World Dialogue on Regulation

The Acacia Initiative has published its report The Acacia Atlas: Mapping the Growth of ICT in Africa on-line. The Atlas provides a graphical overview of a wide range of aspects relating to development of ICT on the African continent over the past 10 years. It provides a starting point for professionals who want to understand the ICT developments and problems ofthe continent.

The World Economic Forum's 5th Global Information Technology Report 2005-2006 was released recently with updated Networked Readiness Index (NRI) rankings for 2005. The NRI is an assessment of a country’s preparedness and capacity to make use of and benefit from Information Communication Technologies (ICTs). In his review of the NRI, Divakar Goswami argues that a number of extraneous variables have been included that do not shed any light on ICT environment, readiness or usage, while others, that may have added greater robustness to the measure, are missing. Additionally, the credibility of the NRI is called into question by the non-transparent manner in which the authors report the sources of the data and the methodology that was followed to collect the raw data.

The ITU released the World Information Society Report for 2006 earlier this month. It features a new tool and index, the Digital Opportunity Index (DOI), that evaluates the opportunity, infrastructure and utilization of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for 180 economies worldwide.

In his report “Evaluation of e-Readiness Indices in Latin America and the Caribbean”, Michael Minges aims to contribute to a better understanding of the different indices of e-Readiness and their application in LAC countries. The paper includes 18 Latin American and 15 Caribbean countries. All of them have signed the Regional Plan of Action for the Information Society in Latin America and the Caribbean, eLAC2007.

A report on the Indicators Workshop held in New Delhi by WDR partner, LIRNEasia in collaboration with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is available here. The report provides a review of international initiatives and best practices, examines some of the difficulties regarding standardising indicators across the region, the challenges of measurement and collection of indicator data and the process of developing an indicators manual for the South Asian region.

The site is UNCTAD's online source of information on indicators, methodologies and statistics related to the information society and a forum that allows practitioners from developed as well as developing countries to engage in discussions on e-measurement related topics and to further develop conceptual and methodological work. Most of the reports are downloadable for a fee.

URL: http://measuring-ict.unctad.org/

Description: The site presents interactive interface for accessing ICT indicator data on a number of countries in the Asian region.

URL: http://www.idrc.ca/mapasia/cone_mapasia.swf

Description: The site is ITU's repository of reports, databases and resources on ICT and telecom indicators. Some of them are available for free, but most reports are downloadable for a fee.

URL: http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/publications/index.html