Yesterday I met with a colleague from UNITAR who provided an update on the relation between them and Microsoft. UNITAR and MS signed a collaoration agreement in 2007/8 and are now planning to expand their joint work supporting Microsoft’s own 4Afrika initiative (http://www.microsoft.com/africa/4afrika/. UNITAR has already explored the possibility of working with UNDP in a…

BDP has recently appointed a focal point for the above who is part of the Poverty Group. We have had a couple of meetings with the team working on SSTC including one with the UNDP Bangladesh advisor for the Access to Information Programme. While the relationship between this group and the UN South-South unit which…

I have  been in contact with the UNDP office in Tripoli discussing ways to support the completion of e-gov strategy and subsequent implementation. The effort is lead by the Ministry of Telecommunications who in turn has already hired PWCs to assist with the completion of the exercise. An initial presentation from the Ministry has bee…

A result from the mission I did to Ukraine last year was an agreement with the CO to support with a small grant activities related to Open Government and the Ukraine National Action Plan. The CO continued the engagement they had with the National E-governance Center and developed this proposal which calls for the creation…

I was supposed to travel to Bishkek to attend an ICTD/e-governance meeting on 5 June which included the participation of the Primer Minister but was unable to travel thanks to my foot injury (the latest agenda of the meeting is here:  Agenda e-leadership).  Instead, the CO asked to prepare a draft speech to be delivered…

Since the dawn of the new Millennium we have seen rapid changes in the ICT environment where mobiles and mobility are clear trend setters. The same can be said about the use and deployment of ICTs in the public sector. We started with e-government and then moved to e-governance a few year later -we can…

Below is a communication I sent to BDP Senior Management on the above. In lieu of the changes that are heading our way in the near future, I thought I should share with you an early report on the outcomes for the recent Istanbul CoP on ICTs, Inclusive Governance and Conflict Prevention. First of all,…

1. It is important to get one of the international experts to speak about open and bottom-up innovation. One of them has a draft paper on this which I have shared with the e-gov team in Istanbul. This will hopefully  balance a bit the”NESTA” approach  and which in my view does not take into account…

The idea of innovation, which is certainly not new to development practitioners, is again picking up steam. In fact, it has become a buzzword that is permeating many discussions and conversations on development and beyond. The Arab Spring and the many other new social movements in both the developed and developing countries have brought back…

Open data has been growing by leaps and bounds all around the globe – which is indeed welcome. However, we should not forget that Open Data is sort of the “second wave” of the Freedom of information movement that rapidly started to expand in the 1990s. Nowadays, over 100 countries have legislation opening public information…

It seems the Saudi’s are pretty active when it comes to ICTs. We have already provided inputs and support to the upcoming Global Crowdsourcing Fund (http://blog.raulza.me/?p=2059) and the more recent draft national FOSS policy (http://blog.raulza.me/?p=2104http://blog.raulza.me/?p=2104). Now we have an interesting proposal for creation a national cloud system. The proposal is here: Saudi Cloud Computing Project.…

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…