INTERVIEWS and OPINIONS

15.05.2008 Walter Fust, former Director-General of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) envisions a knowledge safety net where human values go beyond the statistics of the Gross National Product (GNP). He acknowledges telecentre.org’s work in enabling people to benefit from the transformative power of technology.

09.05.2008 Mark MacGann, Director General of European Information & Communications Technology Industry Association believes that despite being one of the major contributors to climate change, the ICT industry has the potential to tackle the problem by integrating environmental responsibility with corporate strategy.

30.04.2008 Telecentres can serve as an important source of information by connecting citizens with the government. A growing trend of commercialisation is however treating such entitlements as services and citizens as customers who pay service charges, writes research associate Vivek Vaidyanathan.

22.04.2008 Kristine Pearson, chief executive of Freeplay Foundation, is the creator of the wind-up and solar-powered Lifeline radio, the first such initiative in the humanitarian sector. She emphasises the use of renewable and clean energy solutions to improve access to communication for the poor.

16.04.2008 Project Gutenberg (PG), an online source of books is a unique initiative to combine traditional printing with digital technology. Gregory Newby, the CEO, PG and Michael Hart, the founder-editor of the project highlight their new ventures and overall management of e-Books.

01.04.2008 From deployment of telegraph in 1854 to the age of Internet, Blackberries, iPods or Personal Digital Assistants, information and communication technology has traversed a long path. Thomas B. Riley, Executive Director, Commonwealth Centre for e-Governance, discusses the evolution of ICTs and assesses the wider changes in society due to their emergence.

25.03.2008 Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, was in Mumbai, India to launch his new commercial venture ‘Wikia’. Here he shared his desire to increase local Indian language contributions on the site and the need to challenge spam content.

20.02.2008 Steve Buckley of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters was in India recently. Aware of the countless hurdles faced by community radio in the country, he said that the policy here was restrictive in nature.

25.10.2007 To capitalize on the inherent advantage of a hugely diverse society, organizations need to adopt a similar policy consciousness, says Kiran Karnik, President of NASSCOM. Innovation needs to be set free of pre-defined criteria of homogeneous processes and business models, and encourage inter-disciplinary interaction.

23.08.2007 ICT4D dgCommunity has taken an extensive interview of Barbara Fillip from the Academy for Educational Development (AED) and Mark Surman from Telecentre.org, on major telecenters' issues, the outputs of a recent publication untitled "Making the connection: Scaling Telecenters for development" .

14.08.2007 Vamshi Reddy and Shiva Bayyapunedi, Co-Founders and Directors of Apalya Technologies have been interviewed by egov magazine and discussed on the success and barriers of bringing informative entertainment into the hands of mobile users.

06.08.2007 The basis for the track on Digital Learning at eIndia 2007 was clearly pronounced by the keynote speakers when they spoke of increased outreach and inclusion; transformation of teachers into ‘senior’ learners and facilitators, and students into inquisitive explorers of the digital age; and gearing up of teaching-learning practices to the challenges of a society forty years from today.

03.08.2007 The Digital LEARNING magazine interviews Vikas Joshi, Chairman, and Managing Director of Harbinger Group who speaks about how his leadership at Harbinger has resulted in groundbreaking product innovations in the e-Learning industry.

27.07.2007 Director of Health and Human Services Industry, Microsoft Asia Pacific Gabe Rijpma tells the ehealth team about Microsoft's investments to NGOs and allocation for healthcare IT. The interview also explores Gabe's candid views about India's e-healthcare scenario.

27.07.2007 Citizen smart cards are a new revolution that provide a unique citizen number which is centralized in a national register of Indian citizens.It can bring the benefits of e-governance as the use of data warehousing and data mining could also help the government monitor its welfare schemes effectively.

24.07.2007 Egov magazine interviews Kuanishbek Esekeev, the Chairman of Agency for Informatisation and Communications, Republic of Kazakhstan on the development of IT-technologies and the vision of the National e-Government Programme of the country.

23.07.2007 Paul Horwitz who directs the Computer-Assisted Performance Assessment project, recommends coming up with new educational tools to help the students in more creative way.

12.07.2007 Sarbuland Khan, the executive coordinator of the Global Alliance for ICT and Development (GAID) in an interview to IPS, states that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) offers the best hope of empowering the poor and involving civil society in the development process. He hits out at governments that do not share information on water, health, food and sanitation.

09.07.2007 The Dubai e-Government initiative was launched in 2003 which put more than 2,600 government services online. Vikas Kanungo of m-GovWorld interviews the acting director of e-Services, Dubai e-Government department Ms. Rehab Lootah.

04.07.2007 Global IT Company Intel plans to take Africa to the next level in technology by introducing digital literacy in the continent. Dr Martina A. Roth, Director, Intel Education Group for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), speaks on the challenges in incorporating ICT in ways that support 21st-century skills.