By Monjur Mahmud LONDON, United Kingdom,
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The APC ICT policy workshop ended in London with the call for linking national advocacy to global networks through collaboration and information sharing and working together for long-term sustainability.
The workshop, attended by 18 participants from different countries, provided a unique opportunity to the national portal managers to learn from each other and share their experiences.
First day of the workshop mainly focused on understanding and mapping the information and communication technology (ICT) policy issues that relate to the APC’s work.
Willie Currie of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) presented an overview of APC’s work on infrastructure, sources, processes, and where the work is happening on the global, regional and national stages.
A panel made presentations on ‘Open Access to Infrastructure: What does it mean? Other points discussed included how do you get the infrastructure, how do you build, manage, maintain infrastructure globally, whether competition and neutrality are there or not.
The second day was about defining a strategy for the web-campaign work within the APC policy galaxy. Each participant identified three priority areas for respective national ICT policy.
Who are the main target groups for respective policy work, who is the audience for the online policy content and getting concrete with content were among the issues that discussed on the day facilitated by Anna Feldman, APC workshop coordinator.
Anna stressed the need for content generation to make the ICT policy portal more useful, suggesting not to depending too much on content aggregation in developing the national portal.
The third day was about learning to be effective with the online policy resources (or how to make the sites useful, interesting and effective). Engaging publics including civil society organisations, mainstream media, community media and policy makers with content, was the main task of the day that focused on some practical works.
Some portal managers pointed out that they are facing problems in producing write-ups for their portal. It was also pointed out that quality of articles and write-ups in some cases was not as good as it should be.
On day four, a public forum on ‘Internet Governance – rights, and responsibilities’ was held at the London School of Economics.
The final day of the workshop was about networking the network and working together for long-term sustainability. Executive Director of APC, Anriette Esterhuysen, encouraged the participants to chalk out their plans in the short-term, keeping in mind the 31 December 2006 deadline and also mid-term for the next two years.
It was pointed out that APC’s national ICT policy portals can use huge resources the network presently has in its portal depending on the usability and suitability of respective national portals.
Shahzad Ahmad, Bytesforall Pakistan and Monjur Mahmud, Bytes for All Bangladesh represented B4A network in the APC workshop organised at the Development House from 28 June to 2 July 2006.
Bytesforall is an APC member organisation.
