BPN 1652 : WSA Grand Jury 2013 in Tallinn, Estonia (1)

The World Summit Award organisation is ready to gather in Tallinn (Estonia) for its Grand Jury session of the sixth edition of the World Summit Award (WSA). There has been an online selection establishing the shortlist to be considered. Now the final five place are being decided upon in Grand Jury sessions. Besides Grand Jury duties, the WSA Grand Jury will be in sessions with Estonian organisations and visit the Business Accelerator Technopol and the site of the Estonian government, famous for its e-cabinet.

WSA Grand Jury Chair & Moderator
Prof. Peter A. Bruck, Chairman of WSA Board of Directors, Austria
WSA Grand Jury Members
Christian Rupp, Spokesperson e-Gov Digital Platform, Austria

Witman Hung, President iProA, China

Mihkel Tikk, Head of The Department of State Portal, Estonian Information Systems Authority, Estonia

Dorothy Gordon, DG, Ghana-India, Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence, Ghana

Osama Manzar, Founder and CEO, Digital Empowerment Foundation, India

Anne Shongwe, CEO and Founder, Afroes, Kenya

Manar Alhashash, Secretary General Kuwait e-Award, Kuwait

Nibal Idlebi, Chief of the ICT Applications Section at UN-ESCWA, Lebanon

Ieva Zilione, Director, Information Society Development Committee under the Ministry of Transport and Communications, Lithuania

Jak Boumans, Managing Director, Electronic Media Reporting, Netherlands

Marta Tomovska, Deputy Minister, Ministry of Information Society and Administration

Macedonia, Anya Sverdlov

Managing Director, Actis Wunderman, Russian Federation

Mustafa Khan, Director of Center of excellence for Research and Development , Yesser, Saudi Arabia

Jasna Matic, Special Adviser for Competitveness and Knowledge Economy , Ministry of Finance and Economy, Serbia

Ralph Simon, CEO & Founder: Mobilium International; Chairman Emeritus & Founder: Mobile Entertainment Forum – Americas, USA/UK

Madanmohan Rao,  Chief Researcher Mobile Monday, Singapore/India

Chitranganie Mubarak, Senior Programme Head, e-Society Programme, ICTA, Sri Lanka

   
 

BPN 1588: The year that was (1): Arab spring

In December last year I was in Abu Dhabi for the World Summit Mobile Award Ceremony. With hotel on the Formula 1 circuit it was an exciting stay. It was not exciting because of the circuit itself as once a day a car sweeping the circuit passed the hotel room, an hour later followed by a cohort of professional bicyclists. It was really exciting as the World Summit Award had created a competition in mobile content and found a sponsoring partner willing to invest in the competition, the winners and the network. And there were many exciting applications, enough to change the name of Abu Dhabi in the city of Apps Dhabi. After Abu Dhabi I was in more Arab countries like Kuwait and Bahrain in February and March. In Kuwait there was some unrest. I was there in the framework of the Kuwait Content Excellence Awards. Again the WSA local representative had organised a jury to judge new multimedia applications. Again here apps were popping up like mushrooms in fall. In Bahrain I was invited to do two workshops and be an observer to the Bahrain eContent Award competition. The unrest that started in February formed a difficulty for the workshop. On the first day of the workshop, when we were just in the second hour, a burial procession passed under the window of the class room. We had to improvise a lot as the students could not always reach the classroom. So we decided to form a closed user group on Facebook and do a lot of the work online. This worked as most of the students were computer graduates. A month later I arrived for the Bahrain eContent Award jury. And again the unrest formed a difficulty. We had to move hotel to a hotel close to the airport and had to work online, not seeing each other and missing out on profound debates. I left the country being very sad. A month later I was in Hong Kong for the World Summit Global Award jury, organised by Alexander Hung with the support of Elisabeth Quat and Winny Tang, members of the ICT professional association iPROA. It became a good meeting ground with the colleagues from the Middle East: Faouzi from Tunesia, Effat from Egypt, Nawaf from Bahrain and Manar from Kuwait, Suleman from the United Arab Emirates and Nibal from Syria/Lebanon. We even managed to put out the Arab eContent Awards, which were later on awarded in a ceremony linked to a conference. For the coming year there are already some fixed dates in the diary. In April the World Summit Award Ceremony will be held in Cairo; hopefully a sign that Egypt is recovering. Later that year The World Summit Mobile Award jury will be held in Abu Dhabi, followed in December by the award ceremony. Among the best wishes from 2012 I found an image sent by Faouzi from Tunesia, which sums it up: Thanks to the people. Thanks Facebook!

web roi

BPN 1311 Back from Q8 (2)

I am back from my first time visit to Kuwait. I left the country with 27 degrees Celsius and arrived in The Netherlands with 5 degrees Celsius. The weather was pleasant in Kuwait except for the sandstorm we experienced on Tuesday. The sky was diffuse and the sea water was very rough. Even the pelicans had sought shelter.

It is a colourful country, although the colour green, especially for grass, is rare. But as I arrived after liberation day, many buildings were lit up with the national flag and numbers 25 and 26, the day the Iraqi were chased out the country, leaving many oil wells on fire.

