Björn Pehrson

I am into communication systems and want to know more about user communication needs and their requirements on networks.

Differences of internet Use among Students

Hi ,
My name is Shrwan Khanal, a Nepali citizen pursuing Master's in Development and International Cooperation at the University of Jyvaskyla Finland. I am researching on "Internet use among the Students at the University of Zambia". I just came back from four months field visit in Zambia and writing my thesis. I am looking at the relationship between internet use and gender and nature of study. Currently, I got an opportunity to visit Nordic Africa Institute at Upsala as study grant holder. I found this workshop very interesting. Of course, my study is not very much related with environment and ICT but I believe I can meet many scholars who might have a lot of idea about ICT in academic sectors in Africa and have input for my work.

Looking forward to see you all.
Shrwan

Anna... ICTs, learning, adaptation (& sunshine)

Hi! I'm Anna Taylor. I work for the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), based at the Oxford Centre in the UK... although I just got back yesterday from a month in South Africa (which is home and currently far more sunny than here) where I worked out of our office at the University of Cape Town and did some fieldwork in Lesotho on rural livelihoods and the use of wetlands.

Much of the work I do at SEI Oxford is related to climate vulnerability and adaptation, livelihoods and water resource management, with a focus on actor-oriented participatory processes to support decision making and learning.

I have recently become increasingly involved and interested in issues of communication and learning in the context of social, organisational and individual development and adaptation. ICTs have an increasingly important role to play in connecting people and making information accessible but there is also the danger of perpetuating existing inequalities and gaps as well as creating new ones if we are not careful. Issues of access, skills, power, choice, inclusion, lifestyle, culture and language are all, I think, important ones to consider when discussing ICTs. The old adages of information and knowledge is power and the benefit of being well connected will no doubt remain as true as ever but they may well change in nature in the age of widespread use of ICTs.

One of the new initiatives we are heading up, which has an important ICT component, is that of developing a collaborative platform on climate adaptation, called weADAPT, providing guidance on climate risk management. One element of this platform is a wiki, collaboratively used for documenting and sharing information on adaptation process, including methods, tools, experiences, lessons, data, etc. Two big issues that are coming up for us in this regard are quality control / assurance and effectively communicating and dealing with uncertainty.

I am really looking forward to participating in this workshop because there is a lot of scope for using new technologies in adressing environment and development challenges, we already have a lot to learn from each others experiences and I'm sure we can together come up with some exciting new ideas!

See you in Uppsala.

Hydro and Agro Informatics Institute

I am Dr. Royol Chitradon, Director of Hydro and Agro Informatics Institute (HAII).
Please allow me to give a brief description of HAII.

Hydro and Agro Informatics Institute was founded on 16th January 2004 under National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA), the Ministry of Science and Technology, Thailand, as an informatics institute on water resources and agriculture.

With the information system, government agencies who deal with water resource and agricultural issues should have essential information before making any decisions on their plans and operations especially in crisis like drought and flood. The information system includes the important data to apply for the implementation of following up, planning, and managing water resources and agriculture in order to lessen the loss of economic and social growth caused by water issues.

To reach sustainable development, the collaboration of agencies, essential knowledge, and appropriate technology are required. Two main tasks for HAII are to create an essential information system on water resource and agricultural management and found cooperative networks among different organizations.

Please visit our links for more details of our work:
http://www.haii.or.th//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=60
http://www.thaiag.net/
http://www.thaiwater.net/
http://www.thaiweather.net/


It is a pleasure to be invited as one of the key note speakers of this seminar. I am looking forward to seeing you all at the event. The following is details of the presentation:

1. Information about climate change at the global level
2. Information about climate change at the regional level
3. Information about climate change at the country level
4. Community water resource management in the northeast of Thailand: shown how the community develop and manage their plans to cope with climate change risks.

