Context and Rationale
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ICT policy briefs for MPs
By exercising their legislative, representative, and oversight functions and responsibilities, parliaments can address the challenges associated with creating an equitable information society and play a leadership role in this field.
In this context possible areas on which to focus are:
- Legislative frameworks and institutional architectures: Role of Parliament in advancing the Information Society.
In a sector as dynamic as ICT, implementation strategies and policy outcomes need to be constantly monitored and evaluated and decision-makers nimble and responsive to change while ensuring long term stability and certainty. Governance is a determining factor of successful communications sector reform.
- Internet rights and governance: Guaranteeing fundamental rights.
Parliaments have to deal with new challenges of promoting, regulating and safeguarding the development of an equitable Information Society. The main issues here are: expanding opportunities for citizens to access public information and actively participate in policy formulation; ensuring citizen rights of expression in the evolving Internet world; data protection and cyber-crimes. The deployment of the new technologies should be monitored and appraised not only in terms of economic development but also of the need to protect the citizen’s rights and the more deprived and disadvantaged sectors of society.
- Information Society and Knowledge Economy: accessibility and collective interest.
Access to knowledge is an issue in the Information Society that is characterised by the constant creation of knowledge, whose scarcity is not primarily the effect of naturally-occurring events but of deliberate commercial policies. This artificially-created scarcity of information/knowledge could deprive millions of people of extraordinary possibilities for their individual and communal growth especially in Africa where access to knowledge is also key for its development.
- Open Source Software and Open Standards.
The Internet owes its explosive growth and impact to its foundation on open standards and open software. Studies indicate that moving from proprietary software to open standards and open source software in public administration may have a considerable economic impact. African parliaments now have the opportunity to participate in, and benefit from, the open software movement. Legislative support for open software and open standards also has the potential to influence the development of the information technology industry in Africa positively. Enabling greater user control of software and systems development in Africa could mean both more opportunities to localise applications to the specific situation and languages and also to build synergies for a more indigenous and sustainable software industry.
