Kannur hits cyberspace with Community Portals

You are never far away from your home! Whether you live in a remote village here or live overseas, you are always part of your home town. 12 Panchayat community portals have hit cyberspace so far from Kannur. A flagship project funded by UNESCO in association with Akshaya and SPACE is now drawing attention all around. Kerala lacks locally relevant content in the web sphere. Digital divide is manifested not only in access and tools of access but also in the inability to provide locally relevant information. Here the portals come with solutions. All the web portals under development are in Malayalam. Unicode encoding is used to adhere to the universal standardization, which in return will make it searchable content in the web. Each web portal covers detailed information of the Panchayat. You will find the history of the land, governance, information on public services, to mention a few. Locally relevant news and announcements also find its way to the portal. The project is aimed at bringing forth web portals that cater the needs of the citizens locally. In the course of time the portals will be used for local transaction, enabling in it with more business features. If successful, such portals can be set up every village/panchayat of the State. The project now runs participatory way. Facilitators collect data from field, which later entered into the portal by the local staff trained by SPACE. All the web portals are developed in free software. Joomla content management system is used for building the portals. The technical team from SPACE regularly conducts training for the project staff identified by Akshaya. The latest training was held on 23rd and 24th of January,2008. There content editors were given further training for one day. Also a half-day training was conducted focusing the Akshaya entrepreneurs of the area. They were taught to set up Malayalam facility in their computers. It is hoped that soon there will be more articles from the entrepreneurs too to the portals. The portals fully owned by the community thus create models to follow. Expectations are met. So for Kannurites, you are home in a ‘click time’! Do visit... Kannur