Please visit this link for more information of the community in the northeast of Thailand “Ban Limthong Community"

http://www.haii.or.th//index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=47&func=startdown&id=37
http://www.haii.or.th//index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=47&func=fileinfo&id=6

Dear All,


I am working at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) at the Sida Helpdesk for Environmental Assessments that is part of the EIA-Centre at SLU. We are commissioned by Sida - Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency - to assist in the work to integrate environmental perspectives into Swedish development cooperation. Development has to take natural resources and environment on which people depend for their livelihood into account to be sustainable. Environmental assessments are therefore important for integrating environmental aspects into the design and decision-making of development projects and programmes. We work from a holistic point of view through a wide sustainability approach, including strategic environmental assessment.

As we were invited to the ICT workshop, we discussed what our contribution could be. At first, we did not find any nor could we see the linkages. But… after some thinking we realised that we may have quite a lot of sharing to do, if we stand on three legs; environment, people and ICT.

To be honest I have seen several ICT projects in developing countries failing. There are of course many reasons for that and for some of them they had to fail, while others not necessarily had to go that way. Many times a major reason was that experts somehow thought they had the good (read; best) solutions for … there are many lessons learned to be done and I can see that SPIDER and this workshop can bring us all a step further through sharing, learning and cooperating.

I do not think that there are connections or that searching for linkages, between environment and ICT, in every project is necessary or a goal as such. Key is to find the specific added-value or support when looking for special solutions in a specific project or context.

I look forward to present one of our projects; we are developing a web-based tool in order to integrate environment in projects/programmes/sectors and that is an example to discuss further together with you, whereas I can bring back experience to my colleagues…

Looking forward to meet you all,

Anja

Marco Zennaro

Hi! My name is Marco Zennaro. I work at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics as a researcher in the field of wireless networks. We use wireless networks as a quick and cheap way to connect universities in developing countries. I am also a PhD student at KTH, Stockholm, looking into the use of a technology called Wireless Sensor Networks for development projects. Wireless Sensors are quite interesting: they are able to measure some physical parameters and send the measurements wirelessly to a server or to the internet, they don't rely on any existing infrastructure and they are cheap (ok, kind of). They are small and use little power (they are usually solar powered). Despite their huge potential, there are not many deployments in developing countries. I though that an interesting application for them would be monitoring water quality. Since I have a project running in Malawi, I thought it would make sense to use them there. I will be in Malawi this summer, and deploy my system to monitor water quality.

I am really interested in the topic of the workshop, and hope I will be able to discuss with the participants about their projects and about possible collaborations.

Looking forward to meeting you soon!

Best,

Marco

Who I am..

Hi all,
my name is Simone Sala and I graduated in Information and Communication Technologies at the University of Milan, after a four-month research in FAO on the applications of Information and Communication for Development to Natural Resources management and Climate Change Adaptation in Developing Countries. The focus of my studies and experiences is ICTs for Development: in my bachelor thesis I designed an outdoor wireless network for a community of rural Sierra Leone, and I managed also a cooperation project in Ghana for an Italian Ngo (RAY Foundation). I am currently involved in a joint Research program of FAO and the Italian Ministry for Environment and Territory, on the topic of Information&Communication for Natural Resources Management and Climate Change Adaptation.

In November I became an associate member of ICT4D Collective of Royal Holloway, University of London, and I won a scholarship and now I'm a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Milan: through the complementary work at my University and in FAO in the last months I had the chance to deepen my knowledge about the potential applications of ICTs in the Climate Change field and in the broader environmental sector. In this sense I designed some pre-feasibility study of ICTs applications in these fields: in an official conference at the Italian ministry of Foreign Affairs I proposed the participatory application of a set of software tools to manage the Jordan river basin to a tripartite organization of Palestinian, Israeli and Jordan authorities (EXACT Meeting). Even if I didn't make any practical application of ICT for Environment yet, I consider this as one of my best work because my intervention was very successful.

I think that the workshop will be the ideal side for making me push things forward, sharing what I learnt with other researchers. In my opinion, sharing is surely the best way to learn.. and I look forward being in Uppsala!