Observation and Benchmarking News Portugal Elected at OECD to Chair Group on Indicators for the Information Society Portugal Elected at OECD to Chair Group on Indicators for the Information Society
- 18/06/2010
The President of The Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC), Luis Magalhães, was elected yesterday, 17.06.2010, chair of the WPIIS – Working Party on Indicators for the Information Society at the OECD in Paris. His mandate will commence on 1 January 2011.The WPIIS is one of four specialist groups set up under the committee dedicated to Information Society and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) policies, the Committee for Information, Computer and Communications Policy (ICCP), of which the President of UMIC, Luis Magalhães, has been Vice-Chair since the beginning of 2009.
Luis Magalhães follows Tony Clayton as chair of the WPIIS, the latter having chaired the working party, which was set up in 1999, since 2002. Tony Clayton was Head of New Economy Measurement at the UK Office for National Statistics.
The ICCP Committee’s work, which is supported by the OECD Secretariat through the Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry, has a major global impact on public Information Society and ICT policies. This committee’s current agenda follows the guidelines set out at the OECD Ministerial Meeting on the Future of the Internet Economy, which was held in Seoul, Republic of Korea, in June 2008.
Given the OECD’s lofty reputation as an intergovernmental institution which produces evidence-based public policy analyses and recommendations, the Working Party on Indicators for the Information Society (WPIIS) has one of the greatest levels of influence internationally on defining indicators and statistics on the Information Society and ICT and the corresponding methodologies.
Apart from the WPIIS, the ICCP committee’s specialist groups are the WPIE - Working Party on the Information Economy, the WPISP - Working Party on Information Security and Privacy and the WPCISP - Working Party on Communication Infrastructures and Services Policy. The Portuguese delegations have played a very active role in these groups and the ICCP itself, which is borne out by its election to the chair of the WPIIS and in earlier elections for the position of Vice-Chair of the WPISP and the ICCP itself.
As a result of the Portuguese delegation's activity on the ICCP Committee, Portugal was invited to intervene at OECD Conference on eCommerce in Washington in December 2009, at the High-level OECD Conference: ICTs, the Environment and Climate Change in Helsingør, Denmark, in May 2009, and at the OECD Innovation Strategy Committee Presidents in January 2009. Moreover, the Conference on Sensor Networks Organised by the OECD was held in Lisbon in June 2009. Several Portuguese experts took part at this conference and at the OECD Expert Workshop on Measuring Mobile/Wireless Service Data in February 2009.