CEPES, the Peruvian Centre for Social Studies, is unrolling web projects one after the other.
For the last three years, the Peruvian APC member has been promoting website solutions for a variety of actors working in Peru’s rural and often remote districts. Small farmers, passionate environmentalists and civil servants from the Ministry of Agriculture have discovered the ActionApps content management system (CMS). "We’ve been spreading the web-based tool as a way to support rural development," says a passionate Carlos Saldarriaga, CEPES representative to APC.
"Our knowledge of the region [of mountains, valleys and plateaus], combined to our understanding of the action tools, has started to bear fruits in Peru. We now participate in the organisation of workshops, congresses and other events in which we discuss our experiences of information management," explains the energised CEPES activist.
Originally developed by APC social techies, the Action Applications (ActionApps) is a piece of software used to ‘organise and facilitate the collaborative creation of documents and other content’ [1] for APC members and community. Other examples of leading content management systems (CMSs) are Drupal [drupal.org] and Spip [spip.org].
In the case of the ActionApps, it has been applied from Cambodia to Nunavut and from Patagonia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It has also served for a variety of projects and purposes, from environmental information portals to monitor sites and from blogs to government websites.
Environment and Democracy
CEPES has used the ActionApps to develop the portal of the national environmental society (www.portalambiental.org.pe/), which along latest news reports on desertification, regroups information on natural resources, environmental problems and conservation and environmental management techniques. The portal incorporates a discussion forum and enables people to access environment-specific information through a sophisticated site map.
The Cuenca water and environment management programme (GSAAC – www.gsaac.org.pe/) – which fosters exchanges and networking between local, regional and national groups interested in the issue of water and environmental management – seeks to decentralise the management of its website and found that the ActionApps platform was the best way to do it..
“The idea is to make the process of information sharing more collaborative,” says Saldarriaga. The programme, present in eight regions of the country, wants all of its regional offices to post information directly to the website.
Propuesta Ciudadana, a civil society organisation fighting to bring democratic spaces closer to Peruvians (www.participaperu.org.pe/), has launched Participa Perú (Peru Participates) back in 2003 with the help of CEPES’ tools and expertise.
The Peru Watch section of the portal is of particular interest since it has been set up to encourage citizens to keep an eye on the people they vote into office. This alert system is used not only to keep the representatives accountable to constituents, but also to warn about possible wrongdoings.
Since Alberto Fujimori’s brutal regime, the successive governments have committed to increase the access to information and thereby enabled citizens to genuinely look into the issue of transparency in Peru’s halls of power. One report made public on the Peru Watch portal, assessing the operating ethics of the mining industries of Peru, has not gone unnoticed. The latest report about decentralisation of government institutions is another hot topic being discussed online all over Peru, thanks to this innovative portal.
Applying the Action to Agriculture
“In 2005, the Peruvian government gave a huge boost to the spreading of the ActionApps in our country” says Beatriz Salazar, who works for the Communications and Information Programme at CEPES. The Ministry of Agriculture evaluated various content management systems, just to conclude that the ActionApps was the best option for implementing the websites of the agricultural offices at the national level.
Also known as MINAG, the Ministry of Agriculture has received more than 3 million visitors to their new ActionApps portal (www.minag.gob.pe/) in 2005 only. This figure, which has been released in Lima at the end of January 2006, confirms that this portal has become the main reference for the agricultural sector in the Andean country.
“From January 2004 onwards, seeing the increase in number of pages making up the Agricultural Portal, and after evaluating different solutions in the management of online content, we opted for […] APC’s ActionApps, which has now become the main collaborative tool used to decentralise our publications in the Agricultural Portal.” reads the MINAG newsletter made public in the early days of 2006.
Part of the philosophy of MINAG, is to equip each agricultural region of Peru with its own regional agricultural portal, in which it can include information about successful projects and the partnerships of producers and other local actors. At time of writing, 12 out of 14 regional portals use ActionApps and there are still 10 regional portals waiting to be completed.
CEPES is also engaged in a number of other initiatives designed for small farmers in the Huaral Region (in the province to the north of the province of Lima). One can visit huaral.org/facil to find a tool meant to provide computer-illiterate farmers with a friendly and easy-to-use interface to access prices, volumes and projections of agricultural produce in the region. Someone with vision problems for instance can find technical information and legal counselling on that very platform, which is currently in its pilot stage.
Eventually, CEPES’ aim is to move from a point-to-mass approach with this project and have the farmers publish their own experiences and information. “We want to hear them! And for that we need to make the technical platform right, so that they can become active as communicators.” Concluded a resolute Salazar.
The fundamental thread that is found in CEPES’ approach, is to bring the channels closer to the people. “Small farmers and regional staff from government or NGOs need to be able to produce their own input with tools that make sense to them”, says Saldarriaga. Looking up over a field of cotton he pauses, before saying “This is what we need, a decentralised network of citizens, who create rural development from the field up the ministry”.
1 This excerpt comes from the definition given of a content management system (CMS) by Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/)
