Foundation Projects
eToro: Indigenous Botanical Knowledge Management System of Penans
Institute of Social Informatics and Technological Innovations (ISITI-CoERI), UNIMAS and the local community of Long Lamai, Sarawak
The eToro platform was a combination of ICTs and community's activities to support the Indigenous Botanical Knowledge (IBK) management of the Penan community of Long Lamai in Sarawak. The project goal was to preserve the IBK of the community, given that the older generation was slowly dying out, knowledge was not being transferred to the younger generation.
Also, the young were not as interested in learning and retaining the traditional knowledge. The researchers worked together with the community representative team to explore the specific needs of the community, to design the cultural protocols and develop ICT tools for managing the indigenous botanical knowledge.
To clarify the roles and responsibilities of the stakeholders, process flow diagrams for the project have been developed with active participation of community. Local facilitators were actively involved in data instrument design, collection, and analysis. The community involved was located in Long Lamai, a very remote and rural village in Malaysian Borneo, situated near the Kalimantan border.
