It’s time for our monthly meeting - Stammtisch - again, this time even punctual one month after our last one - Stammtisch #4.

This meeting is for curious people in Vienna to find out about ICT4D in general, what we do, how to help and generally just to have a nice evening. We’d be happy to get to know a lot of new people.

What: ICT4D.at Stammtisch

Where: Cafe Benno, Alser Straße 67, Wien

When: Thursday, 11. March 2009, 19:00

If you intend to come it would be great if you could notify us via mail or RSVP on

Yesterday’s 4th ICT4D.at Stammtisch was quite nice again, had a good time with interesting discussions. People that participated - except me:

• Sarah Funk - lecturer for International Development at University of Vienna
• Christoph Derndorfer - OLPC Austria
• Isabella Wagner - studying the master program Science-Technology-Society at University of Vienna and hopefully treasurer to be of ICT4D.at
• PJ McDonagh - Linux administrator and web developer
• Mario Tavric - working at the SAP Sustainability department and studying International Development
• Cornelia Mauser - working at Lebenshilfe Wien

Next Stammtisch will take place at 11 March at Cafe Benno again, hope to see more of you there then

Just a short point to our page “Conferences and Events” where we are gathering upcoming ICT4D events. If you want to add other interesting conferences just contact us, we’ll share the calendar with you.

Check it out!

After four months break since Stammtisch #3 took place, we would like to go on with this kind of informal meeting format and therefore would like to invite you to our 4th Stammtisch.

A lot has happened and we have even grown in numbers - so come by to meet us, find out about how our projects go, tell us what you are currently working on or what you’d be interested to do and spend a nice evening with like-minded people.

What: ICT4D.at Stammtisch

Where: Cafe Benno, Alser Straße 67, Wien

When: Thursday, 11. February 2009, 19:00

If you intend to come it would be great if you could notify us via mail or RSVP on

In the course of our partnership with the eDevelopment Thematic Group we are happy to announce an upcoming event of our partner: IT for Climate-Smart Development: “Not Your Grandfather’s Bank”.

From the IT for Climate-Smart Development event page:

The session will aim to raise staff understanding of how ICT can be used to achieve better results in climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) promise to be important enablers of climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts in several sectors. Examples may include the use of ICTs in:

• Climate monitoring for weather forecasting and predicting, detecting and mitigating the effects of natural disasters, monitoring analysis and control of industrial processes, among others;
• Lowering energy consumption and GHG in the power networks (e.g. through smart grids);
• IT applications in smart buildings and smart motor systems;
• “Dematerialization” via e-government applications
• Adapting agriculture and water resource management systems to evolving weather patterns using satellite-based information and simple mobile phone applications, smart irrigation and logistics.

An important theme will be the rapidly growing reach of mobile phone networks (more than 3bn phones in use in developing countries) and the potential to leverage these networks for climate change efforts.

Another important theme is investing in and growing the ‘clean’ technology sectors of developing countries, so that the economic opportunities presented by clean technologies are realized.

Speakers are

• Jatin Singh, CEO SkyMet (India)
• Frank Rijsberman, Director Program of Google.org
• Monique Meche, Director, Environment Policy and Sustainability, Cisco Systems

So make sure you’ll be online on January 20 from 9:00 to 10:30 a.m. Washington time.

We’ll cover it here on the blog and tweet about it - the hashtag is #it4dev.

Tesla transformer playing the A-Team theme song in front of the BCC where 26c3 took place

From 27th to 30th every year traditionally the hacker’s conference of the Chaos Communication Club takes place in Berlin. This year I went there for the first time - although I’m not so much into computer security and hacking. The reason were Christoph from OLPC Austria had a talk, there were some interesting talks focusing on society and social policy and also I had never been in Berlin before.

Most of the talks here were not related to ICT4D, but still interesting.

One project presentation which really impressed me was about Wikileaks. It’s a platform where all kinds of classified content are hosted and already caused several scandals which appeared in mass media. One of them was for example the illegal dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. They are currently trying to persuade the Icelandic government to put legal regulations into place which would make the country the first safe haven for all kinds of information - so it can’t be suppressed anymore by powerful nations or companies.

What made it into the mass media from here is that the GSM standard is even more vulnerable than thought before. This also might have implications for ICT4D - as it’s now easier than ever to wiretap phones. For a country with an autocratic regime where the majority of the communication takes place via mobile phone this is a big threat for people opposing the regime.

As already mentioned, Christoph from OLPC Austria had a talk where he presented the OLPC project and ongoing efforts, especially around the sugar environment. Sugar is even available for any other platform via USB-stick - Sugar on a Stick.

So far Peru Uruguay (sorry, got that wrong) is the first country where the OLPC project has been rolled out on a large scale and it will be interesting to see the results in the education sector. Including expenses for distributing, setting up and repairing the devices, the cost per child was estimated to $276 there.

From what I heard in Christophs talk and what I had discussed with him before, the main purpose of OLPC is not so much to have a traditional product with a release cycle, forcing the participating nations to purchase new versions again and again, but to have a basic platform where everybody can program applications for and which everybody can customize for their needs. In that respect I think it really created a momentum and quite a lot of people are working now voluntarily in Western but also less developed countries to create applications for eLearning for their local context.

Christophs talk is summed up very detailed in German at Dirk Ollmetzers blog.

