A contact from Intel asked me to provide feedback on a white paper the company is finishing on broadband. The draft paper is here: Intel-Broadband_v 1. The paper looks good but I have a few issues which I briefly highlight below. 1. Unlike others, I do not think broadband alone is going to promote all…

Objectives Conduct 3 day workshop on strategy development with the existing e-governance committee (egovCom), assess gaps and pinpoint emerging issues Meet with local counterparts to explore synergies with other sectors that can benefit from related e-governance work Liaise with UNDP CO and strategize on how to integrate current and pipeline programming using e-governance as a…

I received a request from UNDP Panamá to provide inputs for a press article on e-governance that will be published this coming Tuesday. The office received 5 questions and I am replying to three of them. The article and my inputs are in Spanish. 1.       ¿Qué es la gobernanza electrónica? El surgimiento del Internet a…

Here are some more ideas about the overall content. 1. Overview of e-governance. Definitions. Government vs. governance. Large    context of ICT for Development. Relevance of national contexts.    Insitutional development and national capacities. 2. Policy: assess the overall policy environment, relate to ongoing or  planned development plans and agendas, link to MDGs and other…

Purpose/Objective of Mission: Support to Ukraine’s ongoing Open Government Partnership (OGP) participation, meet local partners and explore ways to finance OGP commitments Liaise with ongoing Local Governance project staff which has a key e-governance component Provide advise on ongoing project to crowd source the theme of the next NHDR Explore ways in which CO can…

Background I have personally been engaged in the post-015 agenda since September of 2011. I helped BDP Dir draft the project document that was finally approved in December. I specially contributed to the section on the virtual platform which envisaged using mobile technologies such as SMS to increase the level of participation in setting up…

A couple of months ago, Bratislava created an “innovation” fund that is supposed to allocate small grants to COs in the region on a competitive basis. The first tranche of the fund has been launched and several COs have already received funding. Ukraine is one of the COs selected. While on mission in Kyiv, I…

Monday The bad weather in NYC ruined my travel plans to San Jose.  I left home around 11am but the flight only took off at 5:45pm. I missed the connecting flight in Miami which departed at 8pm. Had to spent the night in of of the many hotels that surround Miami’s airport. Tuesday Finally arrived…

Now that Rio+20 is over, I expect the work on post0-2015 will accelerate in the coming  weeks, specially after senior managers return to NY after their holidays. While Rio in the did come up with some sort of agreement (very long indeed, see http://www.uncsd2012.org/thefuturewewant.html), we managed to meet with the Germans who are contributing 1…

Demand for e-governance related services continues to grow. In the last week or so, we saw requests from Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, BIH, Costa Rica and Ukraine. While the first three can be seen in the light of traditional e-governance support (development of national strategies and implementation of priorities) the last two are relate to e-health and…

The governance issues for the post2015 activities continues to evolve. On the technical side, we have agreed to bring all the different aspects under one umbrella. This includes the platform itself, the so-called crowdsourcing (now rename to open analytics) and the planned mobile app for enticing voting and participation. An improved version of TWs will…

This is another paper which OGC has commissioned. The first draft has been shared and did generate  negative reaction (unwarranted in my opinion)  from some DGP quarters. The first draft of the paper is here: DG-SHD-Final-Report-IDCR-14-May-2012 ) Here are my initial set of comments. 1. I have issues with the way the paper sees democracy,…

Here are the updates on this on out work with the BCPR’s Conflict Prevention unit: 1. Supporting IPI study on crowdsourcing and conflict prevention funded by BCPR. The study will compile several case studies and shed some light on the usefulness (or not) of mobiles 2. Planning to have a joint e-gov/Conflict CoP before the…

OCG is working on a few papers for both Rio+20 and post-2015. One of them is this one (ODI-Outline-Democratic-Governance-and-MDGs-23-May-2012 which has been commissioned to ODI. Here are my comments. 1. Methodology: I am unsure whether I understood the proposed methodology. The opening paragraph argues for evidence-based contributions, but it is not clear to me where…

Interesting meeting with a rep from Ushahidi who is based not in Nairobi but in cosy San Francisco. Meeting lasted an hour more or less but I think we managed to bore the guy as he was yawning quite a bit while we spoke about exciting UNDP stuff. Or maybe it was too early for…