Media.Knet.Ca

Slate Falls residents are finally getting telephones installed throughout their community.

Working with Windigo First Nations Council and Keewaytinook Okimakanak's K-Net Services, Slate Falls recently completed construction of their local cable plant that includes the cable connections to every building in their community. Funding for this construction project was obtained from Industry Canada's FedNor and BRAND programs, INAC and the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund. Blair Electronics did the construction work. The connection outside the community is completed through a satellite link to Sioux Lookout which is made possible through Industry Canada's National Satellite Initiative, Keewaytinook Okimakanak's earthstation in Sioux Lookout and the partners involved with the Northern Indigenous Community Satellite Network (NICSN).

This past week, working with their K-Net partners, the Asterick IP phone management system was successfully installed in the community and training of a local technician took place to manage their own phone system. This week, new phones are now being installed in some of the buildings and further training is taking place.

Along with the IP phone system, high speed data connections are available for each of the buildings in the community. Video conferencing services that also includes telehealth applications are also now in place in Slate Falls.

Grades 5 and 6 students from Pic River First Nation bid their new friends from Qikiqtarjuaq on Baffin Island farewell on Monday morning. Click here to read the Thunder Bay Chronicle Journal news story entitled "Student exchange a hit"

The student exchange between these two Aboriginal communities is an important component of the Kids From Kanata program that both school classes are participating in and where they were first paired and introduced. Keewaytinook Okimakanak sponsored Pic River School's participation in this year's Kids from Kanata program through Industry Canada's First Nations SchoolNet program.

The CRACIN team made up of Andrew Clement (prof at UofT), Adam Fiser (PhD candidate at UofT), Prabir Neogi (Industry Canada) and Brian Walmark (KO Research Coordinator) were successful at having their proposed paper entitled "The K-Net model of First Nations broadband community networking" accepted for presentation at the 33rd international research conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy.

This annual Telecommunications Policy Research Conference (TPRC) is being held at the National Center for Technology & Law, George Mason University School of Law, Arlington, Virginia on Friday, September 23, 2005 through Sunday, September 25, 2005

This annual TPRC forum is for scholars, industry  and government engaged in publishable research on policy-relevant telecommunications and information issues, and for public- and private-sector decision makers engaged in telecommunications and information policy. The purpose of the conference is to acquaint policy makers with the best of recent research and to familiarize researchers with the knowledge needs of policy makers.

Keewaytinook Okimakanak representatives (Chief Raymond Mason, Keewaywin First Nation, Dan Pellerin, K-Net's Network Manager and Brian Beaton, K-Net Coordinator) shared the K-Net Story with conference participants at the Canadian Commission for UNESCO's Paving the Road to Tunis - WSIS II: The Views of Canada's Civil Society on the Geneva Plan of Action and the Prospects for Phase II gathering in Winnipeg.

Representatives of civil society, academia and the private sector of all provinces and territories gathered over the week-end to discuss issues related to building information societies in Canada in preparation for the second phase of the United Nations' World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS) that is planned for Tunis in the November, 2005. 

The K-Net Story was shared during the Sunday morning session entitled Community Networking in Canada: from Research to Grassroots Experience  which was chaired by Sharon Hackett with the  Rapporteur: Darlene Thompson, Secretary-Treasurer, N-CAP in Nunavut 

• Communities at the Centre of the Information Society, Michael Gurstein, Co-investigator, Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking (CRACIN) and Chair, Community Informatics Research Network
• Grassroots Experience
  • Monique Chartrand, Director-General, Communautique
  • Brian Beaton, Coordinator, K-Net Services
  • Gwen Friedrich, Executive Director, Community Outreach Group Inc.

Hand outs included ...

• The Keewaytinook Okimakanak's position paper entitled "Turning the Corner with First Nations' Telehealth"
• Keewaytinook Okimakanak's e-Community Concept Paper
• Keewaytinook Okimakanak's Community Broadband Aggregation Networking Model
• Kukenah Network community network diagram

This weekend, several Keewaytinook Okimakanak and CRACIN members are planning to attend Canadian Commission for UNESCO's conference:
"Paving the Road to Tunis - WSIS II: Canada's Civil Society Views on the Geneva Plan of Action and the Prospects for Phase II."

The Keewaytinook Okimakanak team is made up of Keewaywin's Chief Raymond Mason, Brian Beaton and Dan Pellerin from K-Net. Among the CRACINites heading to Winnipeg are Andrew Clement, Michael Gurstein, Christie Hurrell, Rob Mastin, Marita Moll, Leslie Shade, Randall Terada and someone from Communautique. 

For those attending, Keewaytinook Okimakanak has a table in the Exhibition area, as does CRACIN.  Drop by to say hello.

For those not attending, you may want to catch the webcasts of  the conference dinner keynote speech by Ann Medina on Friday, as well as the conference plenaries on Saturday and Sunday. This is made possible using the Macromedia Breeze application courtesy of K-Net with CRACIN's Christie Hurrell as the webcaster. The live text chat built into Breeze will
allow for some interaction with the event.

To access the webcast sessions see instructions below or visit the CRACIN home page http://www.cracin.ca and follow the links under the "News" column on the right-hand side of the page.

