On March 3-10, 2003, five years after Pan Asia Networking (PAN) held its first All Partners' Conference at Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, PAN convened its partners for another meeting in Vientiane, Lao PDR. The purpose of the meeting was to allow PAN and its partners to take stock, consolidate, and derive shared meanings by analyzing their work in wider regional and global contexts. The specific objectives of the Vientiane Conference were to:

• initiate training on areas of weakness (e.g. Internet services management) that have persisted in our least developing country partners;
• introduce new areas that had not yet been but should be of concern to our partners (e.g. Internet Governance, Gender Issues);
• negotiate new areas of work (e.g. Local Language Computing, Educational Technologies and Open Source Software);
• facilitate networking, sharing and showcasing of activities
• encourage analysis, synthesis and diagnosis
• network ICT innovators with the less progressive ICT adopters.

In this Conference, there was a paradigm shift in conference content, from connectivity to applications focusing on Distance Education Technologies; Rural Connectivity; Local languages; Telehealth and Telemedicine; and E-commerce. As well, a range of issues to do with Localization (Local Fonts, Unicode, Internationalized Domain Names) took centre stage. Access issues have undergone a paradigm shift so that Internet Governance and Internet equity (Digital Divide, Gender Issues and Reformation) were underscored.

Evaluation Report

Agenda

Participants