ICT4D Wikibooks

The Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (APDIP) realizes how fast a published book gets out-of-date, especially in the fast-moving field of information and communications technology for development (ICT4D). APDIP has therefore donated 15 of its e-Primers to Wikibooks for free use and update (see list below).

In my opinion, this is good news twofold:

  • On one hand, the reason APDIP says its leading the opening of the books — easy and fast content updating — is a heavy weight one, specially in the field of ICTs for Development (and Information Society in general) where things change at the speed of bytes.
  • On the other hand, it does not make any more sense to copyright material issued by public institutions, and I would consider any organization under the umbrella of the United Nations system to be a public institution. While things made out of atoms are fair to be charged because of the concurring “materializing” costs, digital supports should be made freely available. In this issue, I expect the (c) on the APDIP materials to drop (also on their site) and be changed by a (cc) or a GNU FLD or whatever. And I’d also expect to see some other “products” (such as ITU’s databases), clearly of a wide public interest, to be entering the open access paradigm too.

These ICT4D Books belong to two previously issued collections, namely, the APDIP ICT4D e-Primers and the IOSN FOSS Primers, and can be found in the following places:

The titles, so far, are:

  1. The Information Age
  2. Legal and Regulatory Issues in the Information Economy
  3. Nets, Webs and the Information Infrastructure
  4. Information and Communication Technologies for Poverty Alleviation
  5. Internet Governance
  6. e-Government
  7. e-Commerce and e-Business
  8. ICT in Education
  9. Genes, Technology and Policy
  10. Free/Open Source Software: A General Introduction
  11. Free/Open Source Software: Education
  12. Free/Open Source Software: Government Policy
  13. Free/Open Source Software: Licensing
  14. Free/Open Source Software: Localization
  15. Free/Open Source Software: Open Standards

[via The Development Gateway]

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If you need to cite this article in a formal way (i.e. for bibliographical purposes) I dare suggest:

Peña-López, I. (2006) “ICT4D Wikibooks” In ICTlogy, #38, November 2006. Barcelona: ICTlogy.
Retrieved month dd, yyyy from https://ictlogy.net/review/?p=477

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