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The parliamentary committee on Information and Communication Technology has expressed concern that ICT development in the country is backsliding.

The Senate yesterday referred a Bill for an Act to outlaw perpetration of financial crimes through such electronic devices as mobile phones, internet and the Automatic Teller Machines (ATM) to its Committee on Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Matters.

SOUTH African internet billionaire Mark Shuttleworth has enough cash to pump into his software company, Canonical, saying he is being careful with his pennies but is willing to continue supporting a good investment.

Simply put, the "digital divide" is the division between those who have access to ICT and are using it effectively, and those who do not. Since information and communications technology is increasingly a foundation of our societies and economies, the digital divide means that the information "have-nots" are denied the option to participate in new ICT-based jobs, e-government, ICT-improved healthcare, and ICT-enhanced education. More often than not, the information "have-nots" are in developing countries, and in disadvantaged groups within countries. To bridges.org, the digital divide is thus a lost opportunity -- the opportunity for the information "have-nots" to use ICT to improve their lives.

Tackling the digital divide is an enormous task, and no one group could solve the problem on its own. Bridges.org has examined the ICT-based development field and considered what works, and what does not work -- and why. It has built on its own experience and the thinking of a number of other organizations to design a holistic, integrated strategy it calls Real Access/Real Impact (RA/RI). This framework sets out the determining factors in whether there is Real Access to ICT: access that goes beyond computers and connections so that technology use makes a Real Impact on socio-economic development. It is not about a specific technology application that is used in a certain way. Rather, the RA/RI framework offers a roadmap to the digital divide that can be used to improve the way that ICT is integrated into initiatives in healthcare, education, small business development, government services and other programs in the countries and communities that have the most to gain.

In 2002, the World Economic Forum (WEF), the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) and the e-Africa Commission created the e-Readiness Policy Programme to help African countries address policy issues that affect information communications technology (ICT) use in the region. Bridges.org worked on the Programme to assess the current status of technology-related policies in Africa and to drive government, private sector and civil society stakeholders into ICT policy discussions. This report is intended as a first stage in a broader process to advance ICT policy and decision-making across Africa by building partnerships that inform and engage stakeholders in policy processes.

Lack of open source skills is still hindering adoption, says survey.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) based in the city of Stockholm, Sweden, says Open Source statistical models will help to increase the number of researchers using these models for analysis.

The hidden exit costs imposed by a previous software acquisition are a major reason for public administrations to tender software by naming brand names or specific products, which may be illegal, says a draft report by the European Commission's Open Source Observatory and Repository project (OSOR).

Open Source desktops are far cheaper to maintain than proprietary desktop configurations, says Rolf Schuster, a diplomat at the German Embassy in Madrid and the former head of IT at the Foreign Ministry.

The third edition of a guide to help small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to adopt Open Source software was published by the Italian Open Source researcher and software engineer Carlo Daffara on 22 October.

Open Source delivers a very competitive alternative to proprietary solutions, says Jaakko Järvenpää, one of the IT administrators of the City of Oulu in Finland. Oulu recently began a portal to offer its citizens digital access to the city's services, based on Open Source.

Software tenders by European public administration often may not comply with EU regulations, illegally favouring proprietary applications. "These tenders could be protested against, and if necessary the tendering organisations could be taken to court", said Karel De Vriendt, head of the IDABC unit responsible for the Open Source Software Observatory and Repository (osor.eu).

InformationWeek October 31, 2008 In what probably comes as a surprise only to people who haven't been following trends in open source recently, the vast majority of people who've grabbed OpenOffice.org 3.0 in its official release are Windows users. Out of 3-plus million downloads in the first week or so, almost 2.5 million of those were for the Win32 edition of OO.o. The most recent stats are even more impressive -- 5.2 million downloads, with more than 4.4 million of those for Windows.

OASIS,org October 30, 2008 The OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC has recently approved an errata document as a Committee Draft and published the package for public review: "Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) 1.0 Errata 01 Committee Draft 03." The public review ends November 13, 2008.

The European Parliament cast an overwhelmingly positive vote today on the report drafted by MEP Roberta Angelilli which supports the launch of a new EU Safer Internet programme. The 5-year programme (2009–13), proposed by the European Commission last February, will have a budget of € 55 million to combat illegal online content but also to tackle illegal and harmful conduct such as grooming and cyberbullying.

The European Commission launched on 16 October infringement proceedings against Poland and Sweden for failing to fully implement rules providing common conditions for the re-use of information produced, collected and shared by public bodies in the EU. The Commission is sending letters of formal notice (the first step of an infringement proceeding) to Poland and Sweden for incomplete and incorrect transposition of the EU Directive of 2003 on the re-use of public sector information (the PSI Directive). Both Polish and Swedish legislation fail to fully implement several provisions of the PSI Directive, including those that prohibit exclusive arrangements and discrimination. These are crucial in order to open monopoly markets to competition and guarantee equal conditions for all potential re-users.

This semester, I'm fortunate to spend my Wednesday nights teaching management to students who are part of NYU's M.S. in publishing program. Although a significant share of the course is given over to management fundamentals, the students are for the most part already working in publishing, so they also look for connections between lessons learned and their real-world application.

Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? I suggest that perhaps the looming challenge for document standards is not in deciding or developing perfect formats, but in integrating the packaged world of documents with the fragmented world of web resources. ...First, a potted history of the document format landscape over last 25 years...

The US Library of Congress Thomas project is making user-friendly, structured URLs available as permanent aliases for its legislation. I have been pushing a similar approach, but taking it further, in the PRESTO approach

PRESTO is not something new: its basic ideas are presupposed in a lot of people’s thinking about the web, and many people have given names to various parts, but I don’t know that anyone has given a name to this package. In any case, this combination of ideas which seems to me to be the sweet spot of practicality for large public document sets seem to have escaped the way that we approach many problems and systems. However, the question I ask is “How else are you going to do it?”

The job of standards is to promote bazaars. The large monolithic standard is anti-market, however scaffold technologies and small modules are pro-market, which is not to say they necessarily have any commercial appeal. How do we apply these ideas (parallelism, human scale, scaffolding, modularity, evolvability) to standards, and particular to standards development and adoption? Web Meets World

I see the speakers for the Sydney, Australia, October Open Standards 2008 Conference have been announced: Jetty's Greg Wilkins and open source advocate Chris Messina (microformats, OAuth). The theme: Recognizing the Intersection between Open Standards and Open Source.

This paper highlights the capacity gap in the Government for implementation of e-governance and identifies strategies to handle the gap. It also identifies various areas where the Capacity Gap exists in area of e-Governance. The paper suggests various institutions, teams and individuals as may be required for e-governance project implementation. It also highlights that Government needs to establish an insti-tution of e-governance focusing on four areas of Govern-ance, Management, Information Technology and e-Governance.

Public-sector enterprises must constantly be vigilant about protecting their networks and data to maintain daily operations and public confidence.This guide identifies key security challenges and provides solutions and best practices to address them.

Four years ago yesterday, Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 1.0. Four years on and Firefox has grown to a point where it now commands 20 percent market share and has introduced users to a number of new features, many of which we could now not live without.

