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Europe Works Toward E-Voting Standards
by William New
More than 40 experts within the Council of Europe are meeting this week to prepare European standards on the legal, operational and technical aspects of e-voting.
During the "exploratory" meetings on Monday and Tuesday, the experts were expected to consider a proposal by United Kingdom authorities on the development of technical standards for e-voting. Britain is among the few countries that have begun testing such standards.
The U.K. proposal calls for core technical standards that reflect the differing situations of each nation and that would be acceptable to industry. Examples include standards to limit e-voting to people who are entitled to vote, prevent more than one vote per person and the loss of any votes, ensure secrecy in voting, and create an audit trail to enable the detection of fraud. Other ideas are to ensure that e-voting is accessible to all and that the infrastructure could not fail.
The proposal would build on the work of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, an international consortium focused on generating open standards for the exchange of data to support business processes.
Officials from various countries were slated to make presentations on aspects of e-government during the meeting.
U.S. Ponders Science, Technology 'Dialogue'
The United States is examining the possibility of a global meeting on science and technology as a way to generate an international dialogue on issues facing every country, according to Amy Flatten of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
Flatten did not elaborate when presenting the idea to the Northern Virginia Technology Council last week. Flatten's boss, OSTP Director John Marburger, has the role of science minister for the United States in international settings.
In her remarks, Flatten raised several issues facing the field from the U.S. perspective. She said a high priority for the United States is to raise student performance in mathematics and science, especially because those fields have been linked to the nation's economic growth. U.S. students' scores are low when compared with their international counterparts.
Flatten also highlighted the globalization of the science and tech fields, which is resulting in U.S. jobs being moved overseas. She also said her office is focusing more on homeland security.
Other governments are aware that the United States is falling behind in math and science. European Information Society Commissioner Erkki Liikanen told a Washington audience last week that the global computer Olympics was held in California recently, but no one in the United States paid attention because no U.S. universities made the top 10. He noted that several eastern European countries set to join the European Union soon did make the top 10.
Egypt's Telecom Market Opens Slowly
Egypt has taken many steps to open its information and communications technology markets to outside competition, but liberalization of its telecommunications sector is on a slower track, a senior Egyptian official said last week.
Egypt has taken the step of committing to the World Trade Organization's Basic Telecommunications Agreement, but it has until 2006 to complete the deregulation of international telephone traffic, according to Ahmed Nazif, the Egyptian minister of communications and information technology.
Egypt may seek a strategic partnership for the nation's dominant carrier, Telecom Egypt, but "there are no buyers," Nazif said last week in Washington. The problem, he said, is that by the time the government began looking in 2000, the global telecom industry was in trouble.
Telecom Egypt will not be cheap, as Nazif called it "a very successful venture" that is "making a lot of money" from nearly 10 million subscribers. Egypt's population is about 70 million.
Still, the government remains hopeful, and Telecom Egypt is "still on the table," he said. "I think very strong investment is possible in the telecom sector in Egypt."
Some large U.S. IT companies, such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco Systems, and Motorola, have invested in the country, Nazif said. Microsoft helped reduce piracy by offering its software to university students at a "very low price," he said.
The country is taking India's lead and now has some 300 software "houses," with internationally certified software engineers, he said.
It does not appear that U.S. trade negotiators are focused on Egypt's telecom sector in potentially preparing to launch negotiations for a trade agreement between the countries. But Egyptian Foreign Trade Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali said last week that an agreement would help to "ground" the reforms Egypt has made. Taher Helmy, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, meanwhile, asserted that "the reforms are irreversible."
Nazif also described the government's aggressive program for building an information society. For instance, with average incomes in Egypt fairly low, free Internet access is given with a telephone, amounting to a cost of about 20 cents an hour, and still profitable to the private sector, he said. As a result, 8 million households now have Internet access.
People also can buy computers from the telephone company and pay for them by monthly fees.
European Push For Software Patents On Track
The European Union is on track to introduce European patents for software despite opposition from European companies and software developers, a lobbying group for "open source" software based in the United Kingdom said last week.
Users of open-source software can read and alter the underlying code. ZDNet reports that Mike Banahan, the chief technology officer with OpenForum Europe, a subsidiary of the technology lobbying group InterForum, said the EU directive on software patents would prevent smaller firms from competing and threaten open-source software development by engendering expensive patent fights like those in the United States.
WTO 'Mini-Ministerial' Set For Montreal
About 25 trade ministers from WTO nations will convene in Montreal on July 28-30 for a "mini-ministerial." The meeting will provide an opportunity for ministers from developing and developed countries to assess progress in the current round of global trade negotiations, which were launched in 2001 in Doha, Qatar, and discuss how to move the agenda forward.
"The Doha development agenda must move forward, and we are offering another opportunity for both developed and developing countries to bridge the gaps that persist in key areas of the current negotiations," Canadian International Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew said in a statement. WTO trade ministers will formally meet in Cancun, Mexico, in September.
In other Canadian news, Privacy Commissioner George Radwanski resigned last week after being investigated by a parliamentary commission that questioned his high-priced meals and travel. Radwanski, who left after serving three years of a seven-year appointment, has called the investigation a "witch hunt."
Tech Firms Back Jordanian Education Initiative
Numerous top technology firms have committed to participate in a Jordanian educational initiative announced at last week's World Economic Forum event in that country.
The so-called Discovery Schools initiative aims to transform 96 Jordanian schools into model facilities that integrate information technology with teaching and learning, the Jordan Times reports. It then will be extended to all 3,000 schools in Jordan. Participating companies include Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Siemens and Sun Microsystems.
The plan is to connect 2,700 schools through an intranet by 2004 and provide the nation's universities with high-speed, fiber-optic Internet connections. Teaching materials and methods also will be modernized.
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