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On the way to information society
24 May 2003
by Kanti Kumar
Dear Reader,
Digital Opportunity Channel completed its first year on the World Telecommunication Day (May17 ) last week. I take this opportunity to thank you for your support over the past year.
The channel has been making progress since its launch on this day in 2002. Our readership is growing steadily as also our network of organisations working in ICT for development sector. Many of you have written to us, suggesting new resources, giving your feedback on how to improve the channel and alerting us when certain features of the site have malfunctioned. Thanks to all of you!
We initiated Digital Opportunity Channel with the aim of empowering practitioners, community leaders, policymakers and academics with the tools and information they need to utilise ICTs for improving quality of life around the world.
Over the past year, we have laid the foundation for working towards this objective. We have brought you the news of developments in the ICT sector from all over the world. We have presented case studies and best examples not only from our network of over 1500 organisations, but from other organisations and regions as well.
Meanwhile, the preparations for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) has brought into focus the new roles and implications of ICTs. We are at a juncture when the industrial society is rapidly giving way to the information society. In this society of tomorrow, access to information will be the essence of most human activities as also the ability to communicate and disseminate information. Indeed, access to information is being seen as a means to acquire wealth and power.
It is already hard to imagine a world without ICTs. These technologies and tools will only accelerate the evolution of the information society. Therefore it calls for strategic use of ICTs by harnessing them for organising and transforming information into knowledge and communicating that knowledge to a global community for the development of cultures and communities.
To ensure that the benefits of this new, dynamic information society reach the global community, appropriate strategies and roadmaps are required at global, regional and national levels. But often the very communities, especially the marginalized - the have-nots, the unconnected, women, children, senior citizens, people with disabilities - who are implied beneficiaries of these strategies, are left out in the discussions and debates leading to such strategies.
In order to bridge this gap between policymakers and communities, we have initiated - on the eve of our first anniversary - an online discussion forum on Information Society: Voices from the South. We hope this will also help stakeholders from the global South exchange ideas and debate issues about the emerging information society and the WSIS process.
This is the first online discussion forum on Digital Opportunity Channel. In coming months we are going to launch more discussion forums focussing on other aspects of ICTs and their applications. These initiatives are part of our attempt to provide governments, businesses and civil society stakeholders an online community that will inform them about how ICTs can be powerful instruments of social change.
For our future discussion forums, we are training individuals from southern NGOs in moderation. We expect the skills and experience that will be developed in this process will be further used by these organisations in creating and developing more such online communities of practice that will bring southern stakeholders together.
We are also inviting our partners in the sector to take ownership of various parts of this growing portal and develop it together will all community members in an open, participatory manner. The coming months will thus see Digital Opportunity Channel itself evolving into a community-driven community.
I hope you will continue your support to Digital Opportunity Channel and join hands with us in making it a vibrant ICT community.
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