| Community Networks for rural communities in Colombia - 23/06/2020 |
| Asociación Colnodo |
| Technical Community and Civil Society | The Americas | Colombia |
| From Colnodo we accompany processes of rural community networks of Intranet, Internet and mobile telephony, so that indigenous and rural communities that in Colombia have not been able to access quality communication services appropriate to their needs, can design build and maintain their own technological means of communication. During the confinement due to the COVID-19 health crisis, these networks have been a tool for women and men to access communication services where they were not previously available. One of these networks is a pilot of community mobile telephony that is carried out in agreement with ICT Ministry and has allowed communities to maintain communication with family and friends without the need to travel and have direct contact to prevent the spread of the virus, in another of the processes in the east of the country the community has been in charge of making repairs and adjustments to maintain and improve the service of its network as well as or to connect new neighbors who require the service, finally in another of the networks that we accompany in Cauca, the Indigenous communities of the Nasa people want to use the networks with the use of the intranet (local network) and the Internet to disseminate their own content (videos, texts, images) to promote their own community health and education actions and prevent the entry of the virus into the territories.One of the challenges that we have as an organization that accompanies these processes is being able to continue sharing knowledge and experiences with other communities that want to implement these networks in their territories, so that they can have tools to start these processes with remote / virtual support. This is why, with the community networking team, we have started to build a wiki to discuss the experiences and some general considerations needed to implement self-managed, self-sustaining and appropriate community networks. The idea with this wiki is that it can be built together with different actors who are interested and working for and for community networks in Colombia. |
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Source Link Keywords: Community Networks |