Zed sez: “O’Reilly’s quoting Gibson’s ‘the future is here; it’s just not evenly distributed’ makes this seem timely:”
Wearing a traditional feathered headdress and using a Power Point presentation, a leader of the Ashaninka Indian tribe from central Peru described how his village created a presence on the Internet…
In the past several years, the Ashaninkas put up their own Internet server and website to tell their story. Mino said they are using Web-based tools to educate their people, and village Internet kiosks have enabled small villages to communicate with one another.
A key part of the program, he said, was their insistence that the villagers establish their own Web servers and learn to maintain the system for themselves. This led to a year of negotiating with the Peruvian state telephone company to provide the resources necessary for the Ashaninkas to install a network. It was important that the Ashaninkas be able to demonstrate their self-sufficiency to the dominant society in Lima.
(Thanks, Zed!)