E-conference: Worldwide best practices

Issues addressed:

Transforming Education for a Learning Society:

• Teachers learning from each other, particularly given the challenge of educational reform processes and the new pedagogies this implies.
• Participatory mechanisms for designing distance and demand-driven education efeforts, particularly in the context of increasingly learner-centered methods.
• Teaching technical and entrepreneurial skills to using ICT and distance learning methods.

Harnessing emigrant know-how for local development:

• Knowledge transfer from emigrant populations to the home country, in terms of technical skills, talents, business skills, political values, etc.
• Worldwide experience of knowledge transfer among trans-national communities sharing linguistic, cultural and other affinities (e.g. as in Armenia, Colombia, Hungary, Philippines, India, China, Israel, South Pacific islands, etc)

Networking communities and local governments nationally and globally:

• Building local content to enhance local development objectives, including through the use of Websites by local governments.
• Ways of matching university research with development requirements at the level of local government, communities and NGOs. How are they funded/sustained?
• Community information centers in small and medium-sized towns which place emphasis on pro-active gathering and systematization of local/national information, to complement access to foreign information. What are appropriate and sustainable business structures? What types of local information can be usefully created and how can this be updated? Specific examples from different countries.
• Examples of programs and processes which facilitate and streamline the integration of community & local development efforts with national information programs.

Revitalizing rural economies through improved knowledge flows:

• Early warning systems to help prevent or mitigate the effects of disasters such as floods, hurricanes, famine, epidemics, etc.
• Design, management, financing and operation of current information systems on prices of agricultural inputs, products, commodities at the national or local level. Costs and charges? How often are prices updated?
• Examples of learning processes which help small-scale artisans, farmers and other micro-enterprises adapt their production and technology to service domestic markets which become better integrated through information flow on inputs, prices, etc.
• How can agricultural and industrial extension systems be better adpated to generate, absorb, use and diffuse information to reach small-scale rural enterprises?

Deploying knowledge for enterprise development:

• Ways of matching university research with requirements of small or large enterprises. What could be the role of "knowledge brokers" to facilitate better linkages between university research and real needs of enterprises? How can such brokerage and other knowledge transfer mechanisms be funded/sustained?
• Pro-active use of knowledge sharing or knowledge transfer mechanisms within "clusters" of producers & distributors, "co-opetition".
• Mechanisms which lower the transaction costs of small businesses in their search for credit and market information as well as business services.
• Electronic commerce applications which strengthen small business competitiveness and market shares in either internal or external markets.

"Intelligent government": promoting knowledge-based public administration:

• Information systems and networking within and among developing country government agencies which promote efficiency, transparency and better service to the public; including legislative information.
• How can local and national governments improve their knowledge management and adopt best practices to enhance service delivery?
• What kinds of basic information should be in the public domain? Which of this information should be directly provided by government? Examples of good practices.

Other relevant areas of best practice:

Health:

• What kinds of telemedicine services can provide high value-added in low-bandwidth environments?
• How can local health-related knowledge be effectively combined with external knowledge to improve public health?

Intellectual property rights:

• Intellectual property rights legislation and practices which favor knowledge creation in developing countries. How can local communities better acquire and use knowledge of IPRs to protect their interests?
• Best practices in administering GIS information which have addressed and solved issues of intellectual property, compatibility, public monopoly, etc.

updated 31 May 1999

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