Central and Eastern European Countries Synthesis of Master Reports - July 1999

1. Areas of Activities

Several IS promotional Activities are launched in the Central and Eastern European countries. Except Bosnia Herzegovina, all countries have numerous and ambitious projects to form IS or to spread IS. The main sectors of the IS promotion activities are Education, Commerce, telecom services. A lot of seminars, conferences, fairs and round tables take place. They promote IS to the public and to the companies and they allow to know what are the actual IS developments through international workshops.

In addition to these events, the main activities are:

• Launch of action plans or large programs: in Romania, the National Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation co-ordinates the national research and development program for the Information and Communication Technology field in order to develop the Information Society; Slovenia has launched a "National Program for the development of telecommunications". Some programs involve all the ministries of the country: Latvia elaborated the program "Informatics", also called "the Program" in order to form the Information Society in Latvia.
• A lot of fora have been organised: the "Forum for the Information Society of the Romanian academy"; the Forum "From Vision to Solutions" which deals with the application of information and telecommunications technology in our everyday life, also in Romania.
• The edition of press issues and newsletters: there are several magazines in Latvia and leaflets and newsletters are published in Albania.
• Finally, surveys have been launched in Albania and Estonia.

The education sector appears to be a priority sector: a lot of activities are lead to develop IS in schools and libraries: in Latvia, LATLIBNET is a network between the main libraries; the Slovene Ministry of Education and Sport organises the "Open Days of Slovene Education". There are also some experiences of teleworking (Romania) and market analyses (Slovenia). Electronic commerce is not often the focus of these initiatives. The e-commerce is a priority for commercial companies connecting themselves to Internet and using the IT (Lithuania). The Health sector seems to play only a minor role in the promotion of Information Society in the CEEC countries.

2. The Actors

The main actors of this promotion are the following ones:

• The most active institutions are naturally the ministries and academies of Science and Technology. They finance numerous fora, programs (Romania) and international conferences (Slovenia) aimed at informing the public and the companies of the evolution of the Information Society in their country and in the rest of the world. They also install networks between the research centres (Romania, Poland).
• Other active public bodies are schools and libraries.
• Private companies and the Chambers of Commerce also organise workshops and create associations: Conference Information Society ’99 dealt with the formation of the Information Society in Lithuania. Estonian professionals founded the Estonian Computer Association.

3. Summary

A number of countries want to develop IS activities in relationship with the EU. For instance the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre (Poland) became TERENA associated member in October 1998. The Slovene ministry of Science and Technology organised a conference in co-operation with the European Commission.

More generally, there are some regional and local activities and most of the initiatives are nation-wide. Many countries try to organise international fora and conferences because they want to play a role on the international IS scene and to keep updated with results of the IS activities in the rest of the world.

The objectives are different from one country to another: some of them want to promote national projects and others want to collaborate with other countries (Poland and Slovenia with EU). Following the objective, the priorities change.