USAGE of information and communication technologies increased marginally during the year as more and more SMEs move with the technological times. This is according to the latest findings from the annual SME Survey.

Open-Xchange announced Monday it landed a $9 million second round of funding, with the proceeds earmarked for furthering its software development and expansion of its U.S., European, and emerging markets.

‘Tsehai Loves Learning’ is a popular educational children's media project in the local Ethiopian language of Amharic. This UNESCO-sponsored programme won the top prize in the pre-school category at the Japan Prize 2008 International Contest for Educational Media. Beyond the international recognition associated with this award, the prize includes an ornate trophy and $3,000 USD.

On 29 October 2008, Mr Koïchiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO, opened an international symposium on ‘Freedom of Expression: Development, Democracy and Dialogue’ organized at UNESCO’s Headquarters to mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

Each new Ubuntu release has raised the standard by which other Linux distros are judged. With the new Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, the focus is on mobility and 3G network support. I found Intrepid to be a fast and stable release, yet I experienced some minor issues that keep it from absolute perfection.

"Politics breeds cynicism; politicians seem to pander to contradictory focus groups to get elected, then break their promises to everyone. Mass mailings and faxings overwhelm their staffs, and who knows if you can tell your representatives what you really think? Experienced techie and political consultant Silona Bonewald (creator of the Transparent Federal Budget) believes that simple software solutions can fix these problems and more. O'Reilly News recently discussed with her how social software can improve democracy and leadership."

"Is Linux getting too old for you? Are you interested to see what other systems such as OpenSolaris have to offer? OpenSolaris has some great features, such as ZFS and dtrace, which make it a great server OS — but how do you think it will fare on a laptop? Let's take an initial look at the most recent OpenSolaris 2008.11 pre-release on recentish laptop hardware."

Following the initial rush of Information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) projects in rural Africa, many did not yield the anticipated outcomes, and interest has been dying down. People then began talking about “sustainable ICT” projects, in which it was understood that projects would become self-sufficient after their initial donor-led investment and set-up period. But with the use of mobile phones gaining in popularity, popular rhetoric has begun to question the need of ICTs beyond the mobile phone.

Taking e-government beyond the same tired e-government applications require innovations such as social networking, web 2.0/3.0 and mobile technology, all of which are democratizing the web in different ways. The basics of e-government are in the process of moving from a top-down model (e-government strategy, vision, principles, down to agencies, businesses and citizens) to a bottom-up paradigm (citizen-level application managed and developed at the lowest level) with the citizen being the engine of the new e-government.

An annual survey on the use of software by Finnish companies shows that now 75 percent of Finish companies are using open source, up from 13 percent in 2000. Researchers base this on the response from 660 companies. "Open source systems and applications have become mainstream", the researchers said during a presentation last month at the OpenMind conference in the city of Tampere.

The tenth UNESCO Training-the-Trainers (TTT) Workshop in Information Literacy was inaugurated, on 5 November 2008, at Punjabi University in Patiala, India. This Workshop, which is one in the series of eleven IFAP-funded TTT workshops, is organized by the Department of Library and Information Science of Punjabi University from 5 to 7 November.

Asustek is not a name most people know. The Taiwan-based hardware maker traditionally operates in the PC-board sector. But a few years ago the company began to make its own notebook PCs. Branded Asus, the initial slew of notebooks escaped most people’s attention, except geeks who already knew of Asustek’s good reputation in the PC-board market.

Out-sourcing development and open-source development may at first appear to be about as far apart as baseball and football. Both use a ball in a game, but that's about it. Yet a closer look from open-source software developers and industry analysts reveals that enterprises using outsourcing for their programming needs could stand to learn some management and process techniques from the open-source community.

All through this month, a local chiva, the traditional Ecuadorian bus, will be travelling to popular neighbourhoods of Quito and inviting citizens to get on for a trip to the closest cybernarium, the capital’s public Internet access centres. Once in the cybernariums, free training courses are to be provided on how to access local government information and use e-government services.

IBM and Sun Microsystems yesterday released the OpenDocument Format (ODF) Toolkit Union, a new open-source software community project to make it easier for developers to use and develop ODF applications.

Government representatives and organisations involved in software tenders in Hungary, Latvia and the Netherlands say last month's IDABC report 'Guidelines on public procurement and Open Source Software' is useful.

University of the Western Cape (UWC) PHD student, Nico Elema, is the driving force behind a project to provide governments with up-to-date open source software information. As one of the outputs of his current PHD research at UWC, Elema launched the GOV-OSS-RC portal in August this year. Today the portal is a comprehensive and growing resource for government’s around the world to find information on OSS best practices as well as data on other government initiatives.

Getting information about firms and corporations has been eased. ADCEL, a data service firm, has opened to help the public access information about any company in the country free of charge. The information can be accessed at any time of the day from anywhere.

The conference “Women&Technologies: research and innovation” was held in the context of IFIP WCC World Computer Congress (www.wcc2008.org). The whole day of the conference aimed to reflect, at the international level, on the situation of the presence of women in the scientific and NICTs worlds, on female contributions to innovation, creation and production of ICTs, on progress in the overcoming of gender stereotypes in this scientific and working area, and on good practises for engaging young women with NICTs.

During the XXII Annual Conference of Italian Society of Political Science (www.sisp.it), held in Pavia last September, a wide space was dedicated to a theoretical and empirical reflection on participation and deliberation, on national and international political communication through the web, on participative and deliberative public policies, on ICT tools used for implementing participative and deliberative processes, promoted by political institutions as well as by civil society, and on the quality of these processes.

Early on Sunday 9th, the OpenOffice.org Community achieved an historic milestone, when the ten millionth person clicked on the "Download OpenOffice.org" button since the Community announced version 3.0, just four weeks ago. The week also saw the first time the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference has been held outside Europe, with over four hundred people attending the Conference in Beijing, China from Wednesday to Friday.

Sun Microsystems unveiled Monday its Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems line, as it seeks to turn around its ailing business by once again turning to open source. The Sun Storage 7000 line, formerly known as "Amber Road," is intended to bolster the company's storage business by adding open source to its hardware, in a move to make it easier for customers to install and configure the systems and reduce costs. The line will be part of the company's Unified Storage Systems.

'The intersection of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) forms a critical nexus for the future of sustainable human development and poverty eradication. Yet the great paradox of the information age - the persistence of scarcity in a digital era of superabundant capacity – remains the greatest single challenge to the networked economy and society. This report argues that while the means to meet this challenge are actually close at hand, the so-called “digital divide” has shifted perilously in recent years to the detriment of the poorest developing countries with serious and potentially irreversible consequences for the achievement of the MDGs.'

This paper highlights the capacity gap in the Government for implementation of e-governance and identifies strategies to handle the gap. It also identifies various areas where the Capacity Gap exists in area of e-Governance. The paper suggests various institutions, teams and individuals as may be required for e-governance project implementation. It also highlights that Government needs to establish an insti-tution of e-governance focusing on four areas of Govern-ance, Management, Information Technology and e-Governance.

Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt's initiative opening the state's checkbook online has reached the 14 million hit mark as Missourians continue to use the Missouri Accountability Portal to find valuable information about how the state spends their tax dollars.

THE Shuttleworth Foundation and Connexions from Rice University, in the US, yesterday announced plans to jointly develop what they say will be one of the world's largest, most comprehensive sets of free online teaching materials for primary and secondary schoolchildren. The new project had the advantage of being aimed at the teacher instead of the pupil, Horner said. The website could act as a tool for sharing teaching resources, and was not just a place to download them.

The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) has engaged on a strategic framework for the implementation of of Free and Open Source Software in the member states of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA).

On the 7th and 8th of August a group of 300 makerere students in collaboration with Rhodes University in South Africa and a company called translate@thon.org.za were involved in a successful translation of the Mozilla User interface (wordings) into Luganda. Throughout the exercise, we were able to translate 8000 words used on the interface into Luganda.

FOSSFA's presence has reinforced the importance of Free Software and Open Source in the just concluded Internet Governance and Development Seminar organized in collaboration with the Agency of Regulation of Telecommunications and Stations (ARTP) of Senegal, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet Society (ISOC), Kheweul, and other public and private sectors of telecommunications in Senegal.

“Europeana”, the European Digital Library portal is now launched. This initiative within the framework of European Commission’s i2010 strategy has become Europe’s single and multilingual online portal through which all EU citizens have now access to Europe’s rich cultural diversity.

Pundits of all kinds love to preach that the free desktop needs this feature or that software to succeed. They may be right for certain audiences, but they often miss the single essential feature which gives free desktops an amazing evolutionary edge.

Greg-Kroah Hartman discusses why he believes the Linux kernel supports more devices than any other operating system ever has, why binary-only drivers are impractical, immoral, and illegal, and how the kernel development process contributes to the inevitable world domination of free software.

A federal judge has denied the Bush administration's motion to dismiss claims from two private groups that allege the executive offices of the White House failed to archive millions of e-mail messages. The groups allege that officials of the White House and NARA violated the FRA by not taking action to correct the problems of the alleged deletion of millions of e-mail messages and to improve a White House’s records preservation system.

Jammag writes "Both OpenOffice and Google Apps are free, so the choice is purely down to which is better. Bruce Byfield, after looking at both, concluded, 'comparing Google Apps to OpenOffice.org is like clubbing a staked-out bunny — Google Apps is so far behind that the whole exercise seems like an exercise in pointless cruelty.

The current issue of Information Technology in Developing Countries includes articles that discuss why genuinely successful, high-yield e-government projects are so difficult to find and even more difficult to measure, the state of e-government implementation in Malaysia, how Web 2.0 is changing the basic character of the Internet, a few e-government initiatives in India, a book review, and announcements of forthcoming conferences.

The National University of Rwanda (NUR) has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Rwanda Information and Technology Authority (RITA) to increase ICT access in rural areas. The cooperation between the two institutions seeks to translate Rwanda's stated ambition of becoming a regional ICT hub into a reality.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced Sun Systems for MySQL(TM), a set of solutions designed to radically change the economics of Web service delivery for enterprise customers deploying MySQL-based Web Infrastructure on Sun servers. Proven customer deployments have shown the ability to improve performance by 300 percent, reduce power consumption by 83 percent and offer up to 10 times better price/performance, with higher system reliability and faster time to market.

An estimated 130 million Americans are expected to turn out at the polls today to make their voices heard in the 2008 presidential election. While citizens across the country cast their ballots, standards are in place to assure a successful Election Day, from tallying votes and broadcasting results to celebrating patriotism.

MICROSOFT has denied media reports that it paid a Nigerian government contractor US$400,000 to try and prevent Linux’s movement into the government sector. Media reports had alleged that Microsoft proposed to make the payment under a joint marketing agreement last year in order to persuade the contractor to replace Linux OS with Windows OS on thousands of Nigerian school laptops.

Analysts project that the Information and Computer Technology industry may suffer in 2009 due to a skills shortage, which is predicted to be as large as 25 percent. The forecast setback is attributed in part to the fact that domestic supply is far below demand while deep skills are even scarcer than entry level skills. Players in the industry are thus taking measures to resist the problem.

ALTHOUGH cable connections across many African countries are in a poor state of repair or non-existent, the continent is slowly being connected to the global community through five undersea cable projects, three of which are due for completion in 2009.

This brief article describes ten selected agenda items of e-governance of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama. The article reports that the main plank of Obama's e-governance agenda is open government but the implementation of three main agenda items- open government, citizen participation in government decision-making and functioning of Federal Chief Technology Officer- is likely to encounter roadblocks. Since U.S. is a bellwether country in e-governance, the agenda items have important messages for developing countries too.

This document presents the findings of the worldwide survey of municipal digital governance 2007. The survey evaluates 86 large municipalities which have official websites and ranks them on a global scale based on their scores in the areas of security, usability and content of websites, the type of online services currently being offered and citizen responses and participation through websites.

Daniel Scioli, governor of Buenos Aires and John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco recently held a virtual meeting to inaugurate Cisco's first TelePresence system in Argentina. They used the opportunity to discuss the use of technology for health, education and economic development for greater social inclusion of citizens.

Industry analyst firm IDC is revising its yearly forecast on the IT budgets of companies around the world. Because of the worldwide financial crisis, the firm expects spending on technology by enterprise companies to grow by just 2.6 percent next year compared with 2008. Before the late-September Wall Street meltdown, IDC was predicting a worldwide spending growth rate of 5.9 percent. In the U.S., it was expecting 4.2 percent growth, but now IDC is revising that to just 0.9 percent.

Attorney Andrew Updegrove specializes in technology, intellectual property, and standards. While other lawyers can make the same claim, few have his credentials -- maintainer of an online repository about standards consortia, former board member of the Linux Foundation, and progenitor of a major open source license.

The use of social networking tools as part of everyday working life has led to an increase in efficiency, according to an independent market report released by AT&T.

Open source drives innovation by making yesterday's technology a commodity, forcing proprietary vendors to innovate in order to justify their paychecks, says,Daniel Tunkelang, chief scientist for Endeca, commenting on potential competition his company faces from open source.

IT professionals surveyed worldwide said they think their own employees pose a more serious security threat than outsiders, and often it's because of personal use of corporate assets, according to the third and final report based on a 2008 survey (PDF) commissioned by Cisco Systems and released Wednesday.

From the next academic year all principals, their deputies and zonal directors of the Akwa Ibom state Secondary Education Board who cannot show evidence of being computer literate will forfeit his or her promotion. Giving the warning in Uyo, while addressing principals of public secondary schools and zonal directors, the executive chairman of the State Secondary School Education Board, Obong Ime Isine, stated that in a constantly shrinking world, the power of information and communication technology cannot be overemphasized hence the need for all public schools administrators to use the computer.

Canonical has announced that from April 2009, Ubuntu Linux will support the ARMv7 processors used in smaller devices and system-on-chip devices. The ARM version of Ubuntu will include a full desktop operating system optimised for the platform.

