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Colin Millar was invited to contribute a keynote presentation to the Annual Colloquium of the Institution of British Telecommunications Engineers (IBTE) in London on the 22nd November 2002. For his title, Colin chose "Creating Citizen Portals - the Activities of Project CENTURi21". Some 120 people packed the Jeffrey Hall at the Institute of Education to hear Colin speak of the importance of community networks and citizen portals, and describe the approach and activities of CENTURi21.
Using screenshots extracted from the current regional portals, Colin provided a scenario description to explain the key features of the work. The slides used are available on the Project Administration Site or directly from the author. The concluding slide summarises the talk, as follows:
- Community Networks and Citizen Portals can been proven to improve social capital.
- Top-down and Ground-up approaches must engage to ensure viability and sustainability.
- Utilities, Corporations, Companies, Councils and Government, in public-private partnership, are essential to provide the capabilities to turn the vision into a mass-market realisation.
- Centuri21 is an EU Project that has created the platform, the applications and the enabling functions to make this happen.
- As we proceed to validation, the verdict is currently in the hands of the communities!
- We are confident of the Centuri21 capabilities, and the main commercial partners plan to commercially exploit the learning.
The presentation was very well received both at question-time and in discussion later in the day during the Panel Forum. It was a privilege to represent the CENTURi21 Consortium in the presence of such a distinguished audience and speakers - including Professor Heinz Wolff (Brunel), Dr Ian Pearson (BTexactTechnologies), Francis Davis (Xybernaut Corp), and Professor Andy Valdar (UCL). An article on the topic for the IBTE Journal has been sought from the organisers; however Colin suggested that summer 2002 will provide a clearer evaluation of the results, so writing has been delayed until then.
Contact: Colin Millar
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