Quito Educanet: the first step to give ICT services to the citizens
Each year, around the world, many ideas are being developed in order to break the future universal epidemic: The Digital Divide. And in South America, these ideas are more and more pushed by local governments, which know the real situation of their citizens and are in a constant search of the best choices to fight with this problem. In January 2010, in Quito (official name: Metropolitan District of Quito), capital of Ecuador, the Municipality have begun an interesting project in order to build a standard technological platform into the Educative Units, making a better administration of services, administrative processes and educative activities. This project is called”Quito Educanet” and until today, it has worked with many institutions around the Metropolitan District of Quito, but in this year, the strategy will change and now is focused in using these resources to create and deliver new other services. This idea have begun with Municipal Schools and Municipal Educative Units, which were selected because of their strong impact at the end of the project and in order to generate an important material support for the project’s deployment at the rest of Municipal Educative Institutions.
As a result of analyzing the real situation, which have been done in ten municipal institutions, the project managers have defined the principal services that will be built until the end of the project, for example: implementation of the data network, laboratories of computing, Internet services, WiFi networks, digital technology, development of an Academic Management System, Municipal Intranet, Assistance Control based in biometric technology, etc. Obviously, all those services should be adapted to the reality of each institution.
In terms of investment, “Quito Educanet” will offer the infrastructure and the architectural designs of the solutions, an also it will provide a communications link with the core of the network, it means, with the Systems Managers where all the services are present. In another side, the educative institutions should invest in the necessary equipment for the implementation.
To begin with this deployment, the project will begin with the institutions which have the largest number of students, and then it will continue with the rest of educative unites, in order to connect all the Municipal Educative Institutions. These defined standards will be developed and also adopted in Regional Educative Institutions with the same structure. Finally, with a standard technological infrastructure, it will be possible an advanced administration, maintenance to the district, developing more potentialities which can be taken to make future projects at the same level.
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