Here are the summarised results from the telecenter operator survey done by LIRNEasia at the weCan workshop in October 2008. Sample was not representative, but large enough to get a general idea about the telecenter operations in Sri Lanka.
Out of a total of 147 operators surveyed, the bulk, 101 were from Nenasalas, the 500 odd telecenter network created under the World Bank funded e-Sri Lanka programme. 10 were from Sarvodaya multi-purpose telecenters and 6 from others (eg. public libraries) 30 have not specified the type of the telecenter.
Do telecenters in Sri Lanka make money? Yes. They report an average monthly income of Rs. 22,119. (=USD 201) This is associated with a relatively large standard deviation of Rs. 21,714 (= USD 197) indicating a variation within…
Tags: Broadband, Colombo, electricity, ICT Agency, ICTA, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Internet charges, Internet services, Nenasala, odd telecenter network, print services, printing series, Rs, Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka, survey, telecenter, telecenter network, telecentre, USD, VOIP, weCAN, World Bank, World Bank The.
Your operator promises you x Mbps. Are you sure he keeps promise? If not, what you miss?
LIRNEasia, has been researching on Broadband performance quality issues in Asia. One objective of our work is to create ‘EMPOWERED USERS’ armed with broadband performance information.
Our first milestone was to develop ‘Ashoka-Tissa’ methodology of Broadband testing. This was released at a seminar jointly organized with Institute of Engineers Sri Lanka on March 18, 2008.
Next move was to automate the test process. LIRNEasia has developed an Open Source based tester (named AT-Tester) with the help of a team from ITT-Madras. After few months of beta-testing now it is available on the net (including the source).
LIRNEasia plans to launch it in Sri Lanka on at a workshop jointly organized by Sarvodaya.
ATTENDENCE FREE (with…
In 2006, Sarvodaya started a project with IDRC funding to help the burgeoning telecenters (under various names) learn from each other and solve the problems they faced in an environment marked by rapidly changing technology and consumer demand. As part of this effort, Sarvodaya Fusion organized two training sessions at the MAS Institute of Management and Technology in Tulhiriya.
The presentation that Helani Galpaya and I did (Sujata and Chanuka ran a parallel session) included components on innovation in service industries, the external environment that made innovation so important for telecenter operators, and systematic learning from failures. Because we had to work with multiple languages, it was not possible to cover all the slides, which are here.
One of the things we noticed was that there appeared to…
The Sarvodaya Suwadana Center Volunteers (Community Healthcare Workers) assembled at the Medical Officer of Health office in Kuliyapitya (Kurunegala District, Sri Lanka). This was a workshop organized by Sarvodaya and LIRNEasia as part of the Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP), launched in July this year - evidence based healthcare research aiming to evaluate the use of mobile phones for collecting health data and applying statistical data mining software programs for detecting emerging diseases outbreaks. This initiative is to complement the existing national disease surveillance and notification system.
Tags: Alerting, Carnegie Mellon University Auton Lab, community healthcare, disease outbreak, e-Health, intervention, Kurunegala
District, Lanka Software Foundation, m-Health, mobile phones, prevention, real-time biosurveillance program, Rural Technology and Business Incubator, Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka, statistical data mining software programs.
:::::DAILY MIRROR ONLINE EDITION:::::
Can there be a better occasion than the anniversary of South Asian tsunami just to ponder how far we have developed our systems to be ready for a similar event in future? What guarantee we have that a similar tsunami today would not result in a catastrophe of the same size?
This article by LIRNEasia’s Chanuka Wattegama was also featured in the Lankadeepa, the largest circulation Sinhala Daily and summarized in Earth Times. Also at : http://www.indianmuslims.info/news/2007/dec/25/communication_failure_contributed_tsunami_disaster.html
Footage from the video documentary “The Long Last Mile” was used in the Sirasa news on the 24th of December. An interview with the founder and president of Sarvodaya, Dr A.T. Ariyaratne and LIRNEasia’s Rohan Samarajiva will be aired on 28 December 2007 on MTV’s BizFirst InFocus…
It has been a practice at LIRNEasia to write an assessment of the responses to potentially tsunamigenic events in the region. We commented on Nias and Pangandaran. Now that the discussion on the response is starting, here is our take:
Lessons from the Sri Lanka tsunami warnings and evacuation of September 12-13, 2007
The tragedy of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was the absence of any official warning. The September 12th Bengkulu earthquake shows that this is unlikely to be the case in the future. We have seen that the new institutions created since the 2004 tsunami have the will and the capacity to act. What we must guard against now is indifference to warning; of populations that refuse to evacuate in the face of real danger.
…
Tags: addressable satellite radio sets, Arugam Bay-Panama coast, Bangladesh, Bengkulu, Colombo, communication systems, Disaster Management Center, earthquake, GSM/CDMA, India Ocean, Indian Ocean, Indonesia, Last Mile, Matara, Met Department, Mile HazInfo, Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights, mobile phones, Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, Panama, Rohan Samarajiva, Sarvodaya, SMS, Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka Meteorological Department, taped telephone voice message, Thailand, tsunami.
