© Yacine Khelladi  <yacine@aacr.net>
http://kiskeya-alternative.org/yacine
V1- 27-3-2000

At the first day of the TELELAC project operative workshop, (http://tele-centros.org- for which I volunteer in the advisory committee), the issues of "what is a telecenter? "what differs from a cybercafe to a telecenter?", "is my telephone service center with internet connexion a telecenter?" were raised again.

Those questionings are also recurrent in the different forums  as <telecentros@tele-centros.org> and IDRC's  "Open Forum on Telecentres and Development" <telecentres-l@lyris.idrc.ca>

That same day I had the idea of  proposing a model to delimitate the Telecenter Space object of the TELELAC project, and which schematic draft I present it hereafter to receive your comments, critics, and help.

This space (virtual?) has 3 dimensions:

• the services offered by the "Telecentre": gradually from a  "mail forwarding" (printing email y snail mail distribution); internet access + others services (word processing, games, CDroms) + telecom services (telephone, fax) + basic internet use training  + Web Services (hosting, design), support for strategic comunications (working with community groups for internet integration) +  community applications  (telemedicine, teleducation), etc.
• the geographic and social covering: zone y client populations: rural marginal, urban commercial or middle class- up, civic/public  space (school, library); urban marginal; etc.
• the objectives or vision of the Telecentre: simple business, business with social vision, social-business venture, public social service, integrated in community development plan, etc.

Game: try to locate in this tridimensional space the TC you know about, lets see, tell me what happen ?

Note: the cloud is approximate and sometime  might not be possible to places a TC in it with 3 variables