Although government involvement in information society related projects is at a high level, government involvement in information society awareness actions is not at such a high level in Turkey.

Government is involved in many IS related projects such as networking and MIS (Management Information Systems) projects at ministerial or administration level, building infrastructure, etc. There is a project called Kamunet, which aims at co-ordinating these infrastructure building projects and MIS projects. Recently a Kamunet Higher Council is established for this co-ordination, where ministerial undersecretaries and other high level governmental representatives are members of the Council.

Internet Higher Council is another important informal semi-governmental consultative body aiming at promoting Internet penetration and co-ordination and policy making in Internet and telecommunication related issues. Internet Higher Council meets regularly. A major promotional activity of the Council is to organise the yearly Internet Week, where activities such as panels, discussion meetings, seminars and other similar activities take place. Another council established is Educational Technologies Higher Council lead by the Ministry of Education.

Another important governmental body is the Electronic Commerce Co-ordination Committee of the Undersecretary of Foreign Trade, which aims at identifying problems and their solution for widespread use of electronic commerce. Late in 1998 this committee prepared a report in this respect.

Universities and academia are very active in organising seminars and conferences in information technologies and related issues. Several regular yearly conferences are organise including ISCIS (International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences), BAS (Computer Networks Symposium), TAINN (Turkish Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks Symposium) and SIU (Signal Processing Applications Symposium).

Conferences are also organised by other organisations such as NGOs and professional associations. Bilisim (Informatics) Conference and Fair, Open Systems Conference, Technology Congress, Compex fair are some of the conferences organised by such organisations each year. Bilisim series of conferences and expositions are major yearly events attracting over 150 thousands participants.

Many activities took place on the Y2K problem, including the preparation of a national action plan by State Planning Organisation DPT, conducting of a questionnaire by State Statistics Institute DIE, seminars organised by the Association of Turkish Informatics Industrialists TUBISAD, Turkish Informatics Foundation TBV and Hurriyet (a leading national journal), etc.

Turkish Informatics Foundation TBV and Turkish Informatics Association TBD are active in information society related promotional activities. Other NGOs involved actively in information society issues are the Association of Turkish Informatics Industrialists TUBISAD, the Association of Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen TUSIAD, which is a very influential organisation in Turkey, Technology Development Foundation of Turkey TTGV and the Association of Turkish Electronics Industrialists TESID, and Internet Association INETD. Recently established associations include TISSAD, Association of ISPs and TASAD, Association of Software Companies.

Many conferences, workshops, etc. have taken place over the lifetime of the ESIS II project.

The major events were the following:

The main promotional event in Turkey is Bilisim (Informatics Conference and Fair) which is the biggest yearly IT event in Turkey.

Bilisim 99 was originally scheduled to take place in September 1999, but it was postponed to December 1999 due to the Earthquake. Bilisim 99 included an IT fair attracting over 100000 visitors, several conferences and workshops, many keynote speeches and many company presentations.

Bilisim 2000 was organised as a CeBit event, by a joint venture company of Interpro, organiser of Bilisim events up to that year, and Deutche Messe, organiser of CeBit, specially established for this purpose. Both the fair and the conference were big successes. The fair attracted over 185000 visitors, over 800 companies, and over 1500 journalists and the total exhibition area was 24000 sq meters. The fair played an important role in increasing the technology awareness of the general public in IT. The conference attracted 2900 participants and some of the events were repeated due to high demand. The theme of the conference was e-Turkey, and many issues were discussed under this theme. Both the fair and the conference were publicised very well, obtaining very good coverage on the TVs and in the newspapers.

Another fair attracting many visitors is Compex, which is organised yearly. Compex 1999 attracted over 120000 visitors.

There are several other conferences and symposia organised every year, including the Internet in Turkey Conference and the International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS). Internet in Turkey conference is organised by the Internet Council. It includes speeches and panel discussions to discuss issues related to Internet penetration in Turkey. The 5^th Internet Conference was held in Ankara and the 6^th in Istanbul. ISCIS series is the academic symposia. The 14^th ISCIS was held in Izmir and 15^th was held in Istanbul.

The First Turkish-Greek I.S. Forum organised by Turkish Informatics Foundation and SEPE, the Greek Association of IT companies, was of organised as an activity within Bilisim 99. The Second meeting of the Forum was held in Athens in 2000. A similar activity, Israeli-Turkish Telecom Forum, was organised by Interpro in 2000.

