1. Internet Fiesta 2005
The Internet Society Chapter of Mauritius (http://www.isoc-mu.org ) is organising an open day in connection with the Internet Fiesta 2005. This activity will be held on Sunday, the 27th March 2005, at the head-quarters of Grand Port Savanne District Council, Rose Belle from 09:00 to 18:00. On that day free broadband Internet Access will be provided by Telecom Plus and Internet Initiation sessions by volunteers of ISOC-MU.

The Internet Fiesta is a worldwide event and is going to be held From 14 to 27 March 2005. This 7th edition of this event will be centered on the preparation of the Virtual Planetary Exhibition and projects that concerns the main topics of the World Summit of the Information Society to be held in Tunis in December 2005.
2. Essay Competition - “The Internet and its evolution in Mauritius"
The Essay competition title is “The Internet and its evolution in Mauritius” and is open to all Mauritian people, students and non-students alike. The Essay should consist of 2000 to 2500 words and can be submitted in English and French. The deadline for submissions is the 21st March 2005 and the winners will be announced and awarded on the 27th March 2004 at 4:00 pm at Rose Belle.
The Prizes will be awarded to the winners by Hon. Pradeed Jeeha, Minister of IT and Telecommunications and other distinguished guest.

How to submit:
The submission process for the Essay Competition 2005 is Internet-based or by Post.

Email: secretariat@isoc-mu.org
Postal Addresses:
The Essay Organising Committee
Internet Society Chapter of Mauritius
Units 209 – 214
Informatics Park
La Tour Koening
Pointe Aux Sables

PRIZE STRUCTURE:
First Prize - Worth Rs 5,000
Second Prize - Worth Rs 4,000
Third Prize - Worth Rs 3,000
Fourth Prize - Worth Rs 2,000
Fifth Prize - Worth Rs 1,000

MORE INFO:
Phone: 234 6999 (D Kissoondoyal / Gowtam Gowry or Nitish Muslayah)
Email: info@isoc-mu.org
Web Site: http://www.isoc-mu.org

The NEPAD Youth Expert Panel is a project of the African Youth Leadership
Program, of the Centre for Development Action International.

The NEPAD program was created by African Heads of State and aimed at
fighting poverty, consolidating democracy and good governance, fostering
trade, investment, economic, growth and sustainability.

The objective of the Youth Panel is to first, support youth mainstreaming
in the implementation of the NEPAD goals through the three tiers of
the NEPAD implementation framework.

The panelists shall operate from national constituencies, and global
alliances to provide the services required by the broad implementation
institutions and mechanisms of the NEPAD Programme.

The Panel will consist of one representative from each country selected
through a process that is gender sensitive and with intellectual diversity
as well as knowledge of the African development environment.

Interested persons with the following background can request for an
application form:

- Articulate and if you are bilingual will be an added advantage
- Should not be more than 30 years of age
- References to an intellectual capacity or active developmental
involvements.

All enquiry and request for application forms should be received latest
by 27th of September 2004 and attaching a Personal Profile.

The Project was conceptualized through an IIE grant of the Ford Foundation
Office for West Africa.

Application request should be addressed to the attention of:

Officer-in-Charge
Centre for Development Action International
12 Agboyin Avenue, Off Adelabu Street
Surulere, Lagos State, Nigeria
Email: ainpolicy@yahoo.com

Ehizua Imohimi
Email: ainhiv@yahoo.com

The Sixth Annual African Computing
& Telecommunications Summit

Mauritius , 7-9 September, 2004

"Building Partnerships to Mainstream Africa's ICT Sector"

AITEC has been invited by the Act ICT Industry Alliance of Mauritius to hold the sixth annual ACT Summit in Mauritius due to the attendance it will attract from ICT professionals and managers from throughout Africa, as well as other international participation, thus promoting the country’s position as a supplier of ICT services and expertise.

The theme of the Summit will be “Developing Partnerships to Mainstream Africa’s ICT Industry.”

Welcoming AITEC’s decision to hold the Summit in Maurtius, Colin Taylor, Chairman of the Act ICT Industry Alliance, called on industry counterparts across Africa to use the Summit as an opportunity to pool knowledge and experience to promote the continent on the international stage. “Although some of us may land up competing for the same outsourcing work, the potential market is huge and expanding. We will all benefit from increased skills levels across the region, as well as improved perceptions of the continent’s ICT capacity. I’m confident that companies attending ACT 2004 will find that co-operation and alliances, rather than competition, will be the order of the day.”

The following will be the key streams within the Summit:

Business Process Outsourcing Forum
The African Open Source Forum, in association with the Free & Open Source Software Foundation for Africa
eGovernment Forum in association with the UN Economic Commission for Africa
Telecommunication Operators Forum in association with the Global VSAT Forum and the UK Government’s CATIA Programme
Mobile Telephony Applications for Development, in association with the Canadian Government’s Connectivity Africa Programme.
The ACT Summit has been held in the UK, South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria in previous years. Over 2,000 African ICT professionals, managers, resellers, innovators and policy-makers have benefited from the Summit’s intensive knowledge-sharing platform.

The ACT Partnering Hub
All delegates will have use of the free service provided by the Partnering Hub to arrange meetings with potential clients, partners and suppliers. All Summit participants will be asked to provide their local mobile numbers for ease of communication and to arrange meetings. The Partnering Hub will act as a vital meeting place where delegates can make maximum use of the networking opportunities provided by ACT.

