Portal - Goals and Objectives

Indigenous Peoples are located in eight different regions of the world and lack easily accessible and trustworthy international platform like a website to disseminate and receive information about themselves and for themselves. Also non-Indigenous peoples e.g. NGO's, researchers, students and journalists do not have a one specific location for finding information on Indigenous Peoples. Therefore it is crucial to establish a platform where to disseminate useful, accurate information that is immediately accessible for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples.

One of the most important fields of such dissemination, just to name one, is information regarding Indigenous events; e.g., academic conferences and seminars, international meetings at the European Union, Commission & Parliament and meetings at the United Nations Human Rights Sub-Commission and its inner-agencies but also all kinds of Indigenous cultural events.

Creation of an international Indigenous Internet Portal serves the overall development goal of Indigenous Peoples of the world using increasingly ICTs for disseminating information about themselves and for themselves in order to promote their rights and cultural identity. Furthermore the project contributes to fulfilling the actions asked by the WSIS.

The main objective of the project is to create an Indigenous owned and operated Internet Portal that will disseminate reliable information about Indigenous Peoples produced by Indigenous Peoples. The Portal should be the number one location for and about the Indigenous Peoples in the Internet. The Portal will serve to gap the lack of Indigenous information platform by

Creating a space

• to share reliable accurate information on Indigenous Peoples 
• to share reliable accurate information on Indigenous events as well as events relevant to Indigenous Peoples 
• to lobby on Indigenous issues 
• for networking and solidarity

The project will especially pay attention to Indigenous Peoples owning, managing and operating the Portal as well as creating culturally appropriate regional protocols for the information management in order to ensure that the Portal will reflect the values of Indigenous Peoples and that information will be disseminated in culturally appropriate way.

The project will contribute to the specific objectives of:

Connecting Indigenous Peoples with each other

• creating inter-regional management and editing structures for the Portal 
• publishing content in Indigenous and UN languages

Reflecting the regional, cultural and linguistic diversity of Indigenous Peoples 

• enabling the world regions to produce content about themselves in their own language

Reflecting Indigenous values and beliefs 

• enabling Indigenous Peoples to use their own information management and cultural protocols

In addition the project will look into community development possibilities such as helping local Indigenous communities or projects to create their own websites or providing interested Indigenous youth a possibility for ICT skill building in form of mentorship with the Regional Editors of the Portal.