Information Policy

EC: First Internet Governance Forum: Internet must remain the driver for democracy and economic development

The first meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) began in Athens on Monday, 30 October. It is an important milestone agreed last November at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis (WSIS) as part of the drive to internationalise internet governance, to safeguard freedom online and to bridge the global digital divide. The Commission strongly supports this forum as a unique opportunity for an open multi-stakeholder policy dialogue on internet governance and development, helping to make the Tunis agreement reality.

http://europa.eu.int/information_society/policy/internet_gov/index_en.htm

New ICT Learning Centre Opens for Disabled Students

Portland College, a national residential specialist college for physically disabled students, recently unveiled the UK's first purpose-built ICT facility designed to cater specifically for the needs of disabled students. Around 300 students attend the college, ranging in age from 16-60 and all have some form of physical disability, either congenital or acquired through accident or illness. The new ICT Centre will facilitate their learning progression and career development, benefiting as it does from high-standard equipment and furniture throughout, from the IT facilities to the seating. Such levels of specification were secured thanks to more than six years of dedicated fundraising effort by the college. With help from a number of gratefully-received charitable donations and corporate sponsorships, the required sum of £3.6million was raised and the centre was opened to students earlier this year.

http://www.dexigner.com/architecture/news-g9484.html

UNESCO Launch of website for municipality in Casablanca, Morocco

An information system for the municipality of Sidi El Bernoussi in Casablanca, Morocco, that was financed jointly by UNESCO and ISESCO was officially launched on 20 October 2006. Universal access to information and knowledge, and more particularly to public domain information, is one of the fundamental principles on which the knowledge societies are based. It is an essential condition for the participation of all to an equitable knowledge society and for the acceleration of the economic and social development.

UNESCO contributes towards establishing an enabling environment to universal access to information and knowledge. The "Recommendation concerning the promotion and the use of the multilingualism and the universal access to the cyberspace", adopted in 2003, underlines the importance of promoting and disseminating public domain information.

Among the different types of public domain information, it is necessary to emphasize the importance of governmental public domain information, which contributes largely to the economic and social development of society.

UNESCO also focuses on the importance of decentralization and building capacities of the public administration and the decentralized governance structures in order to create a strategic, participative and human rights-based management. The main idea is to produce and disseminate public information that corresponds to the needs of every citizen through means that cost as least as possible, considering in particular the needs of disadvantaged and marginalized people.

The pilot project of UNESCO and ISESCO takes into account these elements and aims at supporting the use of the ICT in the municipality of Sidi Bernoussi in co-operation with the Center for Media Freedom in the Middle East and North Africa (CMF MENA).

The project is composed of the following elements:

• Underscoring good governance, a directory was created in order to make the information emanated by the public authorities easily accessible.
• Drawing attention to service provided to citizens a website was created to enable citizens to make informed decisions on the issues that affect their everyday life, their environment and their future.
• Lastly, emphasizing good governance, and as expressed in the Pact of Good Management adopted by the Moroccan government, a charter of good governance was elaborated in order to preserve and to build trust between the local authorities and the inhabitants of the municipality.

Through this pilot project, it is expected that the experience of e-governance at the local level will be extended to cities of Morocco in order to make the municipalities’ activities more transparent and better serve orientated.

http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=23320&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

Brazilian government faces challenge over proprietary tax software

The Free Software Foundation - Latin America (FSFLA) is campaigning against the Brazilian government's regulations that some citizens must use non-free software for paying taxes. Referring to the software as "Softwares Impostos," a term that puns in Portuguese on "taxes" and "imposed," FSFLA has launched a letter-writing campaign against the requirement, arguing that it is both contrary to current social policies and a violation of the Brazilian constitution.

http://www.egovnews.org/?p=1184

Networking for Policy Change: An Advocacy Training Toolkit by POLICY

The toolkit is organised around a well-developed model tested over time and within diverse cultures for accomplishing advocacy objectives. The building blocks of advocacy are the formation of networks, the identification of political opportunities, and the organisation of campaigns. The toolkit includes a section on each of these building blocks. Each section contains background notes, learning objectives and handouts.

http://www.policyproject.com/pubs/advocacy/English/Introduction.pdf