The ACT Exhibition
The Summit will include a high-quality business-to-business exhibition, enabling local and international ICT manufacturers, suppliers, service providers and operators to promote their products and services to the ACT participants, most of whom are high-volume purchasers. In addition to the exhibition stands, syndicate rooms are available to rent as display, meeting and hospitality areas for the duration of the event. As at all its exhibitions, AITEC will provide free exhibition space for NGOs, non-profit development agencies and other non-profit organizations involved in ICT for development to network and attract partners and supporters.

For further details of ACT 2004, contact:
IN MAURITIUS: Geraldine d'Unienville, Publi-Promo Tel 259-3630; geraldine@aitecafrica.com
INTERNATIONAL: Sean Moroney, AITEC Africa, Tel: +44-1480-495595 sean@aitecafrica.com

IDRC FUNDS PROJECT TO TEACH WIRELESS BUILDERS, PROGRAMMERS IN AFRICA

Plans To Educate Wi-Fi Implementers Via Organized Workshops, Documentation

Urbana, IL, July 3, 2004 - Following attendance at a European wireless conference, the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) worked closely with the Association for Progressive Communications, Ecole Supérieure Multinationale des Télécommunications, and wire.less.dk, a Dutch wireless consulting company, to draft a proposal designed to educate wireless implementers in Africa. The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) has funded the proposal for $225,000 US over the period from July 2004 to June 2006.

CUWiN's involvement in this program is key to sharing our cutting edge technology and experience with trainers and technologists in developing African countries. A positive benefit of making this technical information available online to this target audience is that it will then be available to wireless implementers globally.

The program will be used to teach trainers in Africa how to build out wireless infrastructure and programmers adding features to existing software and those creating new software. The diverse population of Africa faces unique hurdles which this program will overcome through a variety of techniques:

-- Training: hands-on workshops in North, South, and West Africa;

-- Materials development: documentation collected and translated to
English, French, and Arabic; and

-- Distributed knowledge base: development and maintenance of the CUWiN
SourceForge development site to collect technical information of
interest to wireless implementers and programmers

Through projects such as this, the groundwork is being laid to establish lasting communities of wireless networking practitioners in Africa -- and across the world -- with a vision of holding future in-depth training sessions in greater numbers once this path-finding and the program itself are concluded.

About CUWiN

The Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) has built a communications network using wireless networking equipment. This is essentially the same "WiFi" equipment used in homes and offices, but CUWiN puts it on rooftops to connect neighbors and form a high-speed community network.

CUWiN's three-part mission is to:

-- connect more people to Internet and broadband services;

-- develop open-source hardware and software for use by wireless
projects world-wide; and

-- build and support community-owned, not-for-profit broadband
networks in cities and towns around the globe.

CUWiN is a program of the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center. OJC Technologies is CUWiN's development home.

For additional information, contact:

Sascha Meinrath
Project Coordinator
Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network
(217)278-3933
sascha@cuwireless.net
http://www.cuwireless.net/

From 7-9 July, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) hosted a meeting in Geneva, bringing together government policy makers and regulators, representatives of Internet service providers, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) companies, academics, civil society organizations and others, in an effort to counter spam, a "modern day epidemic," and to standardize anti-spam legislation. At present, many countries have no such laws, making it difficult to prosecute spammers.

Robert Horton, head of Australia's Communications Authority, served as the Chairman of the meeting. According to the Chairman's report that emanated from the meeting, "unsolicited commercial communications" or so-called spam has grown into one of the major plagues affecting today's digital world. As much as 80% of all e-mail traffic is spam, compared to 35% a year ago, according to the ITU, with spammers sending hundreds of millions of messages per day. The estimated costs of spam to the global economy are approximately US$25 billion dollars per year. The problem is spreading also to cell phones. In Japan, nine out of ten junk e-mails come in the form of mobile telephone text messages.


Most speakers and participants seemed to agree that there is no "silver bullet," or consensus emerging on the right way forward, as no one solution alone will curb spam. A multi-pronged approach to solving the problem, involving all stakeholders, is clearly necessary. All actors need to engage in a concerted effort, linking the mandates and expertise of various international organizations, as well as the Internet Society, to support and progressively develop an international framework to combat the problem.

The Chairman's report states that spam is a major problem for developed countries, but perhaps is even worse for developing and least developed countries (LDCs), where, because of limited available Internet resources, many users rely on free web-based e-mail services with limits on free storage, which are particularly targeted by spammers. A number of participants highlighted that because of less effective security protection, computers on broadband networks are often compromised in order to hijack then to send spam.

In a session on multilateral and bilateral cooperation, international organizations, regional bodies, and a number of UN Member States presented a review of their initiatives to tackle spam and their views on possible future international cooperation. Acknowledging that the society and culture of each country is different, participants pointed out that it would be very difficult to employ the same anti-spam legislation everywhere. However, information sharing among different national authorities and a cooperative approach to anti-spam law enforcement were seen as fundamental.

Three initiatives were announced during the meeting in Geneva:
1) the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on mutural enforcement on commercial e-mail between enforcement agencies of Australia, the UK and the US, which will include a meeting in London in October 2004;
2) the establishment of an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Task Force on spam, which is likely to hold its first meeting in Busan (South Korea) in early September 2004, in conjunction with ITU Telecom Asia and the OECD's 2nd spam workshop;
3) the holding of a special session on spam at the ITU's Global Symposium for Regulators in December 2004.



NGLS

Source: http://www.un-ngls.org/wsis-spam-report.htm