Posting-4 Conference 'Bridging The Digital Divide'

SEMINAR KEBANGSAAN E-KOMUNITI 2009

MERAPATKAN JURANG DIGITAL: MASYARAKAT BERPENGETAHUAN, MODEL MALAYSIA.

18 of March 2009

The conference was at Darby Park Hotel! hehe.. I really enjoy it!!! I mean really really really enjoy it you know (obviously you can see it from the picture hehe)... I get to meet all the 'big' i mean important people like Prof, Dr. and etc, from many kinds of states, universities and so on. I also gain a lot of information and knowledge and learn new things that i need to learn, you know... It's a very memorible moment for me. And I also get to meet Dr. Ali Salman (a faoreigner who can speak Malay very well) one of the presenter from UKM who was very kind and friendly, too bad I did'nt get the chance to be at his presentation. During the conference, I was very intersted in Dato Jailani Johari's (from SKMM- Suruhanjaya Komunikasi Multimedia Malaysia) presentation with the tittle Bridging The Digital Divide, SKMM Perspective. USP & Digital Divide is a mechanism for reducing the digital divide. Their target, by 2010, 50% of penetration in Malaysia. The BDD effort is to tackle 3 main side which are infrastructure, services and sustainability. The USP objective is to provide communication access to target undeserved area, localities and etc. Undeserved area is an area where the penetration rate for fixed and undeserved localities is where the application services are not sufficienty available to the community at large. From 2002 t0 2008 they've done and still doing some USP Projects ( 40000 individuals lines!). One of them is the Basic Telephony 2002-2007 which is to provide collective and individual telecommunicative and cellular voice communication. Another example of the USP Projects is the Pilot Project which is to provide communication towers along the East-West Highway. He also mention about the Universal Service in rural and sub rural area where they provide Public cellular service, Broadband Community Application and Collective Telephony Access. Until now there's 1250 towers nationwide of Basic Telephony (Fixed and Cellular), 1105 mukim with Community Broadband Center (CBC) one mukim one CBC with 278 CBC nationwide and Community Broadband Library (CBL) with 152 CBL nationwide (one supervisor among local community. Their target Groups is 36 OKU centers. They will provide assitive technology and facilities (consult the center) for people with disabilities. All in all there are of course issues within it, The policy-uniformity of telecenter models, Location- site acquisition site suitability, land power etc, Critical Infostructure- content develpoment, community involvement and sustainability-local champion, expert, trainer and so on.

Another presentation during the conference was about the Rural Communities' Information Needs. Their target is to identify the market from the community and the participitation from the community. To them, before launching any ICT initiative, the information needs of a community should be throughly accessed. The problem statement is that 85% of the population in the state of Kedah resides in the rural areas. This place is very low in terms of computer usage, basic IT knowledge and skill, do not aware about the existance of online application, do not have interested in using ICT and online application. The field of works around here are Fishery, Paddy, Palm- Oil and Rubber. Throughout their finding the percentage of information obtained is lower than information acquired by the community. It means that the community need more information. All in all, the community need more information associated to business, ICT, planning and execution. Besides that, they need more value added ICT programs to be carried out for the specific target groups to expose them to more information that can help them to improve their socio-economic And also provide more ICT access center at the rural areas communities.