SMART MASYARAKAT: Worldview Foundation's Smart Communities




Since sm@sy came to the remote village of Kampung Raja Musa in Selangor, Malaysia, the local community has incorporated technology into daily life. Villagers use sm@sy facilities for transactions with government departments, e-commerce, and e-mailing; small entrepreneurs take advantage of e-payment, e-public services, and Internet surfing; schoolchildren use word processors to do their assignments. And many of the villagers come to the sm@sy center to get free information from the sm@sy database. The community has also enhanced its confidence, cohesiveness, and sense of identity in an increasingly borderless world.

Rafiah, a housewife with no higher education, talks of setting up an online shopfront to market her home-based tailoring business. "I hope to improve business through e-commerce," she says.

Approximately 1.2 million Malaysians currently have little or no access to ICTs. This may be about to change—results from sm@sy's pilot project promise wide replicability for the model in other rural communities.

Challenges. Worldview Foundation conceived of the sm@sy project in 1999 as a means of bringing information technology to rural Malaysia, as a powerful tool for communities to develop the new skill sets and knowledge they need to sustain themselves. Among the challenges facing sm@sy were a number of key questions:

How to foster in the community a willingness to accept technology as part of everyday life? The readiness to learn new skills and adapt them to existing ways of doing things would be critical.

How to ensure that participation could be sustained for the long term, so that the benefits of ICT would truly be realized?

In answer to these questions, sm@sy has fashioned a business model that puts the local community first. The village of Kampung Raja Musa is, in essence, director, manager, and primary stakeholder in the sm@sy project.

Content. Local, relevant content is a key reason for the community's interest and involvement in the sm@sy project. sm@sy developed multimedia content in two languages, Malay and English, dealing with a wide range of topics specific to the residents of Kampung Raja Musa. All content resides in an offline database and is freely available to everyone.

sm@sy content can be categorized as follows:

Agriculture (particularly relating to oil palm cultivation, as the primary economic activity of the village);
Social Development & Civics;
Business & Entrepreneurial;
Education;
Environmental Awareness;
Culture;
Hobby & Interest;
Personal Development & Awareness.

sm@sy content is dynamic, often updated and enhanced by the villagers themselves. sm@sy offline content links to useful and related Internet sites as well.

Info-Structure. In the first phase, sm@sy interfaced with the local community via interactive touch-screen information kiosks located at traditional community gathering places, like the primary school, women's activities center, and community hall. Villagers can use the kiosks to connect to the Internet using pre-paid smart cards.

In the second phase, sm@sy set up its own center with 10 PCs, a printer, and a scanner, with local area network (LAN) and phone line for Internet access.

Capacity Building. sm@sy has designed awareness and capacity-building programs to heighten the community's receptiveness to IT and enhance their ability to use it. These programs have targeted two sectors of the local population:

Core Group: To be self-sustainable, the project had to be able to draw upon local know-how to maintain the system. Ten young people, selected as sm@sy's core group, have been trained in IT and multimedia applications as well as kiosk, PC and network maintenance.

Community: The rest of the community, including villagers aged 4-74, has attended IT awareness programs as well as a half-day session on how to use the touch-screen information kiosks.

Self-Sustaining Business Model. During sm@sy's formative stage, Worldview worked closely with Raja Musa's Village Security and Development Committee to ensure that sm@sy met the actual need of the villagers and to obtain genuine commitment to the project. After a nine month development period, the project was handed over to the villagers themselves.

The sm@sy center is now managed by full-time staff with supervision of the core group, and the kiosks are overseen by the core group. Both the kiosks and sm@sy center are under supervision of the Village Security and Development Committee.

The Committee has designed a fee structure that meets the needs of the community while generating enough income to support operating costs. The center requires users to pay a minimal charge for printing, scanning and Internet surfing; surfing the sm@sy offline database is free of charge.

The sm@sy center has also explored income-generating opportunities including facility rental, computer courses, and sales of pre-paid kiosk smart cards. The center has become a self-sustaining operation, able to pay the salaries of full-time staff, maintenance, and running costs without external infusions of funds.

Future Plans. Worldview continues to upgrade the sm@sy design to make it more effective and to incorporate new technology, ultimately making it more affordable. There are also plans to expand services—to include e-learning, for example.

Nationally... The sm@sy application will be replicated in Malaysia through local councils, low-cost housing communities, and marginalized urban communities.

Internationally... Worldview has signed MOUs to roll out sm@sy in other countries, including Pakistan, China and Bangladesh. Implementation of the project is pending availability of funds.