Finland

Project Activities .

The Finnish NPP DESERVE Project will enforce rural and regional development by locating help points at village level equipped with telephone and computers connected to internet and other IT systems. The Finnish projects will experiment with the roles that electronic communications can play and will combine models from the other partners. In particular village halls (Scotland), multi-service concept (Sweden), and SMART communities models (Iceland).
Within the Finnish DESERVE projects a special system (available in help points and accessible to home users) will be designed to bridge village level with municipality and regional level on specific activity fields; with the help of information technology (perhaps broad band) help points will provide directly or assisted bridging services (portal and forum) created for:

•Social and health care: real time communication with social and health centres; assistance in further decision making (Kainuu)
•Authorities related services & communication – feedback on institutional changes
•Business Services – training and consultancy without transportation costs

By providing virtual services at local level of rural and remote locations the project aims to strengthen the participating communities’ ties with each other and also their ties with the lo regional systems.

The partnership structure in Finland includes practitioners (Rural Advisory Centre of Kainuu), regional authorities (Regional Council of Kainuu, Regional Council of North Karelia) and research units (University Consortium of Kajaani, Karelian Insitute). The partners provide significant expertise from different levels, complementing each other. University Consortium of Kajaani is the DESERVE lead partner in Finland and will design and co-ordinate the overall project implementation in Finland, and will have an active role in project implementation in Kainuu region. Experts from Regional Councils of Kainuu and North Karelia will participate in the DESERVE regional work groups. The Rural Advisory Centre of Kainuu is in charge of the Business Services sub-section and will sub-contract some of these services to the Rural Advisory Centre of North Karelia.

In close co-operation and agreement with all international and national partners the University Consortium of Kajaani will also be involved with the design and implementation of the monitoring and evaluation system of the DESERVE activities. Karelian Institute will provide its expertise to the Finnish project design and will work with the lead partner on the research component for the whole DESERVE project.
The research is action oriented, analysing the current service provision and the transferability grounds in previous projects as well as the results of the models to be borrowed, adapted and transferred / implemented (new approaches to service provision).

Villages at different development stages will be chosen as pilot locations and the OSKU/citizens networks model and network will be taken into consideration when implementing the projects..

The changes taking place in Kainuu(self government) will result it the projects being slightly differently implemented between Kainuu and North Karelia. The plan is to implement the projects firstly in Kainee and then replicate these in North Karelia using implementation and user manuals produced by the Kainuu projects.

It is proposes that the Help points established in the Finnish project will provide directly or assisted bridging services for:

• Social and health care (For designing this component, consultation with Kainuu model will take place, in a way co-ordinating with Kainuu self-government experiment):
• Health care: within self-government experiment in Kainuu, there is a strong commitment to better integrate municipal and regional health care services; an integrated system of patients records will be made available and the already existing Guidance Service Point will have access to it; as addition to the existing communication model, through phone lines, electronic communication system will be made available by DESERVE from Village Virtual Service Points or home computer users to the Guidance Service Point. Consequently, people from village level will be able to benefit of primary and/or specialised care from the Guidance Service Point using email or other form of virtual text communication (SMS).
• Social care: DESERVE will mediate and extend the past and existing experiments/projects (e.g. Kainuun Hoiva, Kainuu nyt), structuring the market of social care services, using information technology; the welfare of villagers would be improved since DESERVE will be supporting communication with social care providers, and also will improve the communication within the local community and with other communities.
• Authorities related services & communication – feedback on institutional changes:
• Citizens Networks/OSKU network will be used as a the support platform for building communication system between villagers and authorities from local (kunta) and regional (maakunta) level
• DESERVE aims to connect previous built networks accustomed to use information technology within their working group, linking for instance Kainuu information network (social network of municipalities representatives using intranet) with OSKU Learning Kainuu (social network of citizens with various interests); special attention should be paid to the information technology solution allowing the various information packages to communicate and the level of access to each others network
• Describing and explaining regulations decided by local and regional authorities on virtual platform and giving the citizens the opportunity to know and comment them is the content of activity run by DESERVE through OSKU/Citizens Networks
• Business Services, INTERNET Advisor – training and consultancy without transportation costs
• Rural Advisory Centre of Kainuu/Pro Agria will integrate in the common system their business services offered to rural households, for example management and training. The advisory services and training will be provided through INTRNET to the pilot groups in Kainuu and North Karelia, will be related to agricultural and home economics, and the experiences and practices will be exchanged with other participating partners in Scotland, Iceland and Sweden. In this project collaboration it will be done with the ongoing project Rural Business Information Exchange System (RuBIES) which also received financing from the Interreg IIIB Northern Periphery program. The target of this sub-section is to create practices, change experiences and organise training with the pilot groups. Afterwards all the information gathered will be available to all interested entrepreneurs or associations via the internet. The output of the project is tested and good quality information and training material for all people who are interested of it.
• OSKU/citizens networks used as environment for organising advising process through internet

Finland

For details on the individual Village Help points and projects which are the Finnish DESERVE project is currently operating see the Documents download section of the website.