The research within the Centre of Excellence in undertaken on three-year cycle (as per the THRIP programme). The current cycle (2007 - 2009) is a logical development of the previous cycle which ended in 2006.
The initial (2004 - 2006 cycle) objective of the research was to develop and field-test a prototype of a simple, cost-effective, robust and integrated e-business/telecommunication platform. This platform was designed for deployment in marginalized and semi-marginalized communities in South Africa, where a large part of the South African population live. The lessons learned from that cycle included:
- there is a need for stronger localization of the system toward lingustic and cultural contextualization
- the integration of other eService (eGovernment, eHealth, eJudiciary) into the telecommunications platform is important
- in order to the platform to better respond to the environmental transformations and the needs of the users, it is important to redesign the architecture as a distributed system
In the current cycle, the aim was to build on the previous work and to incorporate the lessons learnt from the first cycle. The objective is therefore to develop an improved multi-function, distributed, community communication system. The specific tasks within that include:
- building and developing eHealth, eJudiciary and eGovernment service portals
- extending the current WiMAX network by deploying WiFi hotspots around the community
Other tasks are detailed in the projects section
