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…

2013 is not 2000. This short and seemingly tautological phrase was repeated several times during the first day of the just-finalized 2013 Global MDG meeting in Bogotá. It was also reused to magnify how much has changed since the Millennium Declaration was issued. While many of such changes might have negative implications for developing countries,…

With contributions from team members Ruhiya, Minerva and Maartje, here is the draft issues note that we finished just in time for distribution at the upcoming post-2015 Global Governance consultation meeting that will take place in Johannesburg next week.  Since we did not have time to get the paper peer-reviewed, the issue paper will initially…

I submitted a proposal for a paper (see http://blog.raulza.me/?p=1736) for the upcoming Global MDG meeting that will take place next week in Bogotá, Colombia. The proposal was accepted. I have just finished the paper, which is here: MDG-innovations-ICTs-2013-02-19-rz. I will present the paper at the meeting in Colombia. I have already seen a draft agenda, and…

This article was requested by the UK United Nations Association (http://www.una.org.uk/) and will be published in the next issue of their flagship publication, New World. According to UNA, New World has over 20,000 readers in over 100 countries. Thus, the article is customized for such readership. The new century is just about to enter its…