Low-cost technology
Sol Luca de Tena has spent her life living and working between South Africa and Spain, and calls both countries home. She has over a decade of experience in strategic project management within technology development, capacity building, social impact and policy – with a focus on utilising technologies to address environmental and social challenges. She develops collaboration networks between often diverse interests, including communities, academia, industry and administration, and shapes...
Servelots was founded in 1999 by a group of computer scientists who wanted to provide a highly cost-effective but user-friendly software for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with a special focus on organisations working in the social development sectors. Over the years, the opportunity to work with SMEs and the social sector has resulted in a certain awareness of the ground realities, which have furthered research engagement. As an open source group, Servelots strives to push code in...
guifi.net is a bottom-up, citizen-driven technological, social and economic project with the objective of creating a free, open and neutral telecommunications network. The guifi.net project puts in practice a disruptive economic model based on the commons model and the collaborative economy, in which volunteers, SMEs and public administrations cooperate to build and operate sustainable common-p...
Zenzeleni (which means "Do it yourself" in isiXhosa) is a community-owned wireless internet service provider based in rural South Africa. It offers quality, high-speed internet comparable to the country’s most developed urban centres. Its model aims to significantly cut costs of telecommunications, retain expenditure within communities as a form of social entrepreneurship, and s...
Rhizomatica works as a bridge between the potential users of the technology and the engineers and developers of these efforts to ensure the technology is deployed and appropriate for use in the developing world. Its mission is to increase access to mobile telecommunications to the over two billion people without affordable coverage and the 700 million with none at all. Through efforts in Mexico...
AlterMundi is an NGO based in Argentina that strives to promote the emergence of a new paradigm based on freedom gained through peer collaboration. AlterMundi explores different manifestations of peer-to-peer collaboration from a technological perspective and in particular it has a done a great deal of work in relation to wireless community networks for small towns and rural areas. Projects suc...
The Open Institute is a non-governmental and not-for-profit organization that envisions Cambodia as a country in which widespread access to high quality education, information, communications and technology lead to a more developed and just society. Our mission is to ensure that the benefits of technology for social and economic advance are usable in Cambodian society. While the strategy of the...
Colnodo is an association of non-profit non-governmental organisations founded in 1994. Its goal is to facilitate communication and the exchange of information and experiences among Colombian social organisations at the local, national and international level through low-cost electronic networks. In pursuing this goal, Colnodo has developed programmes that place priority on issues such as human...
Although EsLaRed was legally registered in November 1999 as an independent organisation, it has carried out training and dissemination activities on ICTs since 1992 through Universidad de los Andes. Based in Merida, Venezuela, EsLaRed is a non-profit, private, academic institution dedicated to the development and promotion of research and dissemination of information and communications technolo...
Pangea is an independent non-profit organisation founded in 1993 to promote the strategic use of communication networks and ICTs for development and social justice. It promotes that the sharing of information, knowledge and technical resources among organisations and social movements for the effective and strategic use of ICTs, especially the internet, in a sustainable way, respecting the diver...
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