ICT Conversation : Estonia to Guyana..

The participants at the last Software Freedom Day had agreed to keep the conversation going about Guyana and the use of Information and Communications Technologies.

Bhoojnarine Hemchand did not know that Estonians apparently have a "deep abiding love for trees."

He had visited as part of an OAS workshop since Estonia has become a benchmark in terms of how it uses IT. Estonia gained independence from the Soviet Union 1994 independence - they realised that using Information Technology was critical to development of the country.

Estonia is now one of the most 'wired' countries in the world and is an example to other countries wishing to develop similar infrastructure and services.

Some of the lessons for Guyana which I gathered are :-


  • There was a vision - a woman in a forest looking for mushrooms and needing reliable information about the correct mushrooms
  • E-estonia is a national project (non partisan), driven by need to develop their economy and to build on their concern for their sovereignty
  • The Government is keen to offer services to people - emphasis on services. 
  • There are many different stakeholders who are connected and share information.
  • Children learn to code (write programmes) at a young age in school. (I had an experience recently in Guyana where a 3rd former in a senior secondary school asked me " what is a programming language")
  • The Estonian Government relies heavily on Free and Open Source software and distributes its code under public licenses.
Some references are :-

The next ICT conversation will be held in January 2016. The event was held at Brainstreet.



 

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