Net Working / Networking explores the variety in use and approaches to political participation and mobilisation occurring on the Internet. The chapters in the book represent various viewpoints mixing theory with empirical cases. Big politics is broken into pieces to become a multitude of small, more personalised political engagements. Topics addressed range from e-democratic participation to Internet piracy.

Paul W. Taylor blogs on making change in government at Center for Digital Government event.

With a supportive administration behind it and some reshuffled leadership, the next Congress may make more progress on tech legislation, for better or for worse.

As global prices of petroleum continue to dwindle, resulting in low income for the country, Governor Isa Yuguda of Bauchi State has identified commitment to the promotion of the study of science and technology as a cornerstone for the attainment of the Nigeria's vision 2020 project which the Yar'adua administration pursues as a road map for the nation's transformation from a mere developing country to a continental giant.

Rwanda is set to benefit from this project and recently it signed up for a $24m World Bank project to connect its Internet national backbone to either the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) or the SEACOM Cable The construction of SEACOM's undersea fibre-optic cable is in progress with the recent completion of initial works on the cable landing station sites in Kenya and Mozambique.

How happy the man whose documents are clearly divided into variant and invariant: data versus schemas. But in the real world, often there are data values or structures which have fixed choices, but not completely fixed: a twilight zone. For example, the values of a field with codes for different nations may vary independently of the schema which requires such codes be used: think of the political roil of Eastern Europe at the end of the cold war.

Mobile services are quickly emerging as the new frontier in transforming government, health, banking and many other sectors due to fast growing penetration of mobile phones even in the poorest and most remote areas of the globe. In theory, many services can be now made available on a 24x7x365 basis at any place in the world covered by mobile networks, which today means almost everywhere. This emerging trend in improving service delivery and organizational efficiency and effectiveness can be called mobile-enabled development (m-development) or mobile transformation.

An anonymous reader points out a story on the Irish Times that says"the Irish government is looking for ways to combat 'cyber-bullying' after data indicated that a significant percentage of young children are subjected to this kind of abuse via their mobile phone and popular social network accounts. The industry has been asked to come up with solutions for this problem and a government office is due to publish a guide on the issue in the near future. Surely this is a problem faced by children in all developed

THE High Level Segment Information Technology Summit entered its second day today with Kenya’s Information and Communications Minister Samuel Poghisio calling for tougher action against cyber crime.

ITU launched a new initiative today to safeguard children, the most vulnerable users of the Internet. Addressing ITU’s high-level meeting on cybersecurity by video message, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, “We have to protect against cyberthreats, especially when they target children. I welcome the ITU’s ‘Child Online Protection’ initiative and urge all States to support it.”

With its latest version, Sun Microsystems is adding native Mac support to its StarOffice productivity suite.The software, a distant rival to Microsoft's dominant Office package, sells for $35 to individuals and $25 for each user inside a business.StarOffice 9 is open-source and its code is shared with OpenOffice.org 3.0, which was released last month.

Sun Microsystems today announced StarOffice 9, its own version of the popular open source office suite software. In addition to the usual core applications included with OpenOffice.org, StarOffice 9 also bundles Mozilla’s Thunderbird, with Lightning extension, for email and calendaring support and adds a layer of support to that.

President-elect Barack Obama will videotape his weekly address and post it on YouTube, the popular video-sharing Web site, an Obama spokesperson told The Washington Post. This is a first for a U.S. president or president-elect. Obama's address will also be aired on the radio, as has been precedent. According to the newspaper, Obama's technology team will also add online Q&As and video interviews to Change.gov, the presidential transition team's official Web site.

The objective of this annual survey, is to enable participating countries to analyze progress in the field of eGovernment and to compare performance within and between countries. The survey results show a wide gap in the performances in public services for business against those for citizens.

President Paul Kagame, was this week presented with the 'Committed to Connecting the World Awards', at the 2008 International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Council High level segment, meeting, held in Geneva, in recognition of his support for ICT development in Rwanda.

A number of guiding principles for e-government have appeared in recent years. They can be broadly classified into two categories: (i) recommendatory, and (ii) prescriptive.These are comprehensive and useful guidelines but not binding on stakeholders. The prescriptive guidelines, which are binding, again can be grouped into two categories: statutory and executive. The statutory guidelines include the guidelines mandated under, for example, the U.S. E-government Act of 2002.

This survey, undertaken by the Society of IT Management (Socitm), considers the different roles and skills required for the delivery of the e-government agenda. One of the important conclusion of this study is that the service managers have a key role to play in the e-Government agenda as it is now recognised that they are the staff who ‘make a difference’ to the customer by making greater use of technology in their service design.

This report assesses international developments in the policies and public administration issues which now drive e-Government and e-Governance. This is the first in a series of five reports. The report presents an overview of some of the ways in which information management is being approached and the main issues facing managers and administrators.

"Confirming recent comments by Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, an independent report released Friday found that OpenOffice.org's free office suite is five times more popular than Google Docs. This was according to a survey of 2,400 adult Internet users conducted between May and November. Microsoft's share was 10 times that of OpenOffice.org. Microsoft hopes to cement that lead with its upcoming Office Web, as well as online versions of its Exchange and SharePoint products to be announced on Monday.

Using ICTs strategies for Socio-Economic development through digital technologies and Internet network currently can play a leading role in improving livelihood opportunities for people who are living in poverty and especially in rural areas. Taking into consideration the needs of life in rural areas and identifying the most important priorities through studies, survey, and practical research.

A reporting of impressions from Dan Jellinek’s (headstar) e-Democracy conference which took place in London Tuesday this week.

Open-source software is almost universal in the enterprise, a survey from analyst group Garner has confirmed. New research has highlighted quite how pervasive open source software (OSS) has become, with 85 per cent of companies currently using OSS and the remaining 15 per cent expecting to in the next 12 months.

Who says you can’t make money with free software? As reader William points out, Dutch artist Stani did exactly that. He was a participant in a recent Dutch Ministry of Finance competition to design a 5 euro coin with the theme “Netherlands and Architecture”

'The technological advances of the last decade have changed the way we live and work. The World Wide Web is a perfect illustration. The Web offers people and organizations a whole new way to interact and communicate. This report provides a framework for helping local governments achieve the benefits of the Web without being overcome by its complexity.'

New information technology (IT) systems are serious, and potentially risky, investments for government agencies and nonprofit organizations. This guide is designed to help public sector managers better understand how a return on investment (ROI) analysis can take some of that risk out of their next IT investment.

IT analysts Gartner are becoming increasingly bullish about the prospects for open source software. Its latest study predicts that all businesses will be using OSS within the next 12 months.

A number of performance improvement tools and techniques are available to public managers. Yet the performance of the public sector often falls short of citizens expectations.

President Elect Barack Obama and his transition team have already started to stake out a position on e-government in particular. Although it remains to see how this will actually play out, it is interesting to see the emerging themes related to e-government in the Obama administration. So far, these appear to be transparency and connectedness, network neutrality, information sharing, infrastructure, safety networks, health and strategy.

