Global

Last week I looked at the big picture on the digital economy, in the light of UNCTAD’s latest Information Economy Report. This week: some of the issues the digital economy raises for policymakers at a national and local level.

Join us on Twitter on 19 October from 12:00 to 13:00 UTC to discuss Internet Universality Indicators with Guy Berger, Director of Freedom of Expression and Media Development at UNESCO. 

APC’s subgranting programme in its second year awarded a total of USD 273,986 to support its members in achieving APC’s vision. Eighteen member organisations were recipients of 21 grants, and funds were also used to support the research for 28 national GISWatch 2017 reports.

This week’s post is the first of two on the digital economy. UNCTAD – the UN Conference on Trade and Development – published its two-yearly Information Economy Report (IER) last week. It’s consistently one of the more interesting UN publications on the Information Society. Well worth a read.

Robots are talked of more and more these days. Like implants, they’ve moved from science fiction to present reality. Instead of fantasizing over them, we need to understand the role they’re playing in our lives and going to play in them in future.

In the early 1980s, before the internet as we know it existed, activists from different corners of the world were working on stand-alone systems with “human gateways”. Technicians had to travel from one part of the world to another to allow different computer systems to communicate with each other.

This week’s blog post concerns what might happen if the Internet of Things begins to get under your skin.

This video draws on some of the many cases featured in the 2016 GISWatch edition on ESCRs and the internet, and adds an imaginary twist that enables easier understanding of the topic. How can we explain the impact of the internet with a simple metaphor? What if we imagined for a few minutes that the internet was a live animal, that moves and adapts, even camouflages itself, like a zebra? W...