Researchers and intellectuals can
influence the information revolution. We may observe two trends of research:
Academic research and Industry research. In general, academic researches focus
on theoretical aspects and industry researches focus on practical applications.
The notable point about both of these workforces is they are either current or
ex students. It is often happens that students from academic research need to
concentrate exclusively on their project. Similarly, employees from industry
need to run after their deadlines to deliver the products. Thus, they miss out
the opportunity to contribute to other stream of information revolution and
have to throw away all their nice ideas behind. Whereas, their throw-away-ideas
could create new horizon for the people who are yet to reap the true benefits
of ICT.
To our amaze, there are still
communities around the world who do not know, boil water can be life saver, diarrhea
can be prevented by cleanliness or global warming issues. With simple awareness
advices and by sharing our experiences we can save lives or bring positive
changes to the people from these communities. It is not always possible to make
physical presence to these communities to share our knowledge. ICT can help us
to bridge the gap between these communities and to the intellectuals. Thus, it
will help us to reduce the digital divide and will help eradicate poverty by helping
them to take the local resources to the world market. The throw-away-ideas can
be the main driving force in this regard. Thus, rather than leaving our ideas completely
if we make our ideas available for others, may be somewhere, someone will pick those
up and help the communities in need.
The research community will also
be benefited by bringing more people under the ICT umbrella. More people have
access to digital and information technology means, more people are actually
consuming their research outcome. The research community can create a strong
consensus in favor of important issues with large crowd in their favor.
Service Oriented VoIP (SOVoIP), a
research project from the University of Melbourne, Australia, is a good case
study for the above mentioned scenarios. One academic research project and
requirement of SOVoIP architecture is to track physical location of Internet
hosts. The industry oriented project of SOVoIP is to make a place in the world
of Voice over IP (VoIP) along with Skype, MSN and Yahoo messenger. However, compared
to the existing VoIP solutions, SOVoIP is designed to add new services such as
medical advice service, weather report service, flood or bushfire report
service, without any changes to the client side. As a result, it is expected to
be easier to disseminate our knowledge/throw-away-ideas much easily to the world
community. Thus, SOVoIP is and will keep a door open for future inclusion of
our throw-away-ideas.
In conclusion, the efforts to
take our knowledge to the people in need is termed as CREATE. With CREATE it is
aimed to create a world of equal opportunities, create new jobs, create better
communication, create necessary awareness for everyone with the help of ICT. Students
and their ideas are the main driving force of CREATE.
So, let’s CREATE new horizons with technology.
