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coupled with
These need to be supported by
and
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as opposed to:
A major challenge for Europe' rural areas is to understand and balance these conflicts. A central development issue is the need to preserve the best aspects of traditional cultures and life styles while making sure that citizens in rural areas who want access to all the opportunities of the Information Society have equal or better access than people in sophisticated urban centres. One critical aspect of this which definitely needs to be tackled both top down (from the Europen level) and concurrently bottom up (from the very local level) is the need to level the playing field of universal access to a high performance, low cost telecommunication infrastructure and added value basic services such as Internet access. The importance of "local pull" in this cannot be overstated, but very few local decision makers across Europe appear to understand how to exercise that local pull in an environment which until liberalisation of telecommunications has been almost entirely a matter for national governments.
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and
and
As an example of this last criterion, if today local people need extensive training to enable them to tackle new era jobs with success, what measures are in place to ensure that schools, colleges and life-long learning facilities will keep pace in the future with emerging needs?
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A Europe wide programme of stimulation and support to "local communities online" is needed to accelerate the learning curve. Excellent exemplars for this exist and can be built on quickly and cost effectively. Local communities need to be networked locally, with each other and with the "machinery" of development policies and programmes.
This is happening very gradually and patchily on the basis of peer group pressure - for example as Members of the European Parliament and Member States' Parliaments start to use email and to ask other leaders and opinion formers for their email "addresses". Some directorates-general of the Commission are setting an example and have accelerated understanding and take up among their own networks of contacts. However, the Commission as a whole is being relatively slow to respond. An urgent need is for the provision of familiarisation in the skills of leadership across electronic networks - the Internet equivalent of TV interview training. This applies equally to senior people in the Commission, to MEPs and to members of Councils of Ministers, the Committee of the Regions etc. The ETD initiative is working with leading experts in this skills area to develop and test appropriate programmes.
The new networks enable much wider participation and mean that active networking takes much less time, effort and money. This is enabling a new generation of community leaders to emerge, typically on a basis that transcends geography, enabling people of like interests anywhere in Europe (and indeed world wide) to "make common cause". Its vital to any rural community that it has its share of these new "global networkers". Its vital to Europe as a whole that Europeans learn networked leadership and participation skills and exercise these skills at the global as well as the local level. For each of our languages and cultures we need networker skills development programmes that can be accessed readily online. Its vital that people in the most isolated rural areas should have equality of access to such skills development with people in sophisticated urban centres, but without any suggestion of "pushing the Information Society down peoples' throats" before they are ready. Again, the ETD Initiative is assisting the development of relevant skills programmes that can be delivered to citizens and communities everywhere through a combination of local facilities supported by "best of breed" expertise.
Just as each locality has its own unique "sense of place" in the physical and geographical world, so its now open to each locality to develop and proclaim its own sense of place in the new Networked Economy and the Information Society. Success in every aspect of rural development will increasingly depend on how well each locality and local community identifies itself to the world and to its local people "online" as well as offline. Since every aspect of society will change as the Information Society develops, its inadequate (and can even be dangerous) to assume that an identity that was right for the recent and present era remains right for the future. The opportunities are changing and so are the challenges and threats. Through the medium of a Communities Online programme, Europe needs to provide all local communities with access to the best available know how, experience, skills, insights and visions, against which local leaders can test and refine their existing perceptions of how life will be for them and for their communities in an Information Society. Again its vital that special steps are taken to make this kind of support as accessible in rural as in urban areas; electronic networking methods make this a viable proposition.
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