Tens of representatives from a variety of communications organisations came together on the morning of Saturday 29 January at the World Social Forum to take advantage of the rare ‘face-time’ to share information about the events that they believe are critical for the media to cover in Latin American and the Caribbean in 2005 and to schedule news coverage in collaboration.

You can tune in to programming in AMARC, the worldwide network of community radios, in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German and Italian coming live from the world’s biggest gathering of activists.

The new year presents everyone at SANGONeT with a number of fresh and exciting challenges and opportunities, starting with the first SANGONeT "ICTs for Civil Society" conference and exhibition which will be held from 1-3 March 2005 in Fourways, Johannesburg. Read about this and other important plans for 2005 in SANGONeT’s monthly e-newsletter, "Lwati".

Through its Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Policy Monitor for Latin America and the Caribbean, APC held a workshop on ICT policy strategies in Rosario, Argentina, which was attended by the Latin American members of APC, as well as important organisations from the region involved in the subject.

On 15 December 2004 BlueLink the APC member in Bulgaria officially launched Civil Society Information Portal in Bulgaria (www.bluelink.info).

In November 2004, twenty young journalists and civil society representatives from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia and Montenegro learned how to use internet as a tool for organising civil society social movements.

MS Swaminathan Research Foundation and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation called an expert group meeting on “Up-scaling ICT for Poverty Reduction”. The event was held in Chennai, India, from 17–19 November 2004. APC Women’s Networking Support Programme (WNSP) Asia Pacific Coordinator, Cheekay Cinco, was among the participants.

After months of research, the Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA) – APC member in the Philippines- convened a validation workshop to discuss the findings of its ongoing Philippine Communication Rights Report last October 6, 2004 at the Institute of Social Order, Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU).

APC’s newest member, Bytes for All, is an online citizen’s network that connects the people of South Asia on the issues of information and communication technologies (ICT) and development. Bytes for All produces a summary of previous month’s hottest discussion topics on the network. APCNews will now be featuring the summaries on a regular basis. In November deliberations ranged from the FLOSS (Free/libre and open source software) movement in non-profit organisations, ICTs for development, internet governance, and transparency and accountability in transactions to internet standards.