Digital Review of Asia Pacific 2007-2008
Résumé
he Digital Review of Asia Pacific (DirAP) has the mission of generating new descriptive, analytical and predictive knowledge about the fi eld of ICT for development in the Asia Pacific region. It attempts to provide in-depth analyzes and syntheses of ICT policy, developments and applications, and issues and debates concerning the significance of policy and technology enabling environments for national and regional socio-economic development. DirAP targets both regional and global audiences, especially decision and policymakers and practitioners from both government and NGOs.From our perspective as publishers, DirAP’s key contributions to the state-of-practice and state-of-the-art in ICT and ICT for development in Asia Pacific may be summarized as follows:
1. It adds a major source of research-based data and information to a field that is growing into a discipline with as yet relatively little research literature especially relating to Asia Pacific.
2. It gives ICT stakeholders in Asia Pacific opportunities to develop skills in research methods, research processes and research documentation.
3. It draws together a large number of leading ICT players from both developed and developing countries in Asia to reflect on platforms they identify as important for engagement to influence change.
4. It permits a time series narrative macro view of how total project investments by all parties aggregate into national syntheses on both country-level performance and issues based performance.
5. It harnesses the intellectual contribution of a sizable community of practitioners and researchers from a multitude of disciplines from most of the developing countries of the region.
The voices of DirAP are independent and if they are ideological at all, they are the voices of these writers who are the key movers and shakers in the ICT for development arena in the region. We believe that this multiplicity of voices, which includes those of policymakers, professionals from the private sector and senior scholars, offers a unique opportunity to access the richness and the complexity of the debates, of the choices being made and to be made, and of the major issues faced in the interface between communication and development. And we strongly believe in the importance of this complementarity and diversity of voices, ensuring that, as in Kurozawa’s Rashomon, the perspectives of the different actors are represented but also debated through research and statistical evidence.
The previous editions of DirAP were launched at the UN World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva (December 2003) and Tunis (November 2005) in both English and French versions, and they were extremely well received. We hope that this edition will provide you with an important source of perspectives about the major achievements in the midst of constraints as well as the challenges ahead, in your respective working environments within Asia Pacific. And we hope that this edition will provide a well-deserved visibility to the different types of ongoing experiments in the region to stakeholders in other parts of the world, on the different lanes of the Information Highway towards knowledge societies.