| Karel Charvát
This book presents the results of the C@R Integrated Project (FP6-2005-IST-2-034921), co-funded by the European Commission under the Information Society Technologies (IST) Priority within the 6th Framework Programme. (http://www.c-rural.eu/)
Collaboration and Rural (C@R) was a project in the 6th Framework programme that aimed to enable people in remote and rural Europe to fully participate in the knowledge society as citizens and as professionals.
There are many barriers that hinder rural development; the more severe ones include the lack of telecom infrastructures, hard environmental conditions, usability restrictions, lack of ICT literacy, difficulties on the introduction acceptance of new work methods... Barriers are also related to the heterogeneity of policies, cultural aspects and working methodologies.
C@R’s objective was to remove these barriers in order to improve rural development in an effective and harmonised way.
It is already 10 years from publishing, so it is not a new document, but this is interesting, that this was the first project focused on Rural Living Labs, which has activity also in Africa. Now again Living Labs are more and more popular and so I am sure, that this book could be good inspiration.
Another important aspect is, that WirelessInfo http://www.wirelessinfo.cz/en as one from partners of c@r is till now acting as Living Lab and we are ready to share our experience from our 20 years history