Lan-houses, communities and culture (+ a project idea)

Lan-houses -- small establishments which provide paid access to the Internet and to some software (like text editors and games)--, are huge in Brazil, specially among the low-income population. The Brazilian Internet Committee estimates 30% of the Internet access in Brazil is done through lan-houses [pt] and it as been reported Rocinha [en] alone has over 100 lan-houses.

Furthermore, being attended by so many people on a regular basis, lan-houses have become community-gathering spaces. Ronaldo Lemos [pt] reports how, for example, children birthdays are commonly celebrated in lan-houses these days. Both him and Antônio Carvalho Cabral, both which participate in a project examining in detail the universe of lan-houses, have been active voices on defending these small enterprises and their potential for social inclusion.

So, after reading an article on SciDev about podcasting on poor regions and thinking a bit on what could Brazil and its lan-houses learn from that, I've come up with a project idea and thought it'd worth writing it down to register it.

The idea is simple: what if we could enable lan-houses as media-producing centers where the population could very easily record podcasts or videos with local news or art. Now sum to that a simple system (maybe based on YouTube) through which people could vote for the most interesting media available on that community. Then maybe CD-RWs or DVD-RWs could easily be used to have selections of this media circulate periodically in the community, giving the community frequent access to its own voice and maybe strengthening its cultural identity.