Forum Addresses Benefits of Developing an Open ICT Ecosystem
In today's digital age, the ability to collaborate and share information has created an unprecedented opportunity for innovation. At ictQATAR's Digitally Open: Innovation and Open Access Forum, international and regional experts in the "open" movement shared their thoughts on how to create an open ICT ecosystem in Qatar and highlighted its benefits.
ictQATAR Secretary General
"Using open principles of collaboration and transparency will help address issues not only in Qatar but around the world. I believe promotion of digital openness across all sectors is essential to being a global leader of the future and, of course, this event is a big first step." said Dr. Hessa Al-Jaber, ictQATAR's Secretary General.
Al-Jaber outlined specific initiatives ictQATAR is leading to promote an open digital environment, which she said was essential to creating original Arabic content. Initiatives include the establishment of an incubation center for digital content companies, establishing policies that encourage open source solutions in government IT, a major national digitization effort and Arabizing website accessibility standards.
"The Arab world has a strong and important voice that must be heard. Embracing a digitally open world will put us at the forefront of innovation and help propel us towards being a knowledge based economy," said Al-Jaber.
ictQATAR partnered with Creative Commons on the event. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization working in over 70 countries around the world that has developed flexible licenses to address the complicated issue of content rights in the digital world. ictQATAR and Creative Commons will be holding a working meeting tomorrow (Sunday) to explore porting the content rights licenses to Qatar law.
Digitally Open featured Mitchell Baker, Chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation; Joichi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons; Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager at Google; and Michael Nelson, Visiting Professor of Internet Studies at Georgetown University.
"I am very excited by the opportunity to collaborate with ictQATAR in this groundbreaking initiative. Embracing Digital Openness and adopting Creative Commons will greatly accelerate the development and global promotion of Arabic content and help foster sharing and increasing collaboration globally and I am very happy that Qatar is taking initiative in this effort," said Creative Commons CEO Joichi Ito.
There were also three interactive panel discussions at Digitally Open focusing on the benefits of digital openness in government, science and technology, and culture and creativity, as well as a workshop for web developers on open source development.
ictQATAR will be posting video from the event, including special interviews with speakers, on its YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/ictQATAR. For presentations from the event and speaker bios, visit the forum page.