Many meetings were held in this period, including ITU World Radiocommunication Conference, two conferences organised by international conference organizers, one by Euroforum, UK, the other by SMI, UK, in Istanbul on Turkish telecoms. Other meetings included a panel discussion on the draft law on the establishment of a national information security administration, a seminar on risk capital in Turkey, the Internet Week, Turkish Informatics Association’s seminar for data processing centre managers, panel discussions on legal issues in Internet, a panel meeting on digital economy, the BTIE 2000 IT-based Education conference. a workshop on IT use in worker unions, a conference on mobile communications, a meeting of the IT Group in the National Assembly, a panel meeting to discuss DNS policy issues organised by The Internet Technologies Society INETD.

The Information Technologies Group of the Grand National Assembly, which is a group of parliamentarians interested in IT promotion, helds meetings regularly to IT related issues such as taking measures for promoting the use of Turkish character set, incentives for software industry, establishment of a separate ministry on IT, etc.

TUBITAK and Turkish Informatics Foundation organised several information days on EC programs, including the Eumedis program.

Several awards ceremonies were held in the IT area including Interpro Informatics Awards, Best Web Awards, and Informatics Media Awards and NetJini Best Web Application Award.

An interesting content stimulation activity in this period was the establishment of a virtual exhibition and fair.

Other actions for promoting IS development related to education and awareness building include the Electronic Commerce Roadshow jointly organised by Turkish Informatics Foundation and Bogazici University and the announcement of the so-called New Learning Model of Turkish Informatics Foundation.

Some organisations and the industry started some promoting IS development and raising awareness, maybe the most important being Information Age Summit for SMEs organised by KOSGEB. This is a series panel discussions and demonstrations organised in a different city every time where solution providing companies introduce their solutions to SMEs. Other such initiatives include roadshows organised by leading companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, etc. KocSystem, a leading IT company belonging to the Koc Group has started a series of panel meetings to discuss electronic government. Turkish Informatics Foundation and Hurriyet, a leading daily, started panel meeting on e-business.

Turkish ınformatics Foundation held several meetings of the Computer Engineering Department Heads. The meeting held in the last quarter of 2000 was attended by several department heads from Greece.

Many reports were published in ESIS II period including the TUENA (Information Infrastructure Master Plan of Turkey) final report prepared by TUBITAK for the Ministry of Transport, a report on IT related news coverage in the press prepared by the Association of Informatics Industrialist of Turkey TUBISAD, reports published by international IT companies dealing with the information society development in Turkey, and reports on emerging Turkey prepared by the leading national newspaper Hurriyet.

The TUENA project is a Ministry of Transportation project to produce a long term (20 years) plan for the information infrastructure of Turkey. The TUENA report was published. It is based on an analysis of the needs in several main sectors such as education, healthcare, industry and commerce, and a projection of the needs. It is considered to be a major document. was completed in late 1998.

The Intel report on Internet penetration in Turkey is based on interviewing 100 IT managers in 4 main sectors. Findings include the following: 97% consider Internet as a very important business tool, 100% believe their success in the future depends on their doing business on the Internet, only 22% are using Internet in E-Commerce today, only 19% are planning to start E-Commerce in one year, 2-15% of the income of those doing E-Commerce comes from E-Commerce, and 63% do not consider starting E-Commerce in their businesses.

A report published by Merrill Lynch in the last quarter of 2000 predicts that Internet penetration will reach 2.7%, PC penetration will reach 3.7% and mobile telephone penetration will reach 19% by the end of 2000.

A report was published by Cisco Systems on human capital shortage in the Internet and networking areas. The report examines the problem in 12 countries including Turkey that have a potential to transfer into the new economy. The report identifies Turkey as the country that has the second most severe shortage problem after South Africa. The report predicts the current shortage at a level of 5000 persons and it predicts that the shortage will increase to over 20000 in 3 years.

Another report states that the IT sector is very dynamic in Turkey in terms of the establishment of new IT companies. It states that on the average 2 new IT companies were established per day during the first three months of year 2000. The total number of new IT firms established in 3 months were 160 with 40 of them being Internet companies.

Other promotional activities include the publication of some reports including the monthly update reports on the Y2K problem by the State Planning Organisation and reports published by Interpro. The first report produced by Interpro Market Research Center on the national ICT market estimates that the total market size for the year 2000 as 26.2 billion USD, with a distribution of the shares of IT and Communications estimated as 22% and 78%, respectively. Interpro also prepared a catalogue of IT companies and services. It also includes web sites.

Interpro publishes reports on the Turkish ICT market. The report published in 2000 reports that the Internet market and the services market are increasing vey fast. According to the report the top 10 ICT companies are Turk Telekom, Turkcell (leading mobile telephone operator), Ericsson, Telsim (mobile telephone operator), KVK (mobile telephone set distributor), IBM turk, Netas-Nortel Netwoks, Arena (PC and peripheral distributor), Basari (mobile phone set distributor) and Siemens.