Several other presentations I saw were about critical thinking, subversive actions to reclaim your city, fuzzing with phones and electrifying clothes.

My resumé of the whole event: It was fascinating to see so many people working on a transparent and open society in so many various ways.

Notes from the eDevelopment thematic Group seminar on the “Use of Free/Open Source Software in the Public Sector: Brazil Experience“.

.

Introduction and welcoming speeches

Cem Dener (ECSPE), Deepak Bhatia (GICT), Samia Melhem (GICT), Oleg Petrov (e-Development Thematic Group), Mikhail Bunchuk (Moscow Office), Eduardo Calero

Country offices in Albania, Brazil, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Serbia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, St. Vincent, St. Kitts

.

Presentation
Mr. Eduardo Santos, Project Manager, Ministry of Planning, Brasilia - download presentation

FLOSS in Brazilian government

Regulations for free software in Brazil:

• specific branch in the government responsible for informatics and information policies
• different committees for FLOSS implementation, legacy systems, systems integration

A lot of internal struggle about the usage of free software, everybody thought they had the best policy

A lot of trouble with migrating, adapting, intergrating -> decision to create new software

Brazilian Public Software Portal

• sharing software solutions in the government

FLOSS community in Brazil claimed they were also allowed the source code of a product if they purchased it

Public Software Portal evolved

• companies used software and provided training for other organizations
• groups of interest emerged from the users of the software
• Community, companies, municipalities - all users are very important and have different needs -> it’s an ecosystem
• Now: Providing software solutions for society

Software is more than only software

• it’s a change in attitude
• it’s about innovation - more qualified people
• many economic opportunities
• savings of more than $ 3.750.000 just by sharing software

Applications

[read the whole article]

Yesterday I participated at the Südwind Stammtisch. It was a meeting of different people from the organization Südwind and interested people from other organizations.

Südwind is an Austrian NGO which is dealing with awareness raising in various sectors - such as fair trade, the state of asylum seekers and generally foreigners in Austria or development assistance. Furthermore they operate several bookshops, a magazine and an online picture database.

At the meeting there were representatives of Südwind, Attac, Oikocredit Austria and of course me from ICT4D.at.

The topic of the meeting was Web 2.0 and digital ways to communiate with interested people in general, and it was interesting to hear from Südwind how they were thinking of Web 2.0 - coming from a more traditional media perspective. They would like to engage people to contribute content via Web 2.0, but it seems more complicated than expected.

Florian Hörantner from Attac then introduced the 90-9-1 rule, which states that only 9% of observers and readers of content also become active from time to time and only 1% are contributing frequently. For internet users this ratio may even be worse.

A significant advantage of online media over traditional media which was identified was the huge user base of several social networks. Also the possibility to directly link to contextual information was appreciated. Another point which was brought up was the ecological aspect - as there is no paper waste with email.

What was questioned though, was if due to the information overload and email flood it was even possible to create long-term attention and engagement by online tools and messages only. Measures to support this were brought forward: tailor newsletters to fit the target group (simple vs. visually appealing), create possibilities for users to actively contribute and be transparent so that users also have influence on posted content, create incentives - such as competitions with prizes (e.g. foto competition).

Two other interesting - bot non IT-related - questions which were discussed were:

• What actions would cause somebody to change their behaviour in the long term?
• How to engage people which may not be interested in the topic, and how to persuade people which are interested in the topic but not sympathetic to your organization?

I’m glad having attended the meeting, it was very interesting and insightful. Südwind is in place working on various topics surrounding developing countries already 30 years and it’s great to learn from, and discuss with experienced NGO members.

Next date the Stammtisch will take place is 11 January 2010. The topic will be how to handle prejudice and populist propaganda in everyday discussion - and if I find time I will attend again.

As our partnership with the eDevelopment Thematic Group of the World Bank continues, we would like to announce a coming event: the eGovernment seminar on the use of FLOSS in the public sector. It will take place on 17 December in Washington and will be broadcasted live over webcast at http://wwwr.worldbank.org/edevelopment/live.

The event deals with free-/open-source software and its application in the public sector. Among others, the case of Brazil, which is one of the top-adopters of FOSS software in the public sector, will be discussed. The agenda so far can be found at the eTG event page.

What: eTG seminar: eGovernment Seminar on the Use of Free/Open Source Software in the Public Sector

Where: Washington DC, also available via webcast

When: 17 December, 9:00-12:00 Washington time

ICT4D.at will of course cover the event on Twitter and here on the blog.

In the mean time there was not too much going on with ICT4D.at - everybody was busy with something else. I am looking forward to an internal meeting in the beginning of December though, where we will set the path for the coming weeks and months.

One main thing we are currently working on is the preparation for the second round of our Zanzibits support project. Our representative Fritz Grabo in Zanzibar is having rehearsals to choose future students and is working on improving the infrastructure on the ground - repairing stuff, improving furniture and several other things. Here in Austria we are looking for sponsors for the project - so if you want to support a small-scale project for capacity building in Zanzibar, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Some events which we are looking forward to are the launch of the eDevelopment Thematic group Flagship Report and an Open Source workshop, also by the eTG group. Furthermore we will be present in Berlin at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) in December.

One past event we will write about soon is the World Social Web Dialogue - there is still some planning and internal coordination on the way.

So - quiet times, but there’s more to come soon!