The possible partnership between UNDP and Telefónica (TF) continues to move ahead.   A face to face meeting between the two parties will take place in NY on 30 September. From the TF side, we are expecting people from the foundation side who had done programme development on the ground. On the UNDO side we have…

We have received a request from the CO in Georgetown to provide policy and technical support to national Parliament. UNDP is currently running a parliamentary support programme which apparently has an ICT compoment. Parliament is planning to have a brand new web site while beefing up its internal capacity to manage ICTs, develop and deploy…

We received a request from BDP’s Deputy Director to provide advice on the above panel which will take place on 9 September. A senior manager from BoM will be representing the organization. The agenda of the meeting is here. Now, this is a topic that is a bit out of our regular path. So I…

The Issue Brief on Science and Technology, Knowledge-sharing and Capacity Building is one of several inputs that will be submitted to the Open Working Group for their consideration. This brief will be discussed at the 6th meeting of the OWG in December of this year. UNESCO is coordinating the process and prepared an annotated outline…

A request on the above was channelled to me via BERA’s Private Sector group. Six questions were forwarded to UNDP and the last one was related to technology (“How is technology helping UNDP’s  mission?”).  As a side note, I find the assumption that technology==ICTs puzzling – and misinformed too. Technology is much much bigger and…

A few days ago we received the latest draft of the e-GAP paper a few days ago. Let us be more precise here: the paper is on Open Government and Participation and the role that GAP and ICTs can play in the process. Here are the comments I shared with the team and that were…

We organized a one day brainstorming meeting with the consultant working on the hype and reality of ICTs in participation, Alexander Treschel (see http://bit.ly/1dBhKLx  for a short bio). Tiago Peixoto from WBI also joined us from DC.  We received the first draft of the paper 30 minutes before the start of the meeting which did not…

After spending almost two weekends and more on the report, we finally got it shape. Certainly, trying to put together inputs from different sectors and actors is quite challenging. It is however possible but it requires plenty of work. After sharing my additions and edits, the BBComm Secretariat asked about our specific contributions to the…

I have been planning on writing a short blog on the HLP report and the role of ICTs in the post-2015 agenda. As I see it, the report has missed a big opportunity here (as the old MDGs did!) by focusing only in one aspect of the potential of the new technologies in enhancing human…

Initial plans for our work to support BBGWG (see http://blog.raulza.me/?p=2041) changed dramatically as the private donor who had publicly committed to support the WG pulled the funding. As a result, we had to rapidly craft a plan B which was coordinated by the ITU’s Broadband Commission Secretariat. ITU agreed to provide a coordinator for the drafting…

Following on our mission of last year, the CO was finally able to recruit an international consultant who was in the country for almost 5 weeks. The consultant produced a series of documents which incorporated many recommendations and areas of work. The CO provided detailed comments to the consultant -which were also shared with me,…

Background UNDP is the development network on the United Nations. On the ground in 177 countries and territories, UNDP offers both global perspectives and local insights to help empower lives and build resiliency in developing countries. The organization is also helping nations to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were set by the international…

OGC is starting research on the above is partnership wit the German Development Institute (GDI, http://bit.ly/13kqp04). A researcher from GDI has already completed a paper on the Tunisian revolution (see http://bit.ly/13kqFML) and thus has inside expertise on the topic. OGC has drafted a concept note (OGC-Concept Note_Social Media & Social Protest and has already met…

For the last few months I have been in touch with the ICT4Gov project of WBI Open Government team exploring ways to work together and build a stronger ground for the real potential and impact of ICTs in governance. More specifically, the idea is to explore in detail how ICTs actually enhance citizen/stakeholder participation in…

Since its formal launching on September 2011 here in New York, we have been following very closely the activities of the partnership. In addition, several UNDP Country Offices have in fact engaged with national OGP activities and support the implementation of  national Open Government Action Plans. Included here are, among others, Montenegro and Ukraine. A…