L I R N E . N E T

The Center for Communication, Media and Information Technologies (CMI), of the Copenhagen Institute of Technology (CIT), Aalborg University, Denmark, held its First International Conference on Converging Mobile Media. The conference was organized in cooperation with the Advanced technology network on Mobile Systems, CTiF Copenhagen, and CMI’s CAMMP Project.

The conference featured presentations by professionals from industry and researchers including presentations on mobile television in countries that have come furthest in the development and market take-up of new applications and services in this field.

Click here for the slides presented at the conference.

See CMI – First International Conference on Converging Mobile Media post.

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The SPARC Author Addendum is a legal instrument that modifies the publisher’s agreement and allows you to keep key rights to your articles. The Author Addendum is a free resource developed by SPARC in partnership with Creative Commons and Science Commons, established non-profit organizations that offer a range of copyright options for many different creative endeavours.

Why do we need this? In 1999, Phil Agre wrote in his Red Rock Eater news service, “The job of an academic publisher is to take my work for $0,* add almost no value to it, and sell it to my library for way too much money.” Agre’s solution to protecting his right to make his work more freely available was as follows. “So whenever I get one of those form contracts from a journal publisher, I always get out a pen and edit it. Mostly I write in the margin, ‘I reserve the right to post the paper on my Web site’.”

Today, writers and researchers are much more aware about their authorship rights, and are much more likely to self-publish on their own webpages or other online venues to make their work more widely available. The SPARC Author Addendum is a good measure for those wanting to also publish in commercial academic journals.

Click here to go to the SPARC website.
Click here to download the SPARC Author Addendum.

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Debra Aron from LECG and Northwestern University and Dr. Robert Crandall of the Brookings Institution and Criterion Economics have co-authored a white paper with entitled “Investment in Next Generation Networks and Wholesale Telecommunications Regulation.” Focussed on the Canadian experience, the White Paper discusses economic evidence and international experiences regarding the effect of unbundling obligations applied to next generation networks on broadband outcome measures such as investment and penetration. “Canada’s policy makers can encourage efficient investment, innovation, and competition, and thereby promote economic welfare and prosperity in Canada, by establishing a clear policy against expanding the ILECs’ unbundling obligations to new broadband networks.”

Download the full text (PDF format)

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The organizers of the 3rd IEEE/ ACM International Conference on ICT and Development, ICTD2009 Conference (17-19 April 2009 at the Carnegie-Mellon campus in Doha, Qatar), would like to spur reflective dialogue among researchers and between researchers and development practitioners. Therefore a small number of panels will be chosen to be added to the program.

Panel proposals are invited that will add to the emerging ICTD discipline by having multiple points-of-view reflect on issues that affect the practice of ICTD research and its relationship to development practice. Therefore key assessment criteria we will use to evaluate the panel proposals are:

1. Does it reflect on a novel or unresolved issue in the practice of ICTD research?
2. Does it reflect on a novel or unresolved issue in disseminating or scaling the results of ICTD research into general practice?
3. Does it introduce challenges in the practice of development that ICTD research has yet to address adequately?

Deadline for proposals: 2 November 2009.

Click here to go to the ICTD2009 conference website.
Click here for author instructions.

See also post on Richard Heek’s IEEE Computer article on ICT4D 2.0.

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The Research ICT Africa (RIA!) August 2008 Policy Brief is based on the preliminary analysis of the Individual and Household ICT Survey undertaken by the network.
The policy brief provides a snapshot of ICT development in Ghana, which has not been robust despite the country having been amongst the early reformers of the African ICT sector. In spite of improvements in certain sector segments, others such as household fixed line, internet access and public telephones, need policy support to catalyse their development.

Click here to download the RIA! Policy Brief (PDF format)

For further information about this report, contact:
Dr. Godfred Frempong <gkfrempong [at] stepri.csir.org.gh>

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