Information Society Watch

Day 2 of CSTD featured two half day panels on-

1. "Mobile Technology, Convergence and Social Networking Tools for
Development and Poverty Eradication" and
2."Delivering innovation in global public health"

in the form of "Follow-up to the World Summit on the Information
Society: Joint CSTD-ITU-GAID panel discussion"

The second panel was quite different from 'usual' panels on ICTD - most

Introduction
The debate on Free and Open Source software versus proprietary software has often got bogged down in ‘its free’ versus ‘it is not free’ arguments. However there are other critical aspects that need to be considered. The argument for FOSS is looked at from different perspectives in this note.

I was reading on-line the latest Down to Earth magazine (June 25, 2007) which carries in its cover story, diseases that still are rampant in India, since they largely affect the poor and their is not much incentive for the pharmaceutical companies to invest in R&D to treat/cure them. For e.g. the Kala Azar disease largely affects the poor in Bihar and there is no medicine for it .... what is used is medicines that have been forumulated for diseases such as cancer etc...

the article suggests that public funding into R&D on health reasearch is critical for ensuring that medicines for the poor / treating ailments that affect the poor are indeed available...