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The Tsunami as a Wake-Up Call to Bridging the Digital Divide
Author: Andy Carvin , EDC Center for Media & Community | January 4th, 2005

As everyone knows by now, the last week and a half has been a trying time for the people of South Asia. Tens of thousands of people are dead, millions of lives ruined. Being thousands of miles away from the epicenters of destruction, it's sometimes hard for me to fathom the scale of how awful things are.

It's times like this I step back and begin to wonder about the work I do on bridging the digital divide. Sometimes I ask myself, does any of this really matter? Is bridging the digital divide really that important when compared to rebuilding the lives of millions of people, let alone protecting them in the first place?

But as we learn more about why some people survived and others didn't, it's made me realize that bridging the digital divide is more important than ever. Bridging the divide -- particularly in terms of promoting technology literacy and e-government for all -- could have actually saved lives.

One of the first stories to hit home for me was that of Mr. Vijaykumar, a former volunteer at a telecenter in Nallavadu, India, run by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation. Vijaykumar, who's now living in Singapore, received word of the tsunami well before anyone in southern India did. He called his family in Nallavadu, then called the telecenter. Another telecenter colleague living abroad, Mr. Gopu, did the same thing. Immediately the community sprung into action. Using the telecenter's public address system, local volunteers alerted fellow villagers. Among the 500 families in Nallavadu, 150 of their houses were destroyed -- yet no one died, because the telecenter responded to the imminent crisis at a time when no other local or national warning system was in place.

The Nallavadu telecenter is fortunate because it is a part of the Open Knowledge Network (OKN), an initiative that provides communities in develop