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Applications are now open for the 2009 Impact Awards.

Organisations working with children in Africa or South Asia are
invited to apply.

The Middle East and North Africa (TC-MENA) made a distinctive mark in eINDIA 2008 Awards, winning honours for three development projects from Syria,Egypt and Sudan run by leaders of Telecentre in MENA

Frederick Noronha, of APC member organisation BytesforAll, was crowned Outstanding Participant at the recent Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) Community workshop in Auroville, India.

The third Global Knowledge Conference, or GK3, has officially started today. The words “emerging people, emerging markets and emerging technologies”, the three main topics that structure this conference, were repeated many times by the speakers (which included the deputy prime minister of Malaysia). The words “human rights” or “freedom”, however, weren not mentioned not even once. This seemed weird, given what is happening in the streets of Kuala Lumpur, a few minutes away from fancy conference centre: people are being arrested for protesting peacefully against the government.

With general elections just around the corner in Kenya, anxiety is looming everywhere. Aspirants are looking for ways and means to woo voters to their sides.

Eduardo Nuñez, Director of the Brazilian Institute of Statistics, Marthin Hilbert, Coordinator of the Information Society Programme of UN-ECLAC, and Mansour Farah, Team Leader of the ICT Division of UN-ESCWA, all made presentations at the IGF Panel Discussion on the Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development. The presentations focused on describing the partnership and its current activities.

Recommendations developed by workshop participants focused on four main themes; enhancing the development of and access to infrastructure; enabling policies and financing frameworks; offering technological choice, responding to demand and addressing the challenge/opportunities of convergence; and advancing the development dimensions of ICT regulation.

Mandriva recently made an announcement that they would be supplying the Nigerian government with 17,000 Classmate PC's running Mandriva Linux. Now they have published an An open letter to Steve Ballmer of Microsoft after hearing that the customer will be replacing the original software with Windows.

Bangladesh NGOs Network for Radio and Communication (BNNRC) participates actively in Voter Registration for preparing a fresh voter list with photographs and National Identity Card (NID) program through the Rural Knowledge Centre(RKC) taken by the Bangladesh Election Commission in the countrywide.

Citizens in China and Europe from the academia, NGO, companies, government met in Liège (Belgium) to exchange perspectives and discuss on the topic of Information Society and the Internet in China and Europe. The workshop on "IT systems on the age of the Internet" (4-5 October) was the first step of the China-Europe Forum (6-7 October).