The Secretary of the Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights, Mr P. D. Amarasinghe joined LIRNEasia on a visit to Mirissa South, one of the best performing villages in the HazInfo Last-Mile project on 11 September 2007. The visit was organized by the Sarvodaya Community Based Disaster Management Center. The Matara District Sarvodaya Office and the Mirissa Sarvodaya Society hosted us. The objective of the visit was to express appreciation of the excellent performance of the village during the live tests and to try to understand the causes of the excellent organizational strengths of the village. A set of speakers gifted by our Canadian colleague Professor Peter Anderson and his wife Marcie was handed over for use with the WorldSpace addressable radio set used in…
LIRNEasia in partnership with Sarvodaya, is organizing the concluding events of “Evaluating Last-Mile Hazard Information Dissemination Research Project” in Moratuwa, Sri Lanka on 28-29 March 2007. This “Last-Mile” project reflects Sarvodaya and LIRNEasia’s shared objective of evaluating the suitability of information communication technology (ICT) in the last mile of a national disaster warning system for Sri Lanka and possible extension to other developing countries. A major part of the concluding events is the forum entitled, “Sharing knowledge on disaster warning, with a focus on community-based last-mile warning systems”, which will be held on 28-29 March 2007 at the Sarvodaya Damsak Mandiraya (Sarvodaya Main Campus) in Moratuwa. The conference intends to bring together knowledge from the South Asia Region to Sarvodaya for a forum on practical…
By Nuwan Waidyanatha
The Hazard Information Hub (HIH), operated by Sarvodaya as part of the Last-Mile Hazard Information Dissemination Project (HazInfo) to disseminate Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) risk information to the villages in Sri Lanka, monitored the recent tsunami drills conducted in the Pacific by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in the USA. The HazInfo project initiated by LIRNEasia, is a multipartner initiative aimed at tackling the “last-mile” challenges in developing an all-hazards approach to disaster management and mitigation.
Tags: Department of Meteorology, GUI, Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, International Tsunami Information Center, Pacific Ocean, Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, Sarvodaya, simulation, Sri Lanka, United States, web interface, web-product, west coast, West Coast-Alaska Tsunami Warning Center, XML.
The first phase of the Last-Mile Hazard Information Dissemination (HazInfo) project funded by
IDRC, was completed recently with the training of trainer component. LIRNEasia is implementing this project along with its project partners
Sarvodaya, the largest community organization in Sri Lanka and
TVE Asia Pacific (TVEAP), a non-profit media organization working in the Asian region.
LIRNEasia has undertaken a number of initiatives in the area of ICTs disasters and early warning post the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster of 2004. However, this is by far the largest project undertaken LIRNEasia in this area to evaluate the suitability of a number of ICTs (information and communication technologies) deployed in varied conditions for their effectiveness in the last-mile of a hazard warning system.
Tags: Bandaragama, Buddhist Temple, Colombo, communication technologies, Dialog Telekom\'s University of Moratuwa Mobile Communi, early warning systems, GSM, Indian Ocean, last-mile hazard warning technologies, Mile Hazard Dissemination, non-profit media organization working, Panama, Sarvodaya, Sarvodaya Development Center, Sarvodaya\'s Development Educational Center, Shanthi Sena Peace Brigade, Sri Lanka, Technology Partners, Thalpitiya, Thalpitya, the Indian Ocean tsunami, Vanguard Foundation, Wadduwa, west coast.
The Webhamuva Project was showcased at the World Bank’s launch of the Small Grants Program (SGP) 2006 in Sri Lanka on April 6, 2006, as an example of the previous year’s funding under the same program. www.webhamuva.org was launched last year to ensure that the voices of the tsunami affected were heard widely and their interests and input were taken into consideration during the reconstruction and rehabilitation phase. Divakar Goswami, Director of Organizational Development and Projects at LIRNEasia made a presentation on the project and highlighted some of the findings. The presentation is available for download as a PDF document.
This project was partly funded by the World Bank’s Small Grants from 2005 and was implemented by LIRNEasia in partnership with Sarvodaya. It will run until June 2006.
Peter Harold, the…
LIRNEasia in collaboration with The Vanguard Foundation, Sri Lanka National Committee on Large Dams (SLNCOLD), Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) and Sarvodaya has released A Concept Paper for a Dam-related Hazard Warning System in Sri Lanka: A Participatory Study on Actions Required to Avoid and Mitigate Dam Disasters. This work was funded by The Canada Fund for Local Initiatives.
The Concept Paper (version 2.0) and Annexes can be downloaded by following the links:
Dam Safety Concept Paper (version 2.0)
Dam Safety - Annexes
As part of our partnership with Sarvodaya on using ICTs for disaster management, LIRNEasia is managing www.webhamuva.org. The excerpt below is from the Daily Mirror of 10th January 2006(www.dailymirror.lk). We understand that a reader has offered to donate some bicycles to one of the families featured on the blog
"Sarvodaya has initiated and activated its development programs at the grassroots level, taking the ideas and suggestions of benefiting people as the foundation of the schemes and their active participation as the main component of the projects. However, the movement recognized that this might not be the way that all organizations conducting post-Tsunami work coordinate their activities. So in a bid to give voice to the people whose opinions go unheard in the reconstruction work, it set…
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