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By Anonymous on Friday, February 13, 2004 -
10:32 am
Welcome to our site. I just wrote an update on this. Here it is: I have some very good news. We have a more detailed and technical description of the project here. It was written by Bob Marsh, the coordinator of our technology team in the United States and a very experienced engineering manager. Vorasone Dengkayaphichith and I met with Minister Dr. Bountiem Phissamay of the Prime Minister's office for three hours. We also met with the General who stopped our process for 'security concerns'. This true warrior and honorable man met with us for two hours. We also met with many other people, including villagers from Phon Kham, district officials, the head of the Lao Women's Union, the Provincial governor, the Vice Minister of Education, and the President of the Lao Veterans Association. As far as I can determine, now, the Lao government has been very cooperative as well as appropriately prudent to this point. If a mistake was made in the permissions process, it was ours. We did not fully understand the objection nor did we really know how to deal with it. The people we met this trip were all very supportive and understanding. I feel confident that our relationships are much better at every level of government, now. I believe - although the future is the future - permission to go forward with the installation of the Jhai PC and communication system will be granted within days or weeks. In the meantime, we have developed a plan to do the last things on our system necessary for the next field tests at both the one village and five village levels. These include thorough documentation for internal purposes and installing and testing a remote monitoring system before we launch in Phon Kham. We are also preparing for the possibility of replication in other countries and our part as consultants in those replications. Please rest assured our system remains open design, open source. If you wish to see a draft of our business plan for this year and you have an interest in helping us in some way, please contact me at lee@jhai.org, We need additional capital. After several hundred thousands of dollars worth of volunteer effort, we must now pay technical people to complete this effort. Please know that we will be very careful in any roll out. We will do this so that the ability to communicate and use computer business tools becomes available to the widest number of people who find themselves poor and in rural areas without electricity or telephones. We also will do this because we do not want to disappoint poor people. Frankly my experience after over 30 years working with poor people is that, they are disappointed often by people richer than they are. We don't want to be part of that kind of process. Thus, we will divulge all of our information in the end, but will do so in a way that minimizes the possibility of efforts that cannot be supported technically, economically or socially and are not, therefore, sustainable. Hope this helps. Lee@jhai.org |
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