Blog

In Kenya especially the arid and semi-arid areas, scenes of idle land are common. These pieces of land are deemed unproductive.

NepaLinux and Free Geek have been announced co-winners of APC Chris Nicol FOSS Prize 2007 in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Erika Smith, from APC’s women’s programme, blogged live from the Gender Evaluation Methodology (GEM) global trainers exchange, held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from 23-27 July 2007.

Blog for creating awareness in community, government bureaucracy and all concerned about ICT, e-Governance, citizen services, poverty alleviation through ICT and contribute empowering society into knowledge based society

The private yet very important room! The toilet is one room that every human being -- regardless of race, social status or gender -- can never avoid. To most people, visiting the washroom requires high degree of secrecy. Yet, often, this secrecy is seldom given priority especially in public places.

Michal Janda of E-Connect, Czech Republic reminded us of this interesting study about economic impact of free and open source (FOSS) available from
http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf. E-Connect's English pages are here

In the present context of Nepal, excluding the government offices and huge financial institutions, more than 90% of the PC’s run pirated version of Microsoft Windows. Despite the persuasion and the creation of awareness, as long as the piracy continues it will always be difficult for the users to switch to Open Source alternatives such as Linux. The major reasons behind it are the cost and the vendor lock.

Of all the many bytes emerging out of Athens and the IGF, this one made the most sense to me: Piracy creates jobs, but [Free Software and] Open Source and Open Standards create opportunity, create entrepreneurs. And I think that's the challenge for the href="http://www.igfgreece2006.gr">IGF as well, how to look at it is a public interest forum, the
Internet is a public space, and how can we facilitate maximum sharing, maximum creativity, peer production, new models, innovation.
-- Anriette Esterhuysen, at the Internet Governance Forum, Athens, November 1, 2006 http://www.intgovforum.org/IGF-Panel2-311006am.txt.

In September 2006, APC launched a new prize called the Chris Nicol FOSS Prize. It's meant to encourage projects that make use of innovative free and open source software technologies in their activities. Coordinator Karel Novotny was asked by Brazilian journalist Luisa Gockel why the ordinary user should care about this relatively new F-O-S-S acronym.

It emerged yesterday, that a lot of journalists are shying away from covering ICT news and projects because they do not understand the complex terminology and jargon used by ICT project teams.