Had a late conference call with UNDP Guatemala on Tuesday evening. It seems the new government, which is led by retired army officers, is very interested on e-governance and FOSS. The government has just crated a new Ministry which will focus on transparency while also having some comptroller functions. The head of the new Ministry…

DGG Director circulated a request to comment on UNDP Djibouti’s plan programmes. Two of the notes address e-governance (see djibouti-Profil-de-projet-egov and djibouti-Profil-de-projet-egov-2). After a quik review and with inputs from Serge, here is our response. I have received a request from Geraldine to provide initial comments to the e-governance concept notes you kindly shared with…

Country office demand for our work on e-governance continues to be on the increase. This week alone Djibouti, Libya, Moldova and Tunisia have asked for support. Last week, DGG Director circulated a series of concept notes prepared by our CO in Djibouti. e-governance is one of the themes they want to address. The CO wants…

Below is a draft concept note on the above I prepared from DGG Directorate this week. DGG and Media Development  Background UNDP’s support to media development has been scant to say the least. UNESCO and other UN agencies have usually taken the lead here for many years now.  While Access to Information (A2I) become a…

The Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) Using ICTs to effectively support the Rio Agenda Background The idea of SDNP ( http://www.undpegov.org/sdnp/) emerged during preparations for the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit with the perception that many countries, especially poorer ones, lacked a reliable information base to make effective decisions and promote sustainable development issues.…

Demands for Open Government (OG) initiatives seem to be on the rise as this week alone I was involved in two conference calls. In addition to Macedonia, where UNDP and the WB have agreed to work together on the topic  (and work will expand to Moldova eventually), we spoke to a group of Tunisian activists…

Such is the title of a recent post on a Davos meeting of thirty-five or so social innovators from around the globe. Social innovation is not a new concept, not by a long shot. What perhaps is unique about social innovation today is that it is natively emerging in developing countries, including some of the…

I was on leave all of last week so no real updates to report from trying to rest  -although I did spent a lot of time trying to finalize the Mobiles primer. It seems that my mission report on Costa Rica was apparently not well received by project staff. Not sure I understand the reason…

It seems that the Motorotola Solutions Foundation (http://responsibility.motorolasolutions.com/) is having second second thoughts about the mobile apps mapping research we have proposed. I got an email from our counterparts there asking for additional information. Below is that I sent. 1. UN and UNDP guidelines are clear in terms if the way we can engage with …

Once again, we have witnessed the power of the Internet (not only social media!) to empower stakeholders and oppose potential legislation that, some will argue, takes only into account the perspective of those who have resources to lobby the US Congress. For now, SOPA/PIPA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act), essentially promoted by the film and recording industry of the…

On an invitation of the autonomous government (Junta) of Andalucía, I spent the whole week meeting with government representatives, private sector companies and academics working on ICTD  and using Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) to deliver services and information to the people. Political stability and political will has made this possible as long term policies have…

Another short week for me as I came back to the office on the 4th. Not that work stops because I am on leave, not at all. We had our first e-gov staff meeting of 2012 and focused on identifying priority areas for 2012. They are: Ongoing Mobile governance – primer, case studies, guidance note,…