Turkish Informatics Foundation published a report on National Personal Identification Numbering. The report predicted that the savings of such a numbering system would amount to over 10 billion dollars yearly, which due mainly by eliminating losses in many governmental systems including the taxation.

A report published by Interpro stated that the private universities in Turkey are expanding rapidly especially in the field of IT education. The report states that the current yearly student intake of the 11 existing private universities is 800, equal to the figure of over 20 state universities. The intake of 5 private universities in Northern Cyprus, which are taking mainly Turkish high school graduates, is 600. The report states that there is a severe shortage of faculty in private universities.

Information society related issues are gaining importance in the country. An indication of this is the current debate on the establishment of a separate ministry to be responsible for this area. Another indication is that a lot of expertise groups were created during the period of the ESIS II project. The following ones can be mentioned:

A new expertise group was formed on IT use in worker unions by Turkish Informatics Association jointly with leading worker union associations including Turkis, DISK and Hakis.

Another action taken was the formation of two committees on IT by the State Planning Organisation in relation with the preparation of the new 5 year national development plan, one committee on telecommunications infrastructure and services and the other on IT and Internet services.

Higher Council of Internet formed a working group to investigate policy issues related to DNS. This was due to ongoing discussions on DNS issues. ISPs have long been complaining about the heavy bureaucracy involved in domain name application processing. DNS service is currently provided by Middle East Technical University in Turkey. Moreover, work was under way to convert the Internet Higher Council into Internet Foundation. The purpose is to have more flexibility and effectiveness.

Information Technologies Group of the Turkish Grand National Assembly (the parliament) is an interesting initiative of the parliamentarians. It is an informal group of over 40 parliamentarians, aiming at increasing awareness among parliamentarians on information technology related issues. The group recently made two announcements, one to urge establishing a National Information Institute, and the other to declare information society as the goal for the country.

The Electronic Commerce Coordination Committee, which is a committee of the Undersecretary of Foreign Trade, held its first meeting since the formation of the government after the last national elections.

Finally, Turkish Informatics Association became a member of CEPIS, which is the association of the European informatics societies.

Several regulatory development that have impacts on the development of the Information Society occurred during the period of ESIS II:

Several regulatory measures were taken by the government and several draft laws are prepared, including a new law on telecommunication regulation, a draft law to establish National Information Security Organisation, a new law expanding the responsibilities of Capital Market Council to the transactions done in electronic medium, and a new law related to the Higher Council of Banking.

The new telecommunications law introduces major changes in the current telecommunications legislation. The law requires privatising Turk Telekom by the end of year 2003. It also requires establishing an independent regulatory body. An independent telecom regulatory body was established, as required by the new telecom law. The regulatory body is responsible for setting the general rules on tariffs, contracts and technical issues, establish tariffs and monitor them, introduce legislation for services and infrastructure and monitor the implementation, determine calculation methods and upper limits for service prices, monitor commercial companies against the legislation, introduce measures for consumer rights protection, and provide input to the Competition Council on telecom related issues.

The new telecommunications law reflects partially the current national IS strategy. With this law the telecom market is being liberalised. The first major event was the establishment of an independent regulatory authority. The second major event was the licensing of the third GSM network. The third GSM license was granted to the Isbank-Telecom Italia consortium for a relatively high price: 2.525 billion US dollars excluding VAT, doubling the next best bid, which was 1.350 billion US dollars excluding VAT. The forth GSM license was also planned to be awarded but postponed because there was no bid high enough to award the license. An interesting observation was that the shares of Isbank in Istanbul Stock Exchange increased immediately after the bid, with a net increase in the stock value of Isbank surpassing the difference between the first two bids (i.e. over 1 billion US dollars).

Another important development was in the area of Cable Internet. With the new telecom law, several companies were established in this area and the subscription level has increased to 1200 in a short time. It is expected that cable Internet will be a major alternative to the existing services provided by ISPs.

Two bylaws were introduced, one on regulating installation of GSM base stations, and the other on digital TV broadcasting.

There was a debate on establishing a new ministry responsible for information and IT related issues. A draft law has been prepared for this purpose by the IT Group in the Grand National Assembly. It was submitted to the prime minister by the Group. Some experts think that a ministry is essential for co-ordinating IT related issues and for emphasising the importance of IT and the transformation into information society. Others think that Turkey already has a high number of ministries (currently the number of ministries is 34) and that the establishment of another ministry will simply introduce more bureaucracy and will bring overhead to the economy.

