Bridging digital divide: Malaysian experience in building a portal for children

The paper discusses the researcher´s ongoing experience in building a community portal for (underserved) children in Malaysia. This project is a joint venture between the E-Community Research Center, National University of Malaysia, and a government agency, as an effort to bridge digital divide in Malaysia. Children have been identified as one of the marginalized groups due to their economic status/power and also limited access to the Internet. Taking into account the fact that a great number of marginalized or underserved children in Malaysia have very limited access to the Internet due to the imbalanced user/computer ratio at government agencies´ initiated telecenters, this portal is designed with the primary objective of providing children with a quick access channel or contact access point (CAP) to a myriad of services such as education and entertainment available on the net. In other words, this portal is planned in such a way to give more children the opportunity to access the Internet within the limited time they can afford and the limited facility available. The discussion will include the challenges and lessons learned at the different stages involved such as the planning stage, the design stage as well as the testing stage.