The purpose of this Meeting, which was open to all stakeholders from the public and private sectors, the civil society, and international organizations, was to discuss the roles and activities that are and will be built upon the Action Line C1, C7 e-Gov, and C11 including a consideration of potential ICT gaps and challenges for bridging the digital divide and harnessing ICT for sustainable development.

This Meeting provided a platform for participants to exchange information and experiences; to identify the propriety areas for implementation within the Action Lines; and to create synergies among different stakeholders for more effective knowledge sharing and collaboration in order to ensure the implementation of WSIS at the international, regional and national levels.

The outcomes of the meeting are expected to  harness international expertise and experience to support deliberations on Post-2015 priorities and development challenges and to contribute to an overall review process of the implementation of the Summit outcomes in 2015.

Speakers and Participants of the Meeting shared and discussed some successful projects relevant to the thematic focus of your session as well as link between this workshop and issues relevant to WSIS+10 including:

• Achievements in the last 10 years
• Challenges in the last 10 years
• Vision beyond 2015
• Vision of the organizations represented at the Meeting vis a vis the WSIS Process beyond 2015.

The Speakers of the Meeting were:

• Mr. Vyacheslav Cherkasov, Sr. Governance and Public Administration Officer (UNDESA)
• Dr. Yuri Hohlov, Chairman of the Board Institute of the Information Society (Russia)
• Mr. Alexey Kozyrev, Deputy Minister, Russian Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications
• Mr. Ravshan Alimukhamedov, Deputy Director, e-Government Centre, Uzbekistan
• Mr. Ahmed Al-Bulushi, Team Leader International Relations & eGovt, IT Authority, Oman
• Mr. Mohammed Reza A. Shirazi, Manager of ICT Department,Data Processing Co., I.R. Iran
• Mr. Harm Jan Van Burg, Vice Chair,Liaison for UN/CEFACT

Dr. Hohlov made a presentation on "E-Participation: From E-Government to E-Governance" prepared in cooperation with Mr. Cherkasov. 

The next meeting of the day, to which a Russian representative made a contribution, was the interactive session  organized by the Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development.

ICTs are cross-cutting enablers of development and are therefore critical to the achievement of the sustainable development goals (SDGs). At the same time, WSIS stakeholders have recognized the need to link the WSIS process to the SDG framework. The current SDG framework makes several references to ICTs. For example, ICTs are explicitly mentioned as a target under Goal 5 “to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”, and of Goal 9 “to build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovations”. ICT indicators can also help monitor achievements in other areas included in the SDGs, such as poverty reduction, education, economic growth and inclusive societies.

While the future development agenda is still under discussion, its goals and targets have been largely defined, and are unlikely to change much. The discussion on indicators, on the other hand, is still ongoing. This offers the ICT community the opportunity to highlight the importance of ICT for the achievement of the SDGs, and to ensure the inclusion of ICT indicators within the SDG monitoring framework. The Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development is coordinating this effort among the international organizations, and has identified a set of relevant and existing ICT indicators that can help monitor the proposed SDGs and targets.

The Partnership’s proposal of ICT indicators for the SDGs was submitted to the UN Expert Group Meeting on the Indicator Framework for the Post 2015 Development Agenda, which was held in New York in February 2015.This Session presented the Partnership’s proposal and highlighted selected ICT indicators that are relevant to specific SDGs and targets. It also put the proposal in the context of the mapping exercise linking the WSIS action lines with the SDGs. The session discussed the views of countries regarding the importance of monitoring the information society, in particular in the context of the SDGs. It also addressed national needs in terms of capacity building and resources for national statistical systems related to the production of indicators for the SDG framework.

The Session was moderated by Alexandre Barbosa, Head of the Center of Studies for Information and Communications Technologies (CETIC.br), Brazil

The Speakers of the Session were:

• Susan Teltscher, Head of ICT Data and Statistics, ITU
• Peter Wallet, Programme Specialist, UNESCO Institute for Statistics
• Kees Balde, United Nations University, Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS)
• Alexey Kozyrev, Deputy Minister for Communications and Mass Media, Russian Federation.