For those faithful readers interested in ICT in rural Africa, please start following the BOSCO team and I at BOSCOUganda on Twitter. There should be lots of interesting information coming up over the next few weeks.

Why BOSCO?

BOSCO-Uganda is a local, grass roots, organization working to implement collaborative ICT solutions in the rural, post-conflict, communities of northern Uganda.  We deploy our network of solar-powered PCs connected to long-range WiFi Internet and VoIP telephony services in former IDP camps, schools, health clinics, local government offices, and rural CBO/NGO offices.

BOSCO currently organizes community ICT training sessions centered on a Train the Trainer (ToT) model.  Our philosophy is to begin teaching people collaborative, Web 2.0 ICT skills that will be immediately useful to their line of work.  We begin with email, move to blogging, and then encourage users to use our Wikispaces forum and our Intranet forums to post relevant, local, content centered on their needs.  We are seeing schools and farmers post small scale funding proposals in these spaces while others are documenting their surroundings and the post-war resettlment process through digital ethnography.

We also connect local institutions to our network (e.g. health clinics, local government offices, rural CBO/NGO outposts) to better facilitate them in their work and help them to collaborate with their stakeholders.  We are about to double our presence in northern Uganda over the next two years in a newly established partnership with Unicef.

More information can be found at www.bosco-uganda.org or at www.bosco-uganda.wikispaces.net where you will find user-generated content arising from each site.

Some think that the Internet should be closely monitored for websites that can incite violence – thereby defying the absolute freedom of expression the Internet offers in places like Canada (not so much in China). This article, The Global Internet Jihad: Web of Terror, suggests we need to think closely about the other purpose of the Internet:

Many of us used to think the Internet would be a powerful force for progress and modernity, shrinking divisions and differences, in the world and uniting educated people everywhere in the quest for more democracy and freedom. But it turns out that far from dissolving the age-old problems of tribalism, identity and belonging, the Internet can exacerbate them. By connecting politically restless young adults with a noble cause, it gives them a powerful new sense of purpose.

Another article in the New York Times suggests the same. The virtual web of terrorism brings regions like Nigeria, Palestine, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia together.

In fact, neither Pakistan nor Yemen nor Afghanistan is the key place for radicalization. These terrorists go there after being radicalized in the West or in a Western environment. And radicalization does not occur in a concrete political praxis with real people but in a solitary experience of a virtual community: the ummah on the Web.

We have known – for a long time – that the Internet has such side effects. Just looks at the number of creepy sites that value school shootings, anorexia, suicide and so on. Should these websites, as well as those by fundamentalist religious groups – Christians, Muslims and so on – be monitored? Does this infringe on the ultimate freedom of the Internet – where its true power for good lies?