APNIC is a founding partner and key supporter of the Information Society Innovation Fund (ISIF Asia), a program aimed at stimulating creative solutions to ICT development needs in the Asia Pacific region.
Over the past few months, ISIF Asia grant recipients have been busy at a number of events in the region, sharing their expertise, building their human networks and learning from global best practices. Below is a short summary of the activities they have recently participated in.
6th Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance, Macau
Past and present ISIF Asia grant recipients attended the 6th Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance (APrIGF) meeting held 1–3 July at Macau University of Science and Technology, China.
The APrIGF is an open platform for anyone to discuss issues and priorities around Internet Governance in the Asia Pacific region. This year around 300 participants from 27 countries attended the meeting.
With support from Google and APNIC, Jon Brewer from Telco2/NRSC in New Zealand (ISIF grant recipient 2015), Ulrich Speidel from the University of Auckland, New Zealand (ISIF grant recipient 2014) and Nica Dumlao from Foundation of Media Alternatives, Philippines (ISIF grant recipient 2013) were able to contribute as speakers in different sessions, including the workshops Broadband Infrastructure and Services for The Next Billion Users, Threats in Expression in Asia, Bridging Gender Digital Divide, and Localizing Internet Governance.
“The APrIGF provided a space for our organization and our Filipino advocacy partners from the Philippine Internet Freedom Alliance to have meaningful exchanges with other stakeholders in the region and to plan for further collaboration,” says Nica Dumlao.
7th EAI International Conference on Wireless and Satellite Systems, United Kingdom
ISIF Asia funded during 2014 a collaborative project between the University of Auckland, PICISOC, Steinwurf, MIT and Internet NZ to improve Internet Connectivity in the Pacific Island with network coded TCP. One of the project partners, Péter Vingelmann, attended the 7th EAI International Conference on Wireless and Satellite Systems held in Bradford, UK from 6-7 July to present the results of the project, which looked at whether satellite-connected islands in the Pacific could make better use of the satellite links using network-coded TCP.
To learn more about the project, read our post from March Is your satellite link oscillating?
Péter works at Steinwurf, a research company in Denmark that develops products based on Random Linear Network Coding, which allows for new throughput improvements and energy consumption reductions.
The Conference brought together academic and industrial researchers, practitioners, and students interested in future techniques relating to the wireless and satellite communications, networking, technology, systems, and applications.
ICTD 2015, Singapore
Four ISIF Asia grant recipients attended the Seventh International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development ICTD 2015 conference, held in Singapore 15-18 May.
Over the past several decades, as radio and television have been joined by computers, the Internet, and mobile devices, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have become more pervasive, more accessible, and more relevant in the lives of people around the world. Virtually no sphere of human activity remains apart from ICTs, from markets to health care, education to governance, family life to artistic expression. Diverse groups across the world interact with, are affected by, and can shape the design of these technologies.
The ICTD conference is a place to understand these interactions, and to examine, critique, and refine the persistent, pervasive hope that ICTs can be enlisted by individuals and communities in the service of human development. There are multidisciplinary challenges associated with the engineering, application and adoption of ICTs in developing regions and/or for development, with implications for design, policy, and practice.
Grants recipients Jacqueline Chan (Operation ASHA, Cambodia), Tariq Zaman (ISITI, Malaysia), Gurpreet Singh (Punjabi University, India) and Teddy Mantoro (Suria University, Indonesia) attended and participated in workshops relevant to their work, as well as presenting their demos at the conference, and joined the vibrant start-up community in Singapore at an Open House event at the JFDI.Asia incubator space.
RightsCon 2015 Southeast Asia Conference, Philippines
Five ISIF Asia grant recipients attended RightsCon Southeast Asia Conference, held in Manila, Philippines 24-25 March.
RightsCon Summit 2015 was attended by more than 650 people from over 40 economies, who engaged in 125 workshops to discuss topics in relation to online rights protection, digital rights, economic development, technological solutions for human rights challenges, and risks in the ICT sector. The event was convened by Access and EngageMedia, in partnership with Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA), World Wide Web Foundation and the Research Action Design collective, and supported by global and regional sponsors, including APNIC.
Grant recipients’ Bishakha Datta (Point of View, India), Jahangir Alam (Machizo Multimedia, Bangladesh), Arvind Khadri (Servelots, India), Khairil Yusof (Sinar, Malaysia) and Nazdeek (India) attended and participated in workshops that were relevant to their work.
For the ISIF Asia fellows, RightsCon 2015 unraveled a bundle of issues such as online freedom of expression, surveillance, privacy and digital security for human rights defenders.
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