Wired and connected in the valley

Web designer Chakkrisn Palawat aims to bring bright career prospects to the youngsters of Mae Hong Son

Nestled in a deep valley in the northern province of Mae Hong Son province, a group of students quietly work at their computers. The youngsters are all online, connected to the Internet via the WiMax network provided by the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre or Nectec as it's known for short.

Here, in Pai Witthayathan School's computer room, the students are designing and developing graphics for businesses in the province. They may be still at high school yet they are surprisingly skilled at computer graphics, thanks to the volunteer teachers who devote time and effort to transferring knowledge to these youngsters.

One of volunteers who has been teaching at the school for the last three years is Chakkrisn Palawat, a Bangkok native who quit the big city to settle down in Pai.

Chakkrisn, who has more than 10 years of web design experience to his credit, is known to tweeple and to those in the design world by his screen name "imenn". An engineering graduate from Chulalongkorn University, he headed to the US in his early 20s before working as an ISO (international organisation for standandisation) consultant to Paragon Management Company. While he enjoyed travelling around the country and meeting up with entrepreneurs, after two years he realised the job wasn't really what he had in mind. He switched to a jewellery company.

His new boss encouraged him to work towards a master's degree and later offered to underwrite Chakkrisn and his friends in setting up their own company. First though, Chakkrisn went abroad to study media production. On return, he established Tiger Media and within three years had a staff of 20.

Business continued to grow but Chakkrisn found himself tiring of the routine work and his management role. He reduced his employees to just five and switched the company's focus from the broad spectrum of media production to just web design

"I also couldn't take Bangkok any longer; the pollution was just too much. My wife and I decided to settle in Pai," he says.

Internet connections had been few and far between in this remote northern province, which was one of the reasons Nectec had selected Mae Hong Son for its WiMax pilot project. Tiger Media never faltered. The staff switched to working from home and holding regular online meetings with Chakkrisn in Pai.

"We only have face-to-face meetings if I have to come to Bangkok to meet customers. Internal matters can be discussed online," he says.

"Life here is beautiful. There's no rush hour and no sitting around in traffic. I have more time to think and do my work, so my output is much better than in the past."

"I think a small business is happier than a large one. Small is definitely more efficient. Now, apart from running my company, I also pick up freelance web design jobs for local and foreign clients without ever meeting them," he says.

And living in Pai gives Chakkrisn much more time to relax as well as to contribute to society. Part of that contribution is working as a volunteer for Nectec's computer camp, teaching high school students to use Nectec's open source software, which includes Gimp and Inkscape.

Chakkrisn is inspired by this project, saying it will help improve the quality of life of the people of Mae Hong Son who were left behind in the early years of the Internet age. He recently set up his own "Small Valley" project with the aim of developing a local community of web designers and programmers.

"Most high school students here do not go on to study at university. It's rare that their families have the means to support them. I want to give these children a chance to get good jobs based on their computer skills. They are lucky in that there are hi-speed Internet facilities throughout the province. With computer skills, especially web design, they have a career path, which will help them if they can't go to university," he says.

He adds that some students, who have already gone through the training courses taught by volunteer teachers, have a sufficiently high level of graphic design skills to come up with leaflets and posters and could easily find work with local businesses.

"In the Internet era, the kind of knowledge taught at university doesn't always meet the needs of the current market. I don't see why these youngsters should these lose their chance in life because they cannot enter tertiary education," he says.

He's hoping his Small Valley project, which will take on local web designers to handle outsourced works from Bangkok, other provinces and also from abroad, will provide those opportunities.

"I'm a lucky guy who is doing the work that I love. I want to give this same kind of chance to the young generation in Pai and all of Mae Hong Son province," he concludes.