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Project Title: Adopt-an-Haitian-Internet-Technician-or-Facility

I circulated this, and its precursors, notes about the necessity for diesel to keep the generators powering Boutilliers Hill NAP on the Hatian-Dominican Republic Border from failing, earlier this month on the North American Operators Group (NANOG) mailing list. Efforts by former ICANN people, in public service and in the private sector, were critical to bringing the continuity of the surviving infrastructure to the attention of the White House, the Department of State, and the Southern Command. The Embassy of the Dominican Republic joined Southern Command as the first suppliers of jerrycans of diesel, six days after the first quake. The longer-term recovery, targeted to help the data network infrastructure and the men and women who have kept it running, is something the wider ICANN community, and the CircleID communities, can participate in. There are other ways to contribute, even to contribute towards the recovery of the network infrastructure. This simply happens to be one way our peers have directly asked us to help them. Questions to ebw at abenaki dot wabanaki dot net.

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Project Title: Adopt-an-Haitian-Internet-technician-or-facility

Project Description: The project aims to collect money and telecom gear to provide mid-term financial aid to IT technicians that have been affected with their families during the January 12, 2010 earthquake. Money, telecoms gears, time, software, etc will serve to setup technology community centers to support schools, universities, vocational centers that have collapsed.

Begin Date
February 2010

End Date
August 2010

The Context: On the January 12, 2010, Haiti one of the poorest country in the world is hurt by a 7.3 Earthquake that caused major damage to Port-au-Prince, Jacmel, Leogane and other settlements around. Many notable landmark buildings were significantly damaged or destroyed, including schools, universities, vocational schools even the Port-au-Prince Cathedral, and the main jail. Among those killed are a lot of technicians, students, teachers.

Many countries responded to appeals for humanitarian aid, pledging funds and dispatching rescue and medical teams, engineers and support personnel. Communication systems, air, land, and sea transport facilities, hospitals, schools, universities, and electrical networks had been damaged by the earthquake, which hampered rescue and aid efforts; confusion over who was in charge, air traffic congestion, and problems with prioritization of flights further complicated early relief work. As rescues tailed off, supplies, medical care and sanitation become priorities. Among them we also need to address education on a mid term run. With a lot of destroyed schools and dead teachers e-learning can be a good way to overcome this problem.

Deliverables and criteria for close-out

The projects has 2 majors deliverables:

  1. Providing financial support to at least 50 technicians whose houses have been destroyed during the seism. The idea is getting them a job so they don’t have to worry about their family basic needs and keeping them on their workplace
  2. Setup mobile IT community centers to provide IT services to schools and universities.
  3. Contents production for e-learning

The project boundaries: This project aims to provide technical support to teachers helping them putting their courses online or on DVD and make it available for remote schools or schools whose teachers have been killed during the quake. Data Center in a box will facilitate access to those courses by the students. Project will be conducted in joint venture with the Ministry of Education that will define the priority based on must affected area and teacher availability.

The main risks: The main risk of this project is not having enough funds to address all the needs in supporting the schools in producing online courses because it’s a well-known fact that in schools in Haiti adopted their own curriculum ignoring sometimes the official one. The second concern

Stakeholders:

Client(sponsor): Ministry of Education

Project Manager: Reynold Guerrier

Project Team: Reynold Guerrier, Max Larson Henry,

Steering committee: Reynold Guerrier, Stéphane Bruno, Sergey Gaillard, Roque Gagliano, Max Larson Henry

Other Stakeholders: Local ISP, LACNIC, ISOC, IDB

Budget and resources: ($, people, equipment, facilities, software, etc.)

  • 100,000.00 USD for salaries to support technicians and their family to get them back on track
  • 5 contents production units
  • Production software
  • Management software
  • 10 data center in a box

Milestones
Date Key deliverables

In the list of topics (tags here at CircleID) there is nothing for serious failure, natural or the result of human agency.

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Feb-March 2010: Financial support to technicians and families
March 2010: Data center in a box
March-August 2010: Implementation period

Bank Account Info:
Bank: SOGEBANK
Bank Address: Route de Delmas, Delmas 29, Port-au-Prince, HAITI
Account Number: 130212988

Swift code: SOGHHTPP
Beneficiary: Association Haïtienne pour le Développement des Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication
Beneficiary Address: 18, rue Moise, Pétion-Ville, HAITI

By Eric Brunner-Williams, Mathematician

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