A group of prominent Silicon Valley bloggers are spending the week in Israel. Yahoo Finance’s Sarah Lacy is among them and during her visit she found herself being briefed by Zika Abzuka of Cisco’s Corporate Responsibility Team on one of Cisco’s very cool social programs. Called Neta, the program brings together children from rival nations in order to create understanding among the future IT leaders and managers in the region. Neta was originally established by Cisco in November, 2003, and focused on bringing together Palestinian and Israeli students but has since been expanded to include students from several Arab countries and Portugal, Lacy reports.
“The ostensible goal is to help shape the next generation of IT managers in the region and one of the routes is Web 2.0-ifying the kids, if you will. According to Neta’s program manager Abzuka, Web 2.0 is lost on many in the Middle East because it’s such an inherently communal phenomenon. To get where the Web-and hence high tech in general-is going, Abzuka argued the next generation had to understand community first.”
As was hoped, when kids spend time together, they realize they are not so different from one another. Better still, the academic performance of the children who participate in the program has improved, too.
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