This webcast/workshop (Nov 18, 2008) is part of ongoing series of mobile transformation workshops discussing the role of Mobile for Development (M4D), this time focused on Africa.

Governments in the US are using a variety of methods to find out what citizens want from electronic government services. This report presents those methods, and weighs the pros and cons of each of them.

The Electronic Commerce Coordinating Council (EC3) has selected the recipients of its annual Excellence Awards, designed to recognize innovative e-government programs that have produced measurable results inimproving government services. Awards and presentations on these projects are set to take place on Thursday, December 11th at eC3's 13th Annual Conference.

e-Services and especially e-Government services are being preferred more and more by the residents of Dubai. A growing trend is being seen towards the fact that most of Dubai web users prefer to interact with government through the Internet technology. And the procedure for it all is very simple, one simply has to logon to dubai.ae, and there they can search for all kinds of services like government information, filling up of special forms, and even make transactions and payments.

The need to introduce organisations and individuals to access technologies for little cost drove the development of “AccessAT” and “AccessFun”; two collections of assistive technologies from non-profit organisation AbilityNet.

he 32nd edition of the Top 500 supercomputers lists was released late last week and Linux-based systems occupy 439 of the 500 positions. Other Unix variants, including BSD-based systems occupy another 24 positions. The 32nd edition of the biannual list is also notable as the first time a Windows-based supercomputer has made it into the top 10 positions. That machine sits at number 10 on the list and is based at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center. Windows-based machines account for a total of 5 of the top 500 supercomputers in the world.

'E-government policies when designed along the line of New Public Management (NPM) ideology are aimed at reforming the organisation of the public administration, and reducing the role of bureaucratic institutions in favour of market-like structure of coordination and governance. Holding bureaucracy as a fundamental guarantor of equal and impartial action by public administration, this paper explores how traditional approaches to e-government neglect this important dimension of bureaucracy.'

This guide discusses the role of Internet and Communication technologies (ICTs) in development. It takes a particular look at the relationship between ICTs and the poor. It aims to provide ideas for journalists to carry out further research this area.

MySQL AB (now Sun's Database group) established a multi-pronged business model long ago: support contracts, dual licensing, and proprietary add-ons all play a role in making them one of the biggest success stories in the area of open source business. Today their MySQL Query Analyzer adds another brick to that edifice.

Products, Nokia, Education, Agriculture, Global: Nokia will launch Nokia Life Tools, a range of innovative agriculture information and education services targeted at non-urban consumers. Designed specifically for emerging markets, Nokia Life Tools helps overcome information constraints and provides services to this next generation of mobile users. Nokia plans to launch the service in the first half of 2009 with the Nokia 2323 classic and the Nokia 2330 classic as the lead devices in India, expanding across select countries in Asia and Africa later in 2009.

AFRICA Online, a member of Telcom South Africa Group, has developed a technology to safeguard private and confidential data sent over the Internet, Joseph Barungi, the regional manager, has said. Barungi said the Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology was designed to fight cyber crimes. "One can connect from his company network using a basic Internet connection and remain confident the data is secure," he said

'The Excellence in e-Government Awards: 2008 Finalist Case Studies highlights the benefits that improved e-government services are continuing to deliver to citizens, business and the community.The publication, the third in the series, features case studies from the 10 finalists for the e-Award in 2008.The aim of the e-Award is to inspire Australian government agencies to excel and innovate in the use of information and communications technologies.'

This report produced for the publication series ICT Research: The Policy Perspective examines how information and communications technology, or ICT, is revolutionizing the way citizens, businesses and public administrations interact.

Amadou Toumani Toure, the president of the Republic of Mali, has said that strategies of public health and care in the 21st century are based on scientific evidence and Africa must control science and technology.

The demand for mobile communications – such as mobile phones – in Africa is forcing large international companies to come up with new technology which leapfrogs over that in more developed countries, says Chris Gabriel, the chief executive officer of Zain Africa. He was speaking to AllAfrica at AfricaCom, an annual congress for telecommunications professionals on the continent.

As East Africa awaits the expanded high-speed Internet connectivity that new submarine cables will bring the region, another endeavor is aiming higher – targeting all of the continent’s population from the skies.

'Countries that adopt policy frameworks to enable convergence will enhance the impact of ICTs on economic development. Convergence can lower entry barriers, allow service providers to try out new business models, promote competition, lower costs to service providers and users, and broaden the range of services and technologies available to users. This report outlines options for government policy responses along with the likely outcomes and potential benefits and risks.'

The purpose of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), run by the IGF Secretariat is to support the United Nations Secretary-General in carrying out the mandate from the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) with regard to convening a new forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue. The website provides an interactive, collaborative space where all stakeholders can air their views and exchange ideas. Accessibility This Web site aims to promote the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It tries to meet the highest standards set by the W3C.

Members of parliament and other citizen representatives now have a new tool at their fingertips to help them keep on top of their work while on the move – a virtual desktop providing an integrated approach to remote committee management.

ISO/IEC on Tuesday published the Office Open XML (OOXML) file format standard, formally known as ISO/IEC 29500:2008. It describes file formats originally designed by Microsoft for its Office 2007 productivity suite, which are used in presentation, spreadsheet and word processing applications. The main goal in promoting OOXML as an international standard was to support document preservation. Governments and organizations currently use older binary or "legacy" document formats that may be unsupported by present-day or future commercial software applications.

The Italian open source advocacy group Associazione per il Software Libero is protesting two memoranda of understanding (MOU) signed this summer by the Italian government and Microsoft. The group last week published a public protest letter. The association explains that over the past three months it has in vain tried to raise the issue with the minister of public administration and innovation, Renato Brunetta. "We now publish this letter to get his attention on the benefits of open source software."

The economy is falling as fast as temperatures in November. Recession seems certain, if it's not already here. The stock market's performance resembles Disney World's Space Mountain roller coaster. And every open source vendor, every Linux project, will be touched in one way or another.

The Standards News Portal is updated on a daily basis to bring you the most important news about standards, how they are created, and how they affect your business and your life. The Standards News Portal also allows you to search and read all of the 4,793 articles that have been added to the Portal's database since its launch in February 2002, perhaps the largest archive of its type in existence. You can also sort the database by topic or date, by visiting the Portal Archive Page.

This paper contributed by the author to the Second Administrative Reforms Commission on Citizen Centric Governance introduces e-governance in the Indian context and gives suggestions from strategic to implementation levels for using ICTs to improve governance and service. The paper discusses the international scene of e-governance reforms and compares it with India’s institutional framework in this sector.The paper argues that this will not achieve the required level of transformation that people aspires for.

Increasingly civil servants are going online to perform their official functions. This has given rise to a new type of civil service which may be called e-civil service, as distinct from the traditional civil service. The performance of e-civil service has direct bearing on the development of e-government worldwide. However, the emergence of e-civil service has not been formally recognised so far with the result that the pace of development of e-government is slow.

