Orientation of proposal

Any programme intended to promote connectivity in a country, region, city or district must incorporate training with technical and infrastructural requirements. The specifications that service providers must satisfy should include a specific section related to these questions. In particular, one specification should be that cable operators devote part of their profits to training.

Furthermore, all public access points should be simultaneously equipped with computer and connection tools and teachers-facilitators should be available capable of guiding the users not only in teaching them how to use these tools but also in the creation of simple contents, whether in textual or more sophisticated form - multimedia, artistic, etc. and in the processing and classification of information. The French experience of teaching jobs subsidised by the government (a youth employment scheme), currently called into question, is a good example that ought to spark similar initiatives in other countries.

Context

Access to ICTs is not just a question of equipment. Although much attention is given to the digital divide, the real issue is to focus on the question of access. Besides the real problem of connectivity, the capacity of access to ICTs supposes not so much the competency to use the tools themselves as the new cognitive functions called on by ICTs, i.e. the capacity to understand changing contents, the classification of information, its contextualisation, understanding of non-Cartesian logic based on uncertainty, etc. Thus control over the tools will permit each and everyone to progress from the stage of simple consumer of information to that of critical citizen, by being able to classify and sort this information, and by being able to act by producing their own content. It is in this way that ICTs can constitute a vector of both personal development and active citizenship.