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The
benefits of IT for local governance:
1.
cost effectiveness
2. collaboration with many social actors
3. fostering of partnerships— local,
regional, national, and/or global
4. sustainability
5. linkages with initiatives directing affecting
the daily lives of people
6. lack of barriers of time and geographic
location and office schedules.
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LACUM
identified and paired 10 key institutional partners
to develop pilot local government modules for CD-ROM
production. To format these modules for the Internet,
LearnLink is partnering with netassessment.org
for course design. Since some of LACUM’s
partners are university centers that already offer
classes in urban management, it is in LACUM’s
interest to produce modules as distance education
alternatives for students, mid-level managers, and
administrators.
In
addition, as a first step early in this development
project, AED/LearnLink published a now-somewhat-dated
manual of case studies on municipal management
in Central America. This publication collated
experiences highlighted in a conference sponsored
in part by FEMICA: The Second Meeting on Municipal
Training and Technical Assistance Facilitation
held in Roatan, Honduras, March 4-6, 1999, which
included presenters from LearnLink. This document
identifies resources, practices, and plans as
well as limitations, bottlenecks, and opportunities—
especially for training of local government officials—and
highlights applications for IT in El Salvador,
Nicaragua, and Guatemala. The conference also
generated considerable, broad-based enthusiasm
among participants for a Central American Comprehensive
Databank on Technical Assistance and Local Government-based
Development that could be instituted by FEMICA
or any willing and able partner.
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