Media.Knet.Ca

The Keewaytinook Okimakanak SMART team is working together to plan and host the upcoming Indigenous SMART International Virtual Conference that will be happening on March 17 and 18, 2004. Conference information, updates and  activities are being posted at http://smart.knet.ca/international

Everyone is invited to register on-line for this event. Click here for the on-line registration form.

We look forward to learning about different innovative ICT efforts being made by other Indigenous groups from around the world as well as showcasing the work accomplished over the past three years of the Kuhkenah Network of Smart First Nations demonstration project.

Please mark these dates on your calendar and plan to join us for this international event where everyone will have a chance to showcase their work and efforts in using ICTs in their homes, work and communities.

Early Tuesday morning, 200 people gathered at City Hall in Ottawa to celebrate the launch of the SmartCapital.ca portal and recognize the numerous achievements of the Ontario Smart Communities Demonstration project. Included in the celebrations was the Kuh-ke-nah Network of Smart First Nation project via video conference. Click here to see the pictures.

On Monday, Dan Pellerin, K-Net's Network Manager and Roy Hart, Health Canada's Regional IT Director, met with NORTH Network team members and toured their facilities in Toronto. Afterwards, Dan and Roy visited the team at the Education Network of Ontario and discussed network opportunities.

The National Satellite Initiative is a new program within Industry Canada's Broadband for Rural and Northern Development (BRAND) program. On Friday, February 6, Dan Pellerin, K-Net's Network Manager attended a meeting for the Satellite Service Providers in Ottawa. For more information about the purpose of this meeting, click here.

The National Satellite Initiative was created to lower the cost of broadband access for communities in the Far to mid-north, and in isolated and remote areas of Canada, where satellite is the only reasonable means of providing broadband access.

Infrastructure Canada, through the Canada Strategic Infrastructure Fund (CSIF), Industry Canada, and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) are funding partners of this $155 million initiative.

Balmertown, Poplar Hill and Deer Lake are the designation points for the winter video taping that is now being completed as part of the KO Smart Communities Demonstration project evaluation process. George Ferreira is working with the Telecommons Development Group, the University of Guelph and the team at Keewaytinook Okimakanak to capture local stories and experiences using ICTs on video. The winter road experience is now also going to be included in these stories through these efforts.

George traveled from Guelph to Toronto and took the train to Winnipeg with all his gear. In Winnipeg, he rented a suburban and drove to Balmertown on Feb 1. He met and videotaped the KO team in Balmertown and participated in a Chiefs' Board meeting during his stay there. Then on Feb 5, he and Cal Kenny drove to Stormer Lake and videotaped some of the activities taking place there. From there, they took the winter road to Poplar Hill where they met with and videotaped different people and local activities. From Poplar Hill, George is going to drive to Deer Lake with Steven Zussino to work with the local smart team members in that community.

The Chiefs of Keewaytinook Okimakanak met in Balmertown to review the programs being delivered by their organization. As well, future plans and new initiatives were presented and discussed. Click here to see the pictures.

The coordinating team for the Kuhkenah Language iishikiishiwin Workshop met this past week to discuss the workshop content and facilitation. From the invitation poster ...

This conference is for:

• Ontario Aboriginal Language Teachers / Instructors who know about and use the Internet and communication technologies,
• Ontario Aboriginal Language Teachers who are interested in using these technologies for the purposes of teaching the language and working with other language instructors to develop and support on-line resources.

Objectives:

• Using the Internet and computer-mediated tools for the instruction of Aboriginal languages
• Producing and sharing web and multi-media products for language instructors.

A web site has been set up for the workshop facilitators to post all the latest information about this gathering. Watch this web site at http://language.firstnationschools.ca/ for all the latest updates of this workshop that is scheduled for March 23 and 24 in Thunder Bay.

Click here for pictures of the planning team meeting.

Brian Walmark, First Nations SchoolNet Special Projects Coordinator, worked with Seven Generations Education Institute to host another web development workshop for First Nation schools and groups from the Fort Frances region. Jesse Fiddler, K-Net's Multi-media Manager, travelled from Sioux Lookout to lead this workshop. A number of technical and weather related challenges forced everyone to adopt a very flexible agenda. A full network, lack of available IP numbers for the wireless lab, along with frozen vehicles and full hotels due to a hockey tournament created a great learning opportunity for everyone to experience a variety of troubleshooting strategies to support the creation of new web sites.

Personal web pages at MyKnet.org continue to be the most popular on-line space for the Nishnawbe Aski to browse. In January there were over 30 million hits on this K-Net server (over 9 million more hits from the previous month)! The average daily hits on this server rose to nearly 1 million hits each day!

The new games web site along with new First Nation school and community web sites also created an increase in the usage of these on-line services.

All together there were over 40 MILLION hits occurring on the seven most popular monitored K-Net servers throughout January. Specifically, on these seven servers with traffic graphs, there were a total of 40,396,885 hits made to these on-line services provided by Keewaytinook Okimakanak. The seven servers generating this amount of traffic include myknet.org, knet.ca, webmail.knet.ca, hosting.knet.ca, highschool.knet.ca, games.knet.ca and photos.knet.ca (just click on the server to see the traffic monitoring chart for each server). There were 654,682 visits made during this period to these seven servers, indicating that people are exploring these sites more and more.

Most of the K-Net servers that are being monitored for hits, visits and usage statistics using the webalizer program again showed an increase during the month. But http://myknet.org rose by nearly 10 million hits to demonstrate the rapid take up of these communication tools among users across the north.

Please note:

• other on-line K-Net services, such as K-Net chat and the video streamer are not included in these numbers;
• server traffic monitoring information is located at http://tech.knet.ca/~tech/monitoring/webalizer

Several Health Canada officials held meetings with members of the Keewaytinook Okimakanak team to discuss connectivity solutions to support the needs of their staff in the remote First Nations.