1. Areas of Activities
The Information Society promotion
actions in the Mediterranean countries concern mainly the sectors
of Education/training and Commerce. The countries organise
numerous seminars, fairs and exhibitions.
In addition to these events, the
main activities are:
- Many workshops take
place in these countries: two workshops were conductedin Palestine
to "build interactive media for technical education
and training using multimedia software tools".
Jordan organised a four-month regional training workshop
on information systems engineering.
- Surveys have been
launched to study the presence of the IS in different
sectors and committees have been created to conduct them:
in Morocco the sectors of telecom, industry and
administration are concerned; in Israel, the
committee on "Preparation of Israel for the
Information Age" or IT Policy Group has been useful
for the development of IS; in Algeria, national
councils of the statistical and geographical information
have been created.
- The press and the mass
media often have sections about the Information
Society and play a very important role in the extension
of the IT to a large public. Every Israeli newspaper
possesses a weekly supplement or some daily pages about
Internet; the radios and TVs broadcast programs about the
Information Technologies. The Lebanon newspapers
begin to dedicate pages to Internet.
- Large projects: Syria
leads two projects (EMICO and MEDEDI), the first one will
help the Small and Middle Enterprises (SMEs) and the
second one will promote the EDI (Electronic Data
Interchange). Different Israeli ministries launch
a program to implement the "Super Highway of
Information" or to develop the computerisation of
the schools. In Lebanon, the ministry for
administrative reform (OMSAR) conceived a national plan
to form the Information Society.
- In addition to those
programs, some research programs are also
conducted in Cyprus and Algeria.
2. Actors
The main actors of the promotion
of IS are the ministries and the universities. They often
work together, with Institutes of Science and Technology
or with the Chambers of Commerce.
- The universities
contribute a lot to the promotion of the IS, often in
co-operation with Chambers of Commerce, ministries or
private companies. The actions are aimed at learning or
showing the new Information Technologies to individuals
or company employees (Israel, Lebanon). In Jordan
and Palestine, the universities also work with the
UNESCO for education and training. The university of Malta
develop the Malta Internet Foundation to promote the
increase of Internet on the island and finally to
introduce Internet in the schools.
- Education and training
are the main goal of the initiatives but we remark that
most of the actions are aimed at the senior students or
the workers. Except in Malta and Israel, the primary
schools have a little place in the development of IS.
However the states often want to develop the spread of
Internet in the whole society including schools.
3. Summary:
There are many differences between
Mediterranean countries and EU. There are more initiatives of
promotion in the EU and the priorities are different.
Furthermore, the public administration seems to be less important
in the EU than in the Mediterranean countries.
Moreover, there are large
differences between the countries. Due to the particularity of
the infrastructure of each country, the priorities are adapted to
the different needs of material (implementation of networks or
purchase of computers)
One of the problems of this region
is the presence of different alphabets (Roman, Arabic and
Israeli). This problem has initiate some projects, particularly
in Syria and Israel: a part of the MEDEDI project is the
adaptation of the EDI messages to Arab characters; the Israeli
ministry of Science want to develop search engines and Internet
sites in Hebrew.
Many projects are aimed at helping
specific groups: the disabled (Malta), the SMEs (Syria).
Finally this region tries to
develop international workshops in order to discover the IS
activities of the rest of the world and particularly the EU (Syria,
Cyprus, Tunisia). Moreover a part of the Cypriot
actions are aimed at enhancing the stability in the region.