*Webcasting Schedule for the Canadian Commission for UNESCO's "Paving the Road to Tunis" conference.*

To access the meeting rooms for each event:

1. Go to the "meeting room" (webcasting site) at the URL listed on the webcasting schedule below (each event has its own URL)
2. Login at the "enter as a guest" field. Please use your full name as your login.
3. Be patient! Your machine may take a moment to load the breeze plugin and the breeze presenter plugin.
4. To logout, simply close your browser window.

Breeze Live Troubleshooting FAQ
http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_18815

The Road to Tunis Conference Programme
http://www.unesco.ca/en/commission/resources/documents/ProgrammeRoadtoTunisProgrammePaverlavoiedeTunis.pdf

Breeze Webcasting Schedule

*Event for Friday May 13* - Conference Dinner Keynote Speech Summary

Has Canada become a genuine knowledge society? Ethical and social aspects of a knowledge society.
Keynote Speaker Ann Medina, Host of History Television's History on Film and Former Foreign Correspondent CBC's The Journal
URL http://breeze.knet.ca/r70855106/
When 6:30 - 9:30 p.m., Central Time

*Events for Saturday May 14*

*Plenary 1* - Summary Remarks by the President, Canadian Commission for UNESCO Max Wyman
URL http://breeze.knet.ca/r49742995/
When 9 - 9:15 a.m., Central Time

*Plenary 2* - Summary Reports of the Rapporteurs, followed by questions and discussion
Chair Max Wyman
URL http://breeze.knet.ca/r21059126/
When 11:45 a.m.- 12:30 p.m., Central Time

*Plenary 3* - Summary Reports of the Rapporteurs, followed by questions and discussion
Chair Max Wyman
URL http://breeze.knet.ca/r28919912/
When 3:45 - 5:30 p.m., Central Time

*Events for Sunday May 15*

*Plenary 4* - Summary Programme
Chair Max Wyman
URL http://breeze.knet.ca/r80906111/
When 8:45 - 9 a.m., Central Time

*Plenary 5* - Summary 
Reports of the Rapporteurs, followed by questions and discussion

• Presentation and Adoption of the Civil Society's Communiqué
• Adjournment
• Chair Max Wyman
  URL http://breeze.knet.ca/r90227043/
  When 10:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m., Central Time

The latest issue of the @ Guelph university newsletter has an article entitled "Hooking up for better health". Click here to read the article

The article describes the research and production work that George Ferreira, PhD candidate and Andres Ibanez, master degree candidate,in the School of Environmental Design and Rural Development (SEDRD). They're both graduate students of rural extension studies professor Ricardo Ramirez who completed his doctoral thesis about some of the early community ICT work being done by Keewaytinook Okimakanak.

The Northern Ontario School of Medicine is hosting their board and staff retreat in Sioux Lookout this week. As part of their visit to Sioux Lookout, they are touring Keewaytinook Okimakanak's K-Net office, the Sioux Lookout First Nations Health Authority and Menoyawin.

On Thursday, Dan Pellerin, K-Net Network Manager and Terence Burnard, K-Net Systems Analyst travelled with Windigo First Nations Council (Debbie Korobanik), Blair Electronics (Bill Blair) and four Industry Canada officials lead by Rick Hansen and Christine Cosgrove (regional BRAND project managers) to see the results of the broadband infrastructure that is now operating in Slate Falls and Muskrat Dam First Nations.

On Monday, May 2, Cal Kenny and Brian Beaton travelled with the Blair Electronics team (Bill and Roy) and Carl Seibel from FedNor to Attawapiskat. On Tuesday, they continued over to Peawanuck before returning to Sioux Lookout and Thunder Bay respectively.

Meetings were held with the community leaders, school and health administrators in each community to discuss the installation and operation of the new C-Band earth station that is being installed by Blair Electronics over this coming summer. FedNor is providing the funding for Keewaytinook Okimakanak to do the project management for the purchase and installation of earthstations in both of these communities as well as in Marten Falls (Ogoki). The communities are planning their local connections and applications for the use of this resource.

Click here to see the pictures of the Attawapiskat trip.

Click here to see the pictures of the Peawanuck leg of the trip.

Individual homepages for people living in Canada's north are becoming the communication medium of choice for many. Being able to share their own stories, pictures, news as well as participating in friends and family members' chat boxes is now an important and popular past-times for the nearly 16,000 members of the myknet.org on-line environment.

These facts are clearly demonstrated by the increasing popularity of the myknet.org on-line environment since its early beginnings over six years ago. In 1999, Dan Pellerin thought users would be interested in having their own web page, so he found an on-line script and made it available to K-Net users. Very quickly over 300 users signed up and began creating their own web pages. From there, Jesse Fiddler worked with Dan to expand the options available for users and created the present myknet.org on-line environment.

Over the past month of April, the myknet.org traffic increased once again to 101,701,089 hits from 1,204,790 visits to that server! Daily averages increased to over 40,000 visits each day resulting in nearly 3.4 hits a day!

One observer noted that on Saturday afternoon between 5 and 6 in the evening there were about 900 updates to individual pages over that 1 hour period. This fact also indicates that the number of computers in the homes is increasing dramatically as broadband services are introduced in the communities.