It is a very rich country. I spoke to someone who had a year-around collection of Rolex watches, representing some 2 to 3 million euro (divide 1 euro by 3 to get the value of the Kuwaiti dinar). The country is still rich with operational oil wells. And the petrol does not cost much; for some 70 gallons you would pay 5 Kuwaiti dinar, which tranlates roughly to 15 euro).

With interest I have looked at the infrastructure of the country. As other Middle East countries Kuwait has large shopping malls like the Marina one. But for the daily food there are cooperatives per neighbourhood with additional shops for dry cleaning, pharmacy and other needs. The people in the neighbourhood are co-owners of the co-operative and get at the end of the year a share in the profit. But there are also private shops owned by Indians.

Also the labour structure is different from the West. As in other Middle East countries much of the labour is done by people from Egypt, India, the Philippines and Indonesia. The construction work is mostly done by people from Bangladesh. In fact there are roughly 1,29 million foreign workers and only 1,2 million Kuwaitis. It is a close knit Kuwaiti society, based on family ties. Every Kuwaiti has a right to a job. And if he happens to loose a job due to lay-offs, the government will have to offer him/her a job within six months or start paying an allowance. Most of the Kuwaiti are in the service of the government. Not many Kuwaiti run a private business nor have many employees. Of course this labour policy has an effect on the development of private business and competition. As such there is not something like a branch organisation for multimedia and content. In fact the Kuwait eAward (KeA) competition was in fact the start of a network of people interested in multimedia and content.


Kuwait is also working on its skyline. There is the old skyline in the city and the new one with twin towers in daring architecture. But the Kuwaiti have also a sense of preservation. On Monday night Ahmed, one of the jurors, took us to the area with new skyscrapers and should us around an old section of the town. The area looks very much like Les Halles in Paris in the good old days. They have meat there and a special hall for fish. It was exciting to see so much fresh fish (it made my mouth water). In this area there are teahouses and restaurants. We also stopped to have tea in the traditional way, on a stove filled with coal.

Blog Post Number: 1311

Tags: multimedia competition, content

BPN 1310 Back from Q8 (1)

Wednesday was the end of the first national Kuwait eAward competition. The whole process had taken four days, from Sunday till Wednesday. The jurors were tired as well as the moderation team consisting of the Lebanese Gabi Deek, Serbian/Austrian Predrag Micakovic and myself, the Dutchman. Manar Al Hashash was the organiser of the competition and the jury event; she was also part of the moderation team.

Also the support team was tired, but very happy that things had gone smoothly. They were four IT graduates and very critical. They looked to me like the Girls of Halal, a Dutch TV group, scrutinising the relationships between islam culture and the Dutch with toingue in cheek.

It was an impressive event. Manar had worked on it for three years. In 2005 Manar was part of the World Summit Award competition in Bahrain and is still involved. She has been a presenter of the WSA gala in Tunis and Venice (she has her own TV show in Kuwait). Now after three years of work there, is the first edition of the Kuwait eAward competition, under the patronage of the emir of Kuwait and established within the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS).

The event was organised at the venue of Microsoft Innovation Center, close to the KFAS venue and the university grounds. The venue was on the shores of the Gulf. We had four rooms available: two for jury work, complete with fully equipped PCs on wifi. We used the plenary room for jury deliberations; there were many, so we spent a lot of time in there. There was also a small, cosy staff room for the moderation team. All together the venue was suitable.

The jury existed of 18 men and women from various walks of life, from university teaching, to a business man and a medical doctor. It took a while to get them talking and debating, but once they started they kept arguing with each other. And the debate sharpened the arguments for ranking the entries.

On Tuesday one of the female jury members had taken a cake along, celebrating a lot of items, but most the international day of women. Appointing the winners took two days of intensive debate and exchanging arguments. The first ranked Kuwaiti winners of the categories will be scrutinised again in the international WSA in New Dehli and compete with entries from the other 160 countries

As for the entries submitted I was impressed by the quantity of 195 entries. The number of entries by category differed sharply. eScience and eHealth did not receive many entries. However this is quite common in every national competition as well in the international WSA competition. But I was surprised by the low number of the eCulture category. In most national competitions and the international WSA competition there is never a lack of entries. We debated this issue. I had the impression that the lack of cultural products was partly due to the Islam not allowing human representations in art. We did not find a clear answer to it.

Interesting was also to see that many of the entries had a link to the Iraq-Kuwait war of 1991. This war has made a deep impression on the Kuwaiti. In one day the country was occupied and many cruelties started to happen. From one of the jury members I heard that two brothers in law of him had been imprisoned and tortured. Despite the fact that the war did not last a year, generations will talk about it for years. Looking at The Netherlands and its five year involvement in the Second World War (1940-1945), The Dutch have struggled with the war for years. If literature is something to go by, one can say that every novel up to 1975 had to have a war element in it to be dubbed literature (I exaggerate, of course). But only after 1975 Dutch literature got a wider scope again. And it is only since the nineties that one talks about another scope of the national liberation day.

Blog Post Number: 1310

Tags: multimedia competition, content