Foundation Projects
Chiang-Rai MeshTV: An Educational Video-on-Demand (E-VoD) System for a Rural Hill-Tribe Village via a Community Wireless Mesh Network (CWMN)
Internet Education and Research Laboratory, Asian Institute of Technology, in collaboration with the Mirror Foundation and the THNIC Foundation
The project aimed to setup an educational Video-on-Demand system that runs on top of a Community Wireless Mesh Network (CWMN) in a rural tribal village in Chiang-Rai province located in the northern part of Thailand. The system, ‘Chiang-Rai MeshTV’, brings easy-to-use Video-on-Demand capabilities to a remote rural community, which is lagged far behind modern urban cities.
Rural ICT access for tribal ethnic groups required a specialized approach. Some of the tribal ethnic groups had very low ICT and Internet literacy. They may also not have good commands in English or even in a nation’s official language, as they fluently communicate in their local language. Providing easy-to-use educational video contents along with intuitive user devices, such as tablet computers, to view Educational Videoon-Demand (E-VoD) contents can serve as an initial but highly significant path to connect these tribal people to the global digital economy while preserving their cultural heritage via video and other multimedia recordings.
