Category: e-governance

I was in touch with our team supporting the ongoing meeting in Kenya at the end of day 1. It seems the meeting went pretty well with over 60 people attending the three sessions we had planned on policy, governance and MDGs. I was also informed some of the emerging issues which also included feedback…

A couple of weeks ago I received a message from the project manager of the FOSS project UNDP is supporting in the Kingdom. The manager, who I happen to know well, was asking for inputs on a draft FOSS policy which apparently will be presented to decision makers in the near future.  I painstakingly went…

We received the first draft of the guidance note that we have, jointly with BCPR, outsourced to an external consultant with a strong background on conflict prevention. The draft is here: GN 26 April Draft1 Copy WordDoc. I shared the comments below with both BCPR and the consultant. 1. As mentioned in a previous message,…

BDP Director will be in Brussels next week meeting with EU/EC representatives and also exploring funding opportunities. Several DGG sub-practices were requested to provide proposals which  the e-gov team diligently produced. Today we got feedback from our Practice Director indicating that the proposals needed to be  strengthened as it was not clear what exactly we…

The UN Committee of Experts on Public Administration, created by ECOSOC in 2001, meets on an annual basis. There are 24 experts from various backgrounds who are appointed by the UN for a period of 4 years. The latest CEPA meeting started Monday and DGG Director was invited to speak in one if the opening…

Last week I received a request from RBLAC to field an interview with a telecoms publication on broadband. The magazine is here: http://ahcietlarevista.net/ and curiously, the latest issue has an interview with Richard Stallman, the father of Free Software. I received 10 questions from one the analysts of the magazine. Some of them were addressing…

A few days ago we got a request from DGG dir to furnish data on the sub-practice, including: countries or country typology/regions your teams support directly; number of experts available for country support (including experts from the DG roster);  regional focus, priority countries;  key areas of focus  and challenges; examples  of COs that we supported…

IBM has reached back to us after a ling hiatus. A few years ago IBM and Oracle gave UNDP 300,000 USD to support work on open standards and interoperability. There is still close to 40k which remains unspent, sitting in a financial limbo somewhere in UNDP.  To access these funds we will need a signed…

KICG has been awarded USD 250,000 from GP IV funds to launch a programme on innovation. The latest version of the prodoc with comments from e-gov team members is here: ProDoc – Promoting open innovation. In addition to the edited prodoc, I submitted the comments below as part of the virtual PAC. 1.This sort of…

I have been engaged with the Riyadh UNDP office since last summer helping them develop a proposal on what initially they called a global portal to capture contributions from citizens to support development initiatives. Last November I sent a revised version to them (Saudi-crowdfunding-2012-11-06-rz) which essentially introduced the idea of crowdfunding and softened the heavy…

We were requested to submit th above report early this week. The actual ROAR reports on this SL are appalling as we usually get very few countries (between 10 -15 per year) directly reporting here. Luckily we have our almost annual mapping exercises and clear evidence of CO reporting to other SLs and in some…

Overview The first face to face meeting of the BBComm WG on Gender and ICTs (WGGICT) which is chaired by Helen Clark took place last Saturday in Mexico City. The objective of the meeting was to build on the first virtual call that took place in end January (minutes of that meeting are here: BBComm-WGGICT-2013-final)…

Building on inputs provided by Ruhiya and Maartje, here are the comments I submitted to the drafting team on the latest iteration of the report. 1. The report, albeit a bit longish, does address most of the current core  issues. However, when it comes to consider the benefits and impact of  ICTs the report seems…

Taking advantage of my participation in the 2013 Global MDG meeting in Bogotá, I arranged with the CO to provide policy support for the upcoming innovation center programme as well as for any other initiatives they deemed relevant.  A couple of additional items did pop up. National Innovation Center The Government of Colombia via the…

I was contacted by BDP directorate to provide input to a draft of the above mentioned report which I had not seen. The report had a long paragraph on e-governance activities which was apparently drawn from a submission our team made to DGG directorate a few weeks back. The content is the draft was not…