June 2012 Blog Posts (21)

The golden rules of e-participation are “know your audience” and “make it possible, attractive and interesting for the users to participate.” The importance of understanding the needs, challenges and desired benefits of the audience as well as attracting and retaining them cannot be overemphasized.

Social, cultural, educational, religious and economic peculiarities of target audience of e-participation should be taken into consideration in its design and implementation in order to…

A big number of African countries have their Television broadcast and received in analog mode over the terrestrial air waves. With digital transmission, the picture and audio of the television station are converted into corresponding binary form (ones and zeros), then subjected to a number of digital manipulations before being…

We increasingly ask our governments to be more open, provide us with data and information on what they are doing, be transparent. How does this conflict with the citizens right to privacy vs he public good?

(Cross-posted from the Commonwealth IGF blog)

As a proposal I worked on for a workshop at this years Internet Governance Forum on the Internet Governance issues of Open Government…

Some of the factors which lead to difference in costs are;

(i) Low-cost, reliable communications infrastructure being built in rural areas. This goes hand in hand with increased awareness of the value-added services brought about by internet connectivity, which will in turn create the requisite demand and justify the massive financial and technological investment.

(ii)A supportive and effective legal and regulatory environment being created and maintained, to ensure competitive…

I am currently a web reporter for an online website. We are called somehow "freelance", i think it's the right spelling. I've been writing since two years now and i can call myself a journalist because i am reporting on news, fresh news from the ground.

Again, i am running my own, personal blog where i post everything coming to my mind, my daily life and some special info that i want to give to the public. It's a newest one and non professional at all :). See my blog…

Recently, yesterday Uganda’s ministers and ICT stake holders were having Cyber security meeting in order to discuss you about the process of embracing online transactions and communications for more efficient services delivery especially for business and e-commerce, and various ICT solutions like business process outsourcing (BPO) models, e-commerce, mobile commerce (m-commerce), e-procurement, e-banking among others without any legal hindrance.

For more info :…

Our topic for last week in the IGCBP AdvEparticipation class, was Eparticipation: Consultation and Collaboration. Based on a survey conducted in 2005, the UN defines E-participation as a means of:

• Increasing e-information to citizen for decision making
• Enhancing e-consultation for deliberative and participatory processes
• Supporting e-decision making by increasing  citizen input in decision making

Though, it can be carried out in myriads of ways,…

E-Government

E-Government, the use of information communication technology in the public sector, not only enables access for the poor but also helps reduce the cost of access for both the citizens and the Government. OECD defines e-Government to be “the use of ICTs, and particularly the Internet, as a tool to achieve better government” (OECD 2003) . It provides incentive for the usage of ICTs by the public hence increases the overall usage and kick-starts the virtuous…

Many people have asked me the difference between blogging and other forms of writing. My colleague Katharina Hoene sent this to me today and it's worth considering. It explains it all so nicely:

"Arianna Huffington first asked Ephron to write a blog for her when Mark Felt was revealed to have been Deep Throat. "So I tossed something off and got this huge response, and it was fun to do." In the two years since then, she has blogged roughly once a fortnight, on politics…

Our second chat session dealt with a topic which I feel quite comfortable talking about because I've read quite a bit about it and have attended numerous workshops and conference on it: Social Media. 

The chat session focused primarily on using social media in a newspaper outlet and how it can be used to help with dwindling readership. This is a topic of great concern for many newspapers, especially in the developed world where the number of people buying newspapers has been falling…

We are at the end of the first six months of a very eventful year in Internet governance. What were the main developments, and what can we expect during the next six months?…

I just attended an amazing Diplo Webinar about blogging by Mary Murphy and am playing with the idea of blogs. Of course, this Diplo IG Blog is the first blog that comes to mind for me. During the webinar, illustrated by cartoon caricatures of real life blogging situations, I started wondering about this blog. I even asked Mary: isn't an IG blog a bit different, more formal? It often seems that we blog mostly 'announcements'…

The Internet Society is pleased to invite applications for Fellowships to the OECD Technology Foresight Forum.



Fellowships to the OECD Technology Foresight Forum are part of the Internet Society's Next Generation Leaders (NGL) programme and are available to Internet Society members aged between 20 and 40 years.



The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Technology Foresight Forum is an annual event organized by the OECD’s Committee for Information,…

Congratulations to EFF on their new IP expert: 'Carolina Rossini has joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as its International Intellectual Property Director, bringing more than ten years of experience in global IP law and policy to EFF's international team.' Carolina has been a Diplo associate, IP expert, friend and colleague for over 6 years. We are happy to see her at EFF, and look forward to working more closely with her. Read the EFF press release at: …

To create information based society, investment in ICT infrastructure, content, applications and capacity building is necessary. Governments can promote public and private investment by adopting options listed in this essay.

Public Investment

Domestic

In the post liberalisation era, direct public investment is often not desirable unless there is sufficient evidence that market players will not enter a particular market (geographic or service). For example…

I would like to introduce everyone to a new book just released and published by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (Asia) in which I also wrote one chatper about social media in Thai news outlets.

The link is as follows: http://www.kas.de/medien-asien/en/publications/31322/

I invite you to take a look and welcome your comments!

My first chat session was very interesting and a very fruitful experience. I got a chance to meet my new classmates and to learn more about what participation is, not only e-partipation, but participation in general. I think we all agree that participating involves not only speaking but also listening and taking into consideration what people have to say. With "e-participation," we discussed technological barriers that prevent some people from participating. With the ditigal natives being so…

Getting ready for a wee hours class at 4:30 was not an easy option but to be ‘there’ with the ‘Global Team’ was both a challenge and motivation for me. Participants of the Diplo Foundation’s advance course on e-participation (IGCBP12 AdvEparticipation) came from different time zones and the tutor has to manage two sessions in different times to accommodate all.

As the class chat began with the participants’ introductions, they also explored a great deal on what it meant by the…

This has nothing whatsoever to do with information and communication technology – or has it?

Some 400 years ago and 4000 miles away, a man, living in London, listened to a bell and used the bell notes as an image in a piece of writing. He had been very ill and would soon die. His name was John Donne. You can read his whole meditation here but this is the most famous part:…