Two ICTA projects – Shine at World Summit Award, Mexico

The ‘1919’ or the ‘GIC’ project and the project “Impaired Aid” were the two Sri Lankan projects that won the prestigious World Summit Award 2009

Sri Lanka was feted at the World Summit Award (WSA) gala in Mexico recently. Over two of Sri Lanka’s ICTA-initiated projects won the best e-Content awards under two different categories. Sri Lanka shone with a special mark as it was the only developing country to be decked with two WSA 2009 awards.

ICTA Chief Operating Officer, Reshan Dewapura (right) receives the award.

On the occasion of the awards ceremony, WSA Chairman Peter A. Bruck pinpointing the current trend of e-Content projects said: “In contrast to mass TV and newspapers, the new media do not concentrate in one country or one region; we do not see a digital Hollywood or digital Fleet street. Rather, the most interesting e-Contents come from smaller markets and from smaller players. They appear to be much more in touch with users and their communities. Local content, not global, triumphs in terms of quality”
The WSA 09 Winners’ Gala, WSA Winners’ Conference and Exhibition where Sri Lanka made its mark took place in Monterrey, Mexico recently (from September 2 to 5). The event in Mexico had been organised in collaboration with the UN GAID’s Global Forum.
The ‘1919’ or the ‘GIC’ project and the project “Impaired Aid” were the two Sri Lankan projects that won the prestigious World Summit Award 2009.
The World Summit Award (WSA 09) was given to the GIC (‘1919’) project which has a single, electronic, trilingual (Sinhala, Tamil and English) knowledge base of 1,600 services available to citizens from 77 key government organisations. (www.gic.gov.lk).
“The GIC has handled over two million telephone calls in the last two years during which it has been functioning – averaging over 1,500 calls a day which goes up to 2,500 calls when we have a media campaign,” Reshan Dewapura, Chief Operating Officer of the Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) which maintains the Government Information Centre, said.
The project ‘1919’ was submitted under ICTA’s Re-engineering Government programme; “Impaired Aid” was developed by Jinasena Properties Ltd. under ICTA’s e-Society programme. The category under which ‘Impaired Aid’ won the best WSA e-Content award in the world was the ‘e-Inclusion and Participation’ category. WSA 2009 had attracted 560 applications under eight categories from 157 countries of which 545 were ‘jurable’. There were more than 50 entries under each of the eight categories. In total approximately there were 20,000 entries which initially attempted to be selected for the world award. Thus Sri Lanka’s two projects outran about 20,000 projects from 157 countries in being adjudged the best e-Content project in the world each its own category.