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…

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…