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About Village Computing
 Over the past decade, many initiatives have been undertaken around the world aimed at bringing the benefits of the Information Age to rural and peri-urban communities throughout the developing world. Variously referred to as ‘information kiosks’, ‘telecenters’, ‘community technology learning centers’, or even ‘cyber-cafés’, among other names, these initiatives have experimented, to varying degrees of success, with a variety of approaches (e.g., business models, service offerings, target populations, technology employed) in service to their constituents.
We broadly define ‘village computing’ projects as initiatives using shared-access computing devices —not only PCs, but also other computing technologies such as PDAs, cell phones, and others— to provide information and communication services in rural or peri-urban communities around the world.
By using the term “village computing”, we are not trying to just add a new name or provide a final definition to a very diverse field. We are using this term to make clear that the goal of this consultation is to learn from experiences that may sometimes be quite different but that have many things in common. We expect that this term is sufficiently encompassing to achieve this goal.
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