Bahrain eContent Award Competition (1)

Today I am in Bahrain. Yesterday I flew from Amsterdam to Manama. It was a nice flight, especially over Europe, going over Germany, Czech Republic and Hungary. Especially Rumenia was great. I flew over Cluj (the flight navigator told me so) and I had a great look at Bucharest, especially the city lay-out with half circles endind in the river; some day I must go there to have a look on the ground and talk with my friends there.

At the Gulf Hotel I met Waheed and Abdullah from Bahrain. Waheed has been a jury member for the World Summit Award in 2003 and 2005 and has become a very good friend of mine; Abdullah was in the team of the first winning Bahrain project and has been a supporter eversince of the World Summit Award. (Of course the ISOC chapter in Bahrain has shown it self to be very committed.) And at last I met Gabi Deek again, my Lebanese friend, who will be the moderator of the Bahrain eContent Award. In the night Ms Manar Al Hashash, the 2005 WSA jury member from Quwait arrived.

So this morning we were all set to go for the jury deliberations for the Bahrain eContent Awards (BEA). For the second time they now have organised the competition. In 2005 they had about 150 entries; this time they doubled the entries to 300 registered entries. (I can not believe this; in The Netherlands we can not organise a content competition yielding more than 60 entries and the last two years we had to call the editions of the Europrix.nl off due to a lack of entries). eCommerce is way ahead of all the categories; it is followed by e-Government, e-Entertainment and Culture. They jury consists of civil servants working for government administrations, teaching staff and students at the University of Bahrain and people working in computing and technology. The venue for the jury deliberations are held in the ISOC House.

It took a while this morning to get the circus going. With some 300 entries and 13 jurors, the organisation of panels had to be taken care off. Once that was decided, technical issues had to be taken care off. I had an opportunity in order to go through some of the websites and get a discussion going on the criteria to be used such as content, accessibility, value added, attractiveness of design, quality of craftsmanship and strategic importance. After lunch the real work of sifting started and the first results started to be entered.

Blog Posting Number: 738

Tags: content competition, World Summit Award