Turkish Grand National Assembly enacted a new law changing an article of the Income Tax Law to identify software as an intellectual property and programmers as intellectual property holders and to allow income tax exemption for the distribution, publishing and commercialisation of computer programs.

Turkish Informatics Foundation declared that the draft law for the establishment of a National Information Security Council includes many regulations that are in conflict with privacy of personal and commercial information and therefore may endanger development in a free environment. The draft law is being criticised as having a too much large scope in identifying what is related to national information security.

Higher Education Council YOK also announced that the necessary legislation is being prepared to start virtual universities in Turkey.

Various promotion actions have also to be mentioned because of their potential influence on the development of the Information Society in Turkey.

The first fully on line graduate program was started by the Informatics Institute of Middle East Technical University.

One of the leading software companies, Logo, became the first IT company in Turkey whose shares are to be treated in Istanbul Stock Exchange. 15% of Logo shares are being traded in the stock market. Logo shares enjoyed a significant increase in the stock market, doubling the price since its entry to the market.

The 8^th 5-year plan prepared by the State Planning Organisation was approved by the Grand National Assembly. The plan identifies information society issues, information technologies infrastructure (Internet etc), and information technology applications among the most important areas.

Turkey participates in the IST program of the European Commission. According to the special agreement made between DGXIII and TUBITAK the budget share of a Turkish partner will be paid by TUBITAK within a certain upper limit.

Higher Education Council YOK announced a program for trainer training for widespread IT education at university level. The program aims training a sufficient number of IT trainers that will be employed at universities to teach computer literacy courses.

There is no official plans or measures to promote the provision of content in web application. Nevertheless, actions at ministry or administration level in the public sector and market forces in the private sector result in a noticeable activity in content provision nation-wide. There are many sites providing content in tourism and culture and in administration, and there are many e-business sites ranging from e-malls to WAP portals, Internet banking, electronic newspapers, job application, education, search engines, etc.

There were some industry led promotion activities such as Best Web Awards and NetJini Contest to promote web content provision. Another observation is that there were many initiatives to promote entrepreneurship in the IT area including Technology Development Foundation’s initiative, KOSGEB (SME Development Administration), and many private initiatives.

Several leading IT companies were listed in Istanbul Stock Exchange in this period, including NETAS, a leading telecom equipment producer, Alcatel, Logo, a leading software company, and Escort, the leading PC manufacturer, Aselsan, a leading military electronics manufacturer, and Turkcell, the largest GSM operator. Istanbul Stock Exchange introduced a separate index, called the technology index for high tech companies. Turkcell was also listed in NYSE in this period. Several ICT companies applied for listing in Istanbul Stock Exchange Market in 2000, including Gen-Pa, distributer of mobile phone sets, Link, a leading software company, Arena, distributor of computer hardware and peripherals, Index, an integrated solutions provider, Porcan, leading company in barcode systems, Karel, mobile phone sets distributor, and Datateknik, a PC distributor. Companies considering applying in 2001 include KVK, mobile phone sets distributor, Superonline, leading ISP, Ixir, leading ISP, Likom, a software company, and VestelNet, a leading ISP.

Turk Telekom announced that the third communication satellite of Turk Telekom, Turksat 2A would be launched in the last quarter of 2000. Also announced was launching another satellite called Anatolia I. Unfortunately the launching of Turksat 2A was postponed to 2001 due to technical reasons.

An interesting observation was the increase in the number of TV commercials on IT and Internet services. A major portion of prime time commercials in leading national TV channels are on IT products and services and Internet subscription campaigns. About half of the commercials fall into this category in channels such as Kanal D, Kanal E, NTV and CNN Turk.

Cable Internet and Digital TV are expanding in the country. Aside from Digiturk, the digital TV company established in the previous period, a new company called Star Digital was established in this period. Similarly, two new companies Ultra in the Asian side of Istanbul and Interactive in Ankara entered the cable Internet. The previously established cable Internet company Kablonet operates in several major cities including Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. The total number of cable Internet subscription is currently 1200.

Another interesting development is the increase in activities in the area of risk capital. TTGV (Turkish technology Development Foundation) established a fund of 7 million US dollars. Some industrial groups and some independent initiatives are in the process of establishing incubators.

There was a debate on issuing Internet domain names. Currently domain names are issued by Middle East Technical University. Many ISS complain about the high bureaucracy and high cost of obtaining domain names. It is stated that many ISS are shifting from .com.tr to .com, i.e. from Turkish to US domain names.