The current issue of Information Technology in Developing Countries includes articles that discuss why genuinely successful, high-yield e-government projects are so difficult to find and even more difficult to measure, the state of e-government implementation in Malaysia, how Web 2.0 is changing the basic character of the Internet, a few e-government initiatives in India, a book review, and announcements of forthcoming conferences.

This document presents an edited paper containing the work of twelve experts on e-government and e-participation. It aims to address the issues and challenges facing countries developing ICT for development and e-government programmes.The editors point out that the information revolution has ushered in an era where the capabilities for participating in all aspects of the economy and society are changing with the diffusion of modern information and communication technologies (ICTs).

The paper Change Management Strategy identifies various methodologies to implement change in Government. It identifies various resistances to change and methodologies to deal with those resistances. The paper also explains the various change management models like Stages of Change Model, McKinsey 7S model, Lewin’s Model of Change, Kot-ter’s 8 step Change Model, AKDAR model, Kubler – Ross Model, Formula for Change and Appreciative Inquiry. The paper identifies the different stakeholders of change and Types of Change.

'Multiple play in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector refers to the provision of multiple services—such as voice telephony, broadcasting, and Internet access—by one operator over a single communications network, typically telephone or cable television. This offers numerous potential benefits to customers, including lower prices, better services, and more choices among service providers.

The 100-page publication highlights initiatives that are using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to make a real and meaningful difference in communities around the world, no matter how disadvantaged or isolated they may be. These stories on Youth, Poverty and Gender intend to provide snapshots of the learning process that accompanies the introduction and implementation of ICTs in a community development project.

When users want the latest in free and open source software (FOSS), they are likely to think first of sites like freshmeat, or perhaps Softpedia or GnomeFiles. However, as the FOSS community has divided into specialized communities, sites for new releases have proliferated, to the point where it is difficult to keep track of them all. Since 2007, openDesktop.org has provided a portal for many of these specialized sites. Under the slogan "Let's build the desktop of the future," openDesktop.org provides a quick overview of new software that is independent of desktop or distribution.

Spreadsheets might be called databases for the timid, since they're more user-friendly than databases and do a good job working with limited amounts of data. Some tools for databases can work well with spreadsheets too. Take for instance DataForm, a new OpenOffice.org Calc extension that provides a form-like interface designed to make entering and finding spreadsheet data easier.

When Maine State Employees Association SEIU Local 1989 needed software to safeguard confidential information and ward off online threats, it found an open source solution. The labor union, which represents more than 15,000 public and private sector workers throughout the State of Maine, chose Untangle's open source Gateway platform, a solution that not only helps keep confidential data away from prying eyes, but also protects against spam, spyware, phishing, and viruses.

To be built by Europol, the system will pool reports of crimes such as ID or financial theft online, and spot and track illegal activity, from across the 27 EU member states. According to plans, European law enforcement body Europol will receive 300,000 euros ($386,430) to build an alert system that pools reports of cybercrime, such as online identification and financial theft, from across the 27 member states.

Ettiene Sinatambou, the deputy speaker of parliament in Mauritius, has hailed his country’s favourable investment regulations as the major driving force behind the success of ICT in that country. Sanatambou spoke to ITNewsAfrica.com during the African ICT Achievers Awards last week in Johannesburg.

On 17th November the European Commission published the new Work Programme for the ICT theme of the FP7 Specific Programme ‘Cooperation’, defining the priorities for calls for proposals closing in 2009 and 2010 and the criteria that will be used for evaluating the proposals responding to these calls. A specific objective is entitled “ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling”, aiming to develop governance models, process flows, and analytical tools related to a proper understanding, interpretation, visualisation and harnessing of what we can name “e-Participation 2.0″: the potential of on-line collaborations to trigger and shape significant changes in the functioning of future societies.

HAVA mandates that all states and localities upgrade many aspects of their election procedures, such as voting machines, voter registration and poll worker training. It is up to each state to implement the mandates' specifics. HAVA allocates federal funds to states for them to use in implementing the law's mandates.

A generic XML editor that works reasonably well for non-technical users seems to be a myth. Would a simple generic XML editor for end users be a valuable tool? What would it look like?

While Web2.0 communication tools have to be integrated into process of political communication there will be problems and hurdles to be dealt with. Legal frameworks are slow in adapting to the rapidly developing circumstances of the digital age which lead to situations which are not clear cut. Hopefully these problems will slow down the development and adaption of new ways of political communication.

The Center for Technology in Government (CTG) at the University at Albany-SUNY recently released two white papers on government interoperability. Interoperability is a key component of government reform and requires investments that involve complex policy, management, and technology changes that government leaders are often hesitant or unprepared to undertake.

Ettiene Sinatambou, the deputy speaker of parliament in Mauritius, has hailed his country’s favourable investment regulations as the major driving force behind the success of ICT in that country. Sanatambou spoke to ITNewsAfrica.com during the African ICT Achievers Awards last week in Johannesburg.

Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and is funded in part by a grant from the California State Library. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it alone! This is an Open project - the software is open, the data is open, the documentation is open, and the site is open.

An ex-employee of Microsoft has released a new book … on open source software. Titled After the Software Wars, Keith Curtis’ book argues that not only is Microsoft “toast” but that the future of software is open source.

Smivs points out a blandly-worded story from the BBC with scary implications, excerpting "Remote searches of suspect computers will form part of an EU plan to tackle hi-tech crime. The five-year action plan will take steps to combat the growth in cyber theft and the machines used to spread spam and other malicious programs. It will also encourage better sharing of data among European police forces to track down and prosecute criminals. Europol will co-ordinate the investigative work and also issue alerts about cyber crime sprees."

A group including MoveOn.org, Tim O'Reilly, and Newt Gingrich's American Solutions is asking President-elect Barack Obama's transition team to free up content from Change.gov.

The winners of the 2008 European e-Inclusion Awards were announced last night at the e-Inclusion Ministerial Conference in Vienna, the concluding event of the European Commission's "Be Part of it!" campaign. Seven European initiatives have been selected for their innovative uses of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to promote digital and social inclusion in Europe. The Commission also announced the adoption of its communication "Towards an Accessible Information Society," setting strategic orientations on accessibility of ICT (e-accessibility) and in particular on the accessibility of Web sites by persons with disabilities.

Big Blue is reportedly launching a Linux-based collection of virtual desktop applications that run on a server without the need for desktop hardware--or Microsoft software.

Government information collection and sharing programs are too secretive, security and privacy experts tell the House Homeland Security Committee.

soDean writes "The Principles for an Open Transition and a petition were co-launched by Lawrence Lessig, Mozilla, and the Participatory Culture Foundation today. This was in reaction to the announcement that Obama would be posting his transition videos to YouTube. The petition encourages Obama to publish his transition videos with open licenses, make them available for download, and preferably use royalty free/open video formats and standards. Unless YouTube makes some radical changes, the videos will need to be hosted elsewhere."

liraz writes "Stuart Cohen, former CEO of Open Source Development Labs, has written an op-ed on BusinessWeek claiming that the traditional open source business model, which relies solely on support and service revenue streams, is failing to meet the expectations of investors. He discusses the 'great paradox' of the FOSS business model, saying: 'For anyone who hasn't been paying attention to the software industry lately, I have some bad news. The open source business model is broken. Open source code is generally great code, not requiring much support. So open source companies that rely on support and service alone are not long for this world.' Cohen goes on to outline the beginnings of a business model that can work for FOSS going forward."

