Article

Swedish honors for the global kiosk community

Kiosks projects from the U.S., UK, and India are among this year's nominees for the Stockholm Challenge awards, which honor innovation in information technology.

July 9, 2002

Five out of 101 does not sound like a great percentage, but to Guy Browes that is a sign of progress.

Just five of the 101 finalists for this year's Stockholm Challenge information technology (IT) innovation awards are projects that involve kiosks. But Browes, the project manager for UK's Employment Service, said that represents a great leap forward in the progress the industry is making.

"Kiosks are getting to the stage where they're not a leading-edge technology, but a proven technology," Browes said. "People are finding the proper uses for them, instead of saying `We've got a kiosk; what do we do now?' "

Browes' pride and joy is the Jobcentres project, a deployment of 9,000 kiosks that offer job information for the UK's unemployed. It just happens to be one of the five nominees.

The Jobcentres kiosk is one of three kiosk-oriented projects nominated in the Stockholm Challenge's e-Government category. One project has been nominated in the health and e-Business divisions, respectively. Other categories include culture, education, and environment.

There were 514 projects nominated for the fourth annual Stockholm Challenge. The awards, sponsored by the city of Stockholm, Sweden, with the support of the European Commission, will be awarded Oct. 7-10. Last year, 14 projects were honored in seven categories -- public service, culture, health, education, new economy, environment, and global village.

Employment agencies and beyond

For Browes, the success of the Jobcentres project, a collaborative effort between the Employment Service, kiosk manufacturer NeoProducts Ltd., and data systems developer EDS, has created some pleasant moments within government and kiosk circles. And the Stockholm Challenge nomination just adds to that.

UK Jobcentres' employment kiosk project is one of five kiosk-oriented programs nominated for this year's Stockholm Challenge technology awards.

"This project has shown how very quickly you can come from some ways behind the field to being a leader," he said. "In a period of 2 ½ to three years we've made gigantic strides in the way we deliver our service electronically.

"At Amsterdam (for the Kiosks Europe 2002 show in June) I had people coming up and saying `You're Guy Browes. I've been wanting to meet you,' " Browes added. "We've gone from a fairly low base to being a leader. People are coming to us and asking for advice. It's quite good."

But Browes said that Jobcentres is not satisfied with the success of the project thus far. Rather, the organization is already seeking ways to enhance the way it delivers its services electronically.

Later this year, the Employment Service will start rolling out trials of Jobcentres kiosks outside of the roughly 1,000 UK employment agencies where they are located. Several of the kiosks will be located in prisons, where they will be used as part of resettlement work for soon-to-be-released inmates. Other units will be trailed in supermarkets, airports, and the Somerset, England, IT center.

"The whole idea is to take them somewhere and give us a presence where we don't have any office locations," Browes said. "It enables us to take the service to people who want them at the time and place where they want them rather than forcing them to come to us."

The Indian sector

Of the five nominees, three of them are based in India, once again displaying the depth and enthusiasm of the Indian kiosk industry.

Two of the nominees are in the e-Government category. BHOOMI is a farm-oriented initiative in the state of Karnataka. The site makes rural land records available to the state's 6.7 million farms through 177 government-owned kiosks.

The system is supposed to streamline the delivery of information to the state's farmers and replace the previous method. That system had farmers dealing directly with government officials, leading to delays and the possibility of corruption, according to state officials.

"In the manual system, land records were maintained by 9,000 village accountants, each serving a cluster of three or four villages," Rajeev Chawla, Karnataka revenue department secretary, told India's Economic Times.

About 1.25 million farms have paid $390,000 in fees to use the kiosks, according to nomination forms filed with Stockholm Challenge officials.

The other Indian e-Government project that is a Stockholm Challenge finalist is the Drishtee e-governance platform. The project aims to link India's 5,750,000 villages digitally through a network of 50,000 kiosks. The kiosks, which are to be deployed over the next six years, will display information on government services, market-related information, and private information exchanges.

Currently, there are 90 kiosks deployed over five Indian states. Drishtee officials are seeking partners to aid in the development of the program and its revenue-generating capability, which is structured around user fees and retail sales through the kiosk.

The other Indian project is the Akashganga milk-collection service, which has been nominated in the e-Business category. The service recently began trials with a dairy information services kiosk to augment its milk-collection service.

The kiosk offers a multitude of animal husbandry services, maintains databases, and provides Internet service. The service began as a way to organize milk-collection services electronically, cutting down the amount of milk that spoiled while waiting to be processed.

"This project was conceptualized more than four years ago, when IT awareness in the country was limited to big urban centers only," the project's nomination sheet stated. "The fact that illiterate and semi-literate farmers accepted the system and are operating it confidently, is an achievement by itself."

Red, white, and kiosk

The fifth kiosk-oriented project nominated for a Stockholm Challenge award is New Haven, Conn.-based Hygeia Foundation Inc., which was nominated in the health category.

Hygeia is an Internet community created to help parents deal with the loss of a child, a failed pregnancy, or a child's illness. The Web site's aim is to use "new technology to share age-old feelings and lessons."

Created in 1995, the non-profit organization is funded through sponsorships and donations. More than 10,000 users are part of the community, according to Hygeia's nomination form.

Among the organizations that have worked with Hygeia is kiosk software developer Netkey Inc., which designed the software for a Hygeia information and resources kiosk that was launched at a Ronald McDonald House in New Haven in 2000.

Hygeia officials said future plans include expanding their services in resource centers such as Ronald McDonald House, hospices, and community centers.