakeholders, will be directly invited to join the session both onsite and online.
2. Prior to the panel, all online speakers will be invited to a pre-panel session to check that they all know how to use Zoom.
3. The form of participation of the speakers will be through trigger questions. This will facilitate generating a discussion between the speakers and the other participants.
4. During the session in the Zoom room chat the online moderator will share links and notes relevant to the information presented.
5. After the invited speakers respond to the triggering questions, the audience will be asked if they want to comment on it to do so.
6. There will be a specific timing of each participation of the speakers and the rest of the participants.