Hello,
I attended the Telecommunications and ICTs: Drivers of innovation
workshop as a representative of the Mauritius Internet Users. The
workshop was held on the occasion of the World Telecommunications and
Information Society Day 2015. The Executive Director of the
Mauritius Research Council gave a presentation about "innovation in
the knowledge economy". He covered wind farms, ocean research (
https://twitter.com/IshSookun/status/600192071639683072 ) etc. He
also mentioned that the Mauritius Research Council provided funding
for several research projects. Ish commented that there was a person
in Mauritius who has developed open source software and asked whether
funding would be available for such projects. The reply was that the
stakeholders already include such people working on those type of
projects. I commented that IPR was used, outside Mauritius, to
measure innovation. The Executive Director responded that there
hasn't been much IPR from the projects. Is the approach to
innovation a failure?
There was a presentation from Dr P.C. Catherine, Lecturer at the
University of Technology about smart cities sub-saharan Africa. He
talked about urbanization in that region. He also mentioned that The
university has received funding from Horizon 2020 for a project in
Quatre Bornes, one in Maputo and the last one in Nairobi.
After lunch, there was a presentation about Innovative Public service
and ICT. Ish noticed that he could not sign in on m.govmu.org as the
Google CAPTCHA was missing in the mobile version of the web site. He
asked the Acting Director of the Central Informatics Bureau about
that. He will probbaly comment about that on his blog. He also
pointed out that the forums and blogs on govmu.org are not being used
and asked whether there has been any study before the web site was
designed. I commented that there was some discussion on the
Mauritius Internet Users mailing list about the government web site
and pointed out that it was based on nostalgic web design. I asked
whether there were any standards for government web sites. The reply
was that they are mentioned as part of the tender process. I
clarified that I was referring to technical specifications, i.e. it
was not about the quality of the web site.
There was a presentation by the Director of the MSIRI in which he
talked about the usage of Geographic Information System at the MSIRI
and the software developed for providing information to the
agricultural sector. The last presentation was about seven ways to
boost innovation for a SMART Mauritius.
Ish explained about the 100 Mbps (local access) initiative during an
informal conversation. I had an informal conversation about whether
there was data which could be made available from the Geographic
Information System.
I would like to thank the Linux User Group Meta for extending an
invitation to the Mauritius Internet Users for this workshop. I
would also like to thank the National Computer Board for the nice lunch.
Regards,
S. Moonesamy
Received on Mon May 18 2015 - 13:15:34 PST