People-Net against Poverty

An underlying principle in human rights thinking is that all people must have the possibility to advance their lives based on the maxims of human value and dignity. Emerging ICTs hold many promises of providing effective means for impoverished and uneducated people to acquire the knowledge and tools they need, but the digital divide or gap has remained an immediate threat to productive and sustainable ICT use among the poor. People-net is a service concept, which is designed to ensure and enrich access by the world¡¯s poor need to concrete and effective information they need to advance their lives. An important type of information is ¡°how-to¡±-knowledge about vital areas of life, ranging from business to health affairs. The key idea is to exploit mobile internet technologies, focusing on human action-oriented and culturally-sensitive ISD initiatives. The practices of open-access, open-innovation and open-source communities are especially fertile for developing ecologically-valid, practical answers to concrete problems of poor people in their natural environments. This concept we call People-net, as it is intended to connect people with critical knowledge resources regarding the every-day activities of knowledge-needing poor people.