Information Policy

Yandex: Runet grows by 66% in 2007

The company Yandex has published its survey regarding the internet development in Russia as of Fall – Winter 2007. The number of sites in Runet in 2007 has grown by 66%. The number of domains registered in the regions is increasing a little bit slower (57% over the past year). According to the survey, Moscow and St. Petersburg are the leaders regarding the internet penetration and activity of the internet users.

http://eng.cnews.ru/news/line/indexEn.shtml?2007/12/25/281014

ICANN Posts 2007 Annual Report

ICANN has released its second annual report, covering in detail the organization's achievements and progress over the past 12 months. "I am delighted to announce the release of our second annual report," said Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN's President and CEO. "As an organization we have made great progress this year, both in terms of policy work and in the quality of our operations. We have also made great efforts in relation to transparency and accountability".

http://icann.org/announcements/announcement-23dec07.htm

Top Five Open Source Stories Of 2007

It's been a landmark year for open source, and in so many different ways that even a casual survey of the year's events will range far and wide. Here's a quick rundown of what to me were the top five open source events of the year -- not an exhaustive list, of course, but the things that best reflected how important and widely entrenched open source software (especially Linux) has become.

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/12/top_five_openso.html

Call for broadband community centres in Malaysia

Alcatel-Lucent is bringing broadband based community centres in order to deliver high-speed Internet services to rural folk in Malaysia.

The broadband community centres can provide rural folk with basic telecommunication services, as well as facilities such as mobile banking. In India, farmers are using their local broadband community centres to conduct e-Agriculture activities, such as checking up on local prices of goods online and selling their produce over the Internet. While in Philippines, villagers are able to make even small transactions from their villages without having to travel to the nearest bank which may be quite a distance away.

http://www.egovonline.net/news/news-details.asp?newsid=12977

Bloggers and Journalists: Friends or Foes?

Audio and video of the blogging panel from this year’s Society of Professional Journalists Convention:

Legal action against bloggers has skyrocketed during the past three years. While some cases have merit, most are lawsuits designed to suppress free speech. Meanwhile, journalists have sought to differentiate themselves from bloggers through self-regulation and legislation. But should they? As new organizations have begun to embrace blogs and user-generated content, the “blogging v. journalism” debate has begun to dissolve, replaced instead by a greater awareness that what threatens bloggers today may well threaten professional journalists tomorrow.

http://www.cyberjournalist.net/bloggers-and-journalists-friends-or-foes/

Technology in 2008

The Economist makes three predictions for the new year: 1. Surfing will slow (as cyberspace become more crowded with traffic with higher bit rates from more people and many more machines and devices); 2. Surfing will detach (as spectrum freed by digital broadcasting is auctioned to providers of Internet services for wireless connectivity); and 3. Surfing—and everything else computer-related—will open (as the open commons movement gains support and impact).

http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/techview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10410912

UN agency announces global standards for Internet television services

The lead United Nations agency for information and communication technology (ICT) announced the first set of global standards for providing television services over the Internet, a move that is expected to fuel innovation and competition in an emerging field. The standards for Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) were developed by the UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU) with input from leading service providers and manufacturers from the ICT sector.

They “cement ITU’s role as the global leader in IPTV standards development,” the agency said in a press statement.

Highlighting the importance of the guidelines, the Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau said they will “encourage innovation, help mask the complexity of services, guarantee quality of service, ensure interoperability and, ultimately, help players remain competitive.”

According to the agency, IPTV is a key element of a “triple-play package” of voice, video and data services, noting that “standardization is imperative if service providers are to offer high quality products with value-additions, such as video-on-demand services that will inevitably drive the market.

“A combination of voice, Internet and video services over a single broadband link and from a single provider is foreseen as the ultimate goal of the broadband revolution,” it added.

http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=25715&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

Telecentre on Wheels: A new way to access information in rural India

"Telecentre on Wheels" is the name of a six-month experimental project for remote villages in West Bengal, India. It was recently launched by the Change Initiatives, a rural Indian NGO, with support from UNESCO and the West Bengal Renewable Energy Development Agency (WBREDA).

http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=25713&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

2007 Global Accountability Report

The 2007 Global Accountability Report assesses thirty of the world's most powerful organisations from intergovernmental, non-governmental, and corporate sectors. The Report analyzes each organization's capabilities according to the four dimensions of accountability as defined by the Global Accountability Framework: transparency, participation, evaluation, and complaint and response mechanisms. The United Nations Development Program is ranked highest among the organizations studied, with the Asian Development Bank and Christian Aid tied for second. Robert Lloyd, Jeffrey Oatham and Michael Hammer, One World Trust, 2007.

http://www.oneworldtrust.org/?display=index_2007_home

Japan picks Sun for e-governance

by Sourav Dutta

Japan has chosen Sun Microsystems to create an open, web 2.0 architecture that will better leverage IT to deliver government services to citizens.

Sun explained that governments around the globe are keen to use IT to give their constituents a single point of access to available governmental services. Open Source technologies, such as the OpenSolaris operating system (OS), help foster an ecosystem of developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) that can be leveraged by governments as it looks to scale the initiative and provide more services to the country.

The government of Japan has been exploring ways to provide electronic government services for many years, which led to the formulation of the 'New IT Reform Strategy' in January 2006. The strategy has a goal of making 50 per cent of all applications and filings for government agencies to be submitted online by 2010.

Sun was chosen to create an integrated and secure network, called Trusted Network, which will help enable a one-stop service infrastructure. The complete Sun solution is comprised of OpenSolaris OS, Sun Java System Identity Manager software, Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite and Sun Ray thin clients.

http://www.digitalmediaasia.com/default.asp?ArticleID=28448