The Greater Mekong Subregion Academic and Research Network (GMSARN)
recently conducted its 4th workshop on the formation of a GMS Energy
and Environment Network (GMSEENet). The objective of the workshop was
to train participants on how to effectively share expertise and
resources in the energy and environment domains using the Knowledge
Management Toolkit (KMTk) developed at the Asian Institute of
Technology, which includes a collection of community tools such as
weblogs, wikis, and digital libraries. The workshop was held at the
National University of Laos (NUoL) Dongdok Campus, Vientiane, Laos PDR
on 24th-25th July 2008.
The GMSARN was established in 2001 to encourage cooperation and
research in the areas of human resource development, joint research,
and the dissemination of information and intellectual assets across the
6 countries of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS): Cambodia, China,
Laos PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. The Greater Mekong Subregion
Energy and Environment Network (GMSEENet) and the KMTk projects were
both initiated last year in support of the GMSARN goal of regional
cooperation.
The purpose of the workshop was to train the participants on how to use
a collection of online knowledge management tools for sharing
information within their organization as well as with the partner
institutes. The workshop participants were from 15 prestigious
universities and research institutes from across the GMS.
In the welcome address, Professor Vilas Wuwongse, Vice President of
External Relations at the Asian Institute of Technology stressed upon
the need for more networking, knowledge sharing and exploring new areas
for development work in Greater Mekong subregion countries for the
holistic development of the region. The opening remarks were given by
Dr. Weerakorn Ongsakul, Associate Professor and Coordinator of Energy
field of study at AIT, who introduced new partners of GMSARN and
explained the objective of GMSEENet, which is to strengthen regional
collaboration and exchange of information in the domains of energy and
environment. Dr. Paul Janecek, Assistant Professor and Coordinator of
the Computer Science and Information Management Program at the AIT,
then introduced the new community web portal developed for GMSEENet by
the KMTk project.
The web portal was developed over the past year by a team of AIT staff
and students, and includes a collection of popular open source tools: a
digital library for sharing documents; community tools to encourage
collaboration, such as a web log (“blog”), Wiki, and forums; a
customized community search engine; and a content management system to
integrate the tools into a single portal. This portal is specifically
designed to allow all members of the community to work together by
providing an easy interface for adding content that does not require a
technical background, and is localized for all the languages of the
GMS. After a few hours of training, participants were able to begin
building the community portals for their institutes.
At the conclusion of the workshop, the developers of the community
portal explained that although GMSEENet is the first application for
the KMTk project, they intend to work with other communities in the
future. There will be another training session for the GMSEENet web
portal at the AIT in October. For more information about the GMSEENet
and KMTk projects, please contact Jagriti Shankar jagriti@ait.ac.th or
visit http://gmsarn.cs.ait.ac.th/gmseenet.