Policy briefs

In this piece written for the South Centre Bulletin (issue 5, December 2007), Parminder Jeet Singh and Gurumurthy Kasinathan highlight Internet governance issues that are important from a development perspective. The World Summit on Information Society was the first step towards debating issues of Internet governance and its recommendation on the setting up of the Internet Governance Forum which heads into its third year at Hyderabad is an important space which discusses issues of Internet governance.

IT for Change presented a paper titled 'Project development for expanding women's digital opportunities: some reflections' at the Policy and Strategy for Digital Opportunities from the Gender Perspectives organised by the Asian Pacific Women's Information Network Center (APWINC) in Seoul (South Korea) in July 2006. In this paper, Anita Gurumurthy analyses the necessary link between project definition and policy making, arguing that policies need to serve project objectives, as much as they determine them.

In this article, Anita Gurumurthy and Parminder Jeet Singh analyse the way in which the emphasis on Internet governance and its high visibility in the WSIS process tended to take focus away from the important issue of exploring how the Internet can address long-standing development issues.

The 2006 Internet Governance Forum (IGF) was held in Athens (Greece, 30 October - 2 November) and its overall theme was 'Internet Governance for Development'.

IT for Change submitted a paper titled 'A development agenda for Internet Governance - Call for a framework convention on the Internet'.