Towards a Smart Community Centre: SEIDET Digital Village

Abstract

South African communities are constantly being developed through new ICT projects which are initiated by individuals, government and private organisations. The problem with these developments is that they are implemented in isolation. This isolation causes limited sharing of resources, duplication, poor-governance of the resources and in worse-case scenarios, failure of project initiatives. This paper proposes a model that could be used to address these problems by focusing on the SEIDET community centre using it as an ex-ample. The model follows a descriptive analysis of ICT related work spanning over two decades performed within the SEIDET context, including the ongoing SEIDET Digital Village. The benefits of the proposed smart community centre model include community and rural development through sharing of scarce ICT resources. It could further provide support for entrepreneurs through training interventions, action-based research for policy development as well as spawn local innovation and free-sharing of resources and services.