Social Clubs—And More Pócspetri, Hungary

ILLUSTRATION: TONY SALVADOR/JOHN SHERRY

We arrived in the northeastern Hungarian village of Pócspetri in early evening. The teleház (a word that, loosely translated, means telecommunications cottage) is in an unassuming building in the center of the village. The entire two-room facility measures approximately 8 by 15 meters. Immediately inside the front door of one room is a table with some local and regional magazines; a bench crammed with 10 PCs lines the perimeter of the room on three walls. Groups are clustered around each computer, some people sitting in chairs, some standing. Ranging in age from the early teens to the early twenties, the youths are playing games, surfing the Internet, and doing homework [see photo, "Hungarian Hangout"].

In the second room, partitioned off from the first with flimsy accordion doors, is the desk of the teleház operator, who sits in front of a computer facing a group of three sofas. Several people are already there as we sit down and are offered drinks and snacks. The operator deals with technical problems as they come up, but her main job is to search the Internet for grants that could benefit village residents and then help the people write the grant applications. She has successfully obtained funds to nurture a local children's clothing business, build a center to do contract data entry, and even buy a machine that automatically serves tennis balls.

Two kilometers away, in Máriapócs, is another teleház. This one is slightly smaller, housed in an old, run-down house. The front room is similar to that of the Pócspetri teleház—10 computers ring the periphery. The second room again has the manager's desk and computer, but it is dimly lit and dominated by a large television. This room becomes the local movie house in the evenings, after the manager's computer is attached to the television.

The real elegance of the teleház is the subtle way that these places are all the same, and yet each is customized to its community. The Máriapócs teleház is very much a social center; the No. 1 job at the Pócspetri teleház is economic development. Nevertheless, superficially, the two buildings are almost identical.

Mátyás Gáspar, the president of the European Union of Telecottage Associations, is credited with the establishment of the first teleház. He's also responsible for the conception and ongoing promotion of the teleház in Hungary, as well as in Slovenia, Slovakia, and Romania and in African countries.

In Hungary, the business model for the teleház has three legs. Each is sponsored by a local nonprofit civic organization, created by the local government explicitly for the teleház, and by an independent for-profit operator. The official owner is the civic organization; the local government supports the enterprise with either a building or land or some other resource. The operator who runs the business profits through a variety of means, such as charging for the computer time used in playing games or in searching the Web. The operator also writes grant applications for community members and gets a fee or a percentage of the grant if it's accepted.

Although these legal and operational structures are the same, each teleház we visited differed in its goals, the services and products it offered, and its primary beneficiaries. If it is owned by an arts organization, for instance, the teleház might run a festival, whereas one owned by a chamber of commerce would focus on economic development or tourism. The teleház in Pócspetri belongs to a loose confederation called the Teleház Association in Hungary.

The differences also depend on the operators themselves, as well as on the patrons and the needs of the community. Some of these telecottages serve primarily as the equivalent of a social club without alcohol for teenagers. Others provide connections for people eager to do business in the area. Some are thriving businesses in their own right, integrally embedded in their local ecosystems. One we saw, for example, catalyzed an entire tourist economy in the area, sparking the development of restaurants, hotels, and other tourist facilities.

The first 30 telecottages in the teleház movement were funded in the late 1990s with a variety of grants from independent organizations and governments. The funding was part of a wide-ranging effort to develop the country following Hungary's emergence in the late 1980s from decades of Soviet control. The telecottages thrive today because local operators know their communities and can work with residents to match their needs, whether for government grant writing or for game playing.

An information kiosk, a cabina pública, and a teleház are different in appearance and in operation. Each, however, is economically valuable to its local community. The proprietors and entrepreneurs running these establishments rely on local social networks and the knowledge of how to mobilize resources locally to benefit the community. They use—and in some cases co-opt—technology to meet the needs of their local customers, needs that are usually very different from those of people living in more developed countries.

The work of our group, though most often begun as pure research without a particular product concept in mind, has begun to make waves within Intel. The company now has a product in development that relates to the way computers are used to support local economic development in rural India, but exactly how it works is confidential at the time this article is going to press. And the knowledge gained by our research will likely affect other products and business strategies in development.

In January, Intel completely reorganized its corporate structure. Previously aligned over product lines, the company is now aligned by markets. Moreover, Intel itself is beginning to define and design indigenous products. During a recent speech in Brazil, Intel CEO Paul Otellini announced that the company would establish a center in São Paulo, to help define new computing platforms and technologies that meet local market needs. The São Paulo center will employ local resources and look for specific products and technology concepts that address the needs of the Latin American markets. Otellini said Intel is making a concerted effort to establish such localized technology centers around the world.

To date, the people who developed the world's computing hardware and software created it to fit their world—the world of the "haves." Our study provided a glimpse into the way technology is being applied in the rest of the world, and how, in the future, it might be designed to better fit into that world.