The Networking TIC Club developed its network in Medellín. On the 13nd of November, it invited the Network of Public Libraries of Medellin Metropolitan Area to present its experience in Bogotá. The Club focuses its effort on reducing the Digital Divide and sharing digital alphabetization success stories. The Club started to work with the Network of Public Libraries as part of its activities to strengthen the local actors and their initiatives in the use of the ICT.

In the framework of the ‘Lisbon Strategy for Growth and Jobs’, the EU has committed itself to improving the legal and administrative environment with the aim of unlocking business potential. Bringing public administrations online and enabling the cross-border communication of enterprises and individuals with them, favours entrepreneurship and facilitates the citizen’s contact with public authorities.

Wikipedia and a host of other websites which employ varying degrees of user-interactivity have changed the face of the internet might have potential in ICT4D and the attempt to bridge the digital divide. The most obvious potential for Web 2.0 applications is that they provide free tools to the user which would otherwise require expensive software packages, one example of this is using the free Google Docs service to replace Microsoft Office.

The National Assembly has proposed a bill for the establishment of a science and technology trust fund to aid science and technological education. The establishment of the trust fund will reduce the reliance on government subvention by agencies in the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology thereby increasing their efficiency.

Python 3.0 was finally released yesterday. As one of the more popular programming languages, particularly for Web applications, Python has a huge following among programmers. Python 3.0, also known as Python 3000, is a new version of the language which is incompatible with the 2.x line of releases. The language is mostly the same, but many details, especially how built-in objects like dictionaries and strings work, have changed considerably, and a lot of deprecated features have finally been removed. Also, the standard library has been reorganised in a few prominent places.

2009 will be the first time, ePart, a new International Conference on eParticipation (www.demo-net.org/epart), will take place following the 8th international EGOV conference 2009 (part of the DEXA conference cluster, www.dexa.org). ePart is dedicated to topics on eParticipation and eDemocracy. ePart will take place 3-4 September 2009 in Linz (AT), i.e. right after EGOV conference 30 August to 2 September 2009 with which ePart will be co-located.

Dan Jellinek was in Vienna on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday for the EU digital inclusion conference. He says that the conference looked at digital inclusion in a very broad sense. It covered efforts to ensure that socially excluded or disadvantaged groups have access to new technologies such as the internet and mobile phones, looking at multiple factors including poverty; health; disability; education; geography; political exclusion; technophobia; language; usability; and many other factors. But It also covered the importance of ensuring that everyone continues to have access to equal services even when they are digitally excluded.

“The principles of freedom or expression and universal access must be safeguarded on the Internet and, consequently, in Internet Governance structures”, said Abdul Waheed Khan, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information yesterday at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Hyderabad, India.

In the past year, the Internet user base in South Africa has seen its highest rate of growth since 2001, increasing by 12.5% to 4.5 million. This is the key finding of the Internet Access in South Africa 2008 study, released today, Thursday, 4 December 2008 by World Wide Worx

On Tuesday a consortium of technology companies, including IBM (IBM), will launch a new initiative designed to help shield the open-source software community from threats posed by companies or individuals holding dubious software patents and seeking payment for alleged infringements by open-source software products.

The EU is investing heavily in e-government to help boost growth while delivering on the benefits of the information society, including greater cross-border collaboration, less fragmented research effort, and access to ICT anywhere, any time and by any one. This report examines how ICT is revolutionising the way citizens, businesses and public administrations interact.

A new administration, a new generation of workers and emerging technologies will fundamentally change how government does business, according to Amit Yoran, chief executive officer of NetWitness and Richard Burk, the former chief architect at the Office of Management and Budget.

AS the world becomes a global village, Nigeria is taking Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to the countryside in a bid to bring modern communication technology to rural people. The National Information Technology Development Agency of Nigeria (Nitda) said the move would expose both primary and secondary scholars to advanced technology.

Africa will in the next two years be having its own satellite; this was announced today in Johannesburg by Intelsat and their partner Convergence Partners. Intelsat are the world’s leading provider of fixed satellite services, and have formed a joint venture with a South African investor group led by Convergence Partners. The group said it will utilise project financing to build and launch a new satellite into the 33º East orbital location, ideally positioned to serve the African continent.

Julia Glidden remembers her trip to the Kingdom of Lesotho.The purpose of the visit was to conduct a workshop on local democracy with government officials and to launch a landmark study on the implementation of local democracy in Lesotho.

Most of you are familiar with the concept of RSS-Feeds, which enable you to collect/check new content of different websites without visiting them. Beyond the readers there are lots of different feed aggregators, allowing you to display and remix different RSS feeds on one or more screens. One example is netvibes. Other services allow you to build a community around the feeds, where members can additionally rate the feeds, comment on it, or post messages, like e.g. friendfeed.

A consortium of technology companies, including IBM (IBM), will today launch a new initiative designed to help shield the open source software community from threats posed by companies or individuals holding dubious software patents and seeking payment for alleged infringements by open-source software products, reports Fortune.

IBM and Canonical yesterday announced a virtualised software bundle with Lotus desktop applications running on top of Ubuntu Linux. The pair of companies say that the Ubuntu-based system is far cheaper than running Microsoft’s Office suite on conventional Windows PCs.

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of eRwanda project Wilson Muyenzi, has said that the government of Rwanda has set aside US$38m (Rwf20.9b ) for the whole national fiber optic connectivity. According to Muyenzi, the World Bank approved $24m (Rwf13.2b) to boost the fiber optic connectivity by creating on-line information access.

W3C announced a new standard that will help Web designers and developers create sites that better meet the needs of users with disabilities and older users. Drawing on extensive experience and community feedback, the "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0" specification improves upon W3C's groundbreaking initial standard for accessible Web content, apply to more advanced technologies, and are more precisely testable.

The Open Document Format continues to gain ground with governments as the format in which they wish to create important documents, despite Microsoft's Office format, OOXML, being recognized as an international standard as well.... The ODF Alliance, with Sun Microsystems and IBM as principal backers, announced at the end of December that Germany and Uruguay had joined 14 other national and eight regional governments in requiring ODF, not OOXML, as the format for government documents.

Great news for ODF in Brazil: it's becoming the official format for storing government agency dox:... [Via Google Translate: "Already in April 2008, the ODF (Open Document Format) had been adopted as national standard in Brazil, but now we know for a release of SERPRO which was published version 4.0 of the Standards for Interoperability of Electronic Government (E-PING ) That mandate the use of ODF in the public service federation...."

Using open standards and open source is the best option for Italy's plans to modernise government, improve education and cut costs, says the Italian open source advocacy group Associazione per il Software Libero. The Italian government presented its e-Goverment plans last week Wednesday.

Objectives of this Assessment Framework is to assess whether and to what extent a given e-Governance project has the characteristics of a good e-governance project delivering 'Value' to stakeholders, To guide in funding of e-governance projects at various stages of their life-cycle (newly starting, roll-out, scaling up, replication),To provide guidelines for mid-term assessment of ongoing initiatives, so that mid-course corrections, if any, can be applied,To provide guidelines for shaping future e-governance projects,To provide material for e-governance training programs,To enhance the trust and confidence of stakeholders by enabling creation of a knowledgebase of all e-Governance projects rated as per a trusted framework.

This programme aims to improve the services of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs with the increased use of ICT and to achieve the model of a paperless office. In doing so, the project aims to demonstrate an e-governance model with increasd use of ICT from improved delivery of public services, and to share the experiences and expertise of e-governance gained with other governmental bodies in Turkey.

The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through open source technologies and products. The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley's most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He revealed he has been asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration....Improvements

Schools should embrace open source, says Miles Berry, headmaster of Alton Convent Prep. Berry chaired the presentation of open source software for British Schools held at the British Education Training and Technology conference (BETT), on 17 January.

An e-Governance project to study, analyze, design and develop reports for Nemmadi Project from Karnataka Electronics Development Corporation (KEONICS) has been bagged by Ram Informatics, engaged in computer software and training.

Second Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) has suggested implementation of e-Governance in all spheres, at all levels of government by 2020 and proposed a legal framework for it in its report.

The Web 2.0 trend has placed a renewed emphasis on interoperability and cooperation between systems and people. The digital libraries community is familiar with interoperability through technologies like OAI-PMH, but is disconnected from the general Web 2.0 community. This disconnect prevents the digital library from taking advantage of the rich network of data, services and interfaces offered by that community. This paper presents a case study of a collection within the Texas A&M Repository that was improved by adopting the principles of cooperation embodied by the term Web 2.0.

Training / workshop on FOSS technologies has been scheduled from 2nd February 2009 to 13th February 2009 for the officials from ASEAN Countries at C-DAC, Chennai. The programme is sponsored by the ASEAN Cooperation.

Australia's Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has issued a consultation paper asking for public input on, among other topics, OA to public sector information.

Jonathan Gray gives a brief summary of what Obama can do to promote openness: Open government data. Make core government data open so that it can be re-used in mashups, visually represented, used in semantic web applications and so on! ... -Open access to publicly funded research. ... -Publish public information in way which makes it easy to re-use. -Legal and licensing clarity. Be clear about what can and can’t be done with public content and data -Make it open by default. Make public content and data - whether its government data, or publicly funded digitisation of cultural heritage artefacts - open by default.

This document intends to give a brief introduction to government interoperability frameworks (GIFs), explain how they are classified and provide details of their common features. It also discusses the importance of open standards in GIFs and why governments should consider open standards seriously when designing or evaluating their GIFs.

This document introduces the concept of pro-poor e-governance; gives two examples of e-governance projects targeted at poor and vulnerable groups; and provides a comprehensive approach to pro-poor e-governance comprised of seven building blocks.

Bihar government's e-Governance 'Jankari' project has bagged the National award for e-governance. This Jankari project envisages Call Centre facility under Right to Information Act (RTI). This award will be given away on February 12, 2009 at the national conference on e-governance in Goa, by the Department of Administrative Reforms under Ministry of Personnel, New Delhi. Bihar is the first state to start the Jankari project, which enables people living in remote corners of the state to make applications under RTI through a telephone call.

Cambridge University Press has recently (2009) published 'ICT4D', edited by Tim Unwin. This provides an authoritative and accessible account of the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in contemporary development practice. It combines theory with practical guidance – including both a conceptual framework for understanding the rapid development of ICT4D, and practitioners’ overviews of the use of ICTs in enterprise, health, governance, education and rural development. Boxed case studies provide detailed examples of issues and initiatives from a wide variety of countries and organisations.

The use of open source by Germany's Foreign Ministry's makes its IT budget small in comparison with that of similar organisations, says Linbit, an Austrian provider of open source IT services. "It's IT budget is a quarter of that of the United Nations, an organisation of similar size." The company says this comparison was made in an overview by Torsten Werner, responsible for the IT unit at the Foreign Ministry, in the 2007 German year book on open source.

At least 55 members from the National Assembly and other staff working at the Assembly, yesterday, completed a three-week's training course on basic information technology skills. The training which is part of an ongoing United Nations Development Programme capacity development project for parliamentarians was aimed, among other things, to equip the honourable members in the use of the internet as a learning resource centre for research development, communication, as well as to provide them with skills necessary to create professional presentations using Powerpoint.

The Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe is proud to announce its latest initiative: pdfreaders.org, a site providing information about PDF with links to Free Software PDF readers for all major operating systems. FSFE president Georg Greve says: 'Interoperability, competition and choice are primary benefits of Open Standards that translate into vendor-independence and better value for money for customers. Although many versions of PDF offer all these benefits for formatted text and documents, files in PDF formats typically come with information that users need to use a specific product. pdfreaders.org provides an alternative to highlight the strengths of PDF as an Open Standard.

Rufus Pollock, Open Data Openness and Licensing, Open Knowledge Foundation Blog, writes, "Why bother about openness and licensing for data? ... It’s crucial because open data is so much easier to break-up and recombine, to use and reuse. We therefore want people to have incentives to make their data open and for open data to be easily usable and reusable — i.e. for open data to form a ‘commons’. A good definition of openness acts as a standard that ensures different open datasets are ‘interoperable’ and therefore do form a commons. Licensing is important because it reduces uncertainty. ..."

On January 26, Manuel Medina Ortega, a Member of the European Parliament from Spain, tabled the Commission's report on the application of Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society. The report is "non-legislative" but makes recommendations. An unofficial text of the report is available here (changes from the previous draft are in bold text). The European Parliament's Legislative Observatory forecasts it could be taken up in the parliament's next plenary sitting, scheduled for March 2009.

Sociolingo talks about a site he came across called '‘Africa i-parliament‘ through the development gateway'. This is an attempt at capacity building for African governments.

ITU TELECOM AFRICA kicks off with the launch of ITU’s African Telecommunication / ICT Indicators 2008 report, which is an invaluable information tool to inform and guide policy-makers, investors, analysts and other observers of Africa’s telecommunications landscape. It contains an extensive overview of key sector developments, and includes a number of recommendations to sustain growth and deepen access to information and communication technologies (ICT) in the region.

eLearning Africa is delighted to announce that this year’s conference, the fourth in the highly successful series of pan-African gatherings, will take place in Senegal. In May 2009, the Continent’s largest annual assembly of eLearning and education professionals from Africa and beyond will convene in the capital, Dakar. Moving to Senegal in 2009, eLearning Africa continues to build and expand a worldwide network for people involved in all aspects of technology-enhanced education and training in Africa, including management and policymaking.

This workshop aims to bring together the best experiences from all over Europe. It will focus on projects that apply web2.0 in government, run by civil society, individual citizens, private companies and government. It will also look into existing policies on how to enable and promote web 2.0 in government.