Topic: Kete wins a Special Mention at WSA
Topic type:
The World Summit Awards is a global initiative to select and promote the worlds best e-content. It was started in 2003 in the framework of the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society.
Kete received a Special Mention is for being an excellent example of e-content from our region: North America and Oceania.
Kete was presented at the Winners Conference, held in Venice in early November 2007. Jo Ransom (Kete Project Manager), Pippa Coard (Kete Content Manager) and Pascal Krajewski (Researcher) all attended the Winners Conference, before attending the Awards Ceremony and Global Forum 2007: Building the Collaborative Knowledge Society.
Discuss This Topic
There are 2 comments in this discussion.
Read and join this discussion
We are having an amazing time, exhausted but happy!
Pascal, who helped us early on with this project, came over to the WSA celebrations. It has been lovely but I am very happy that he has gone home! It was so cool to catch up with him again, but we stayed up every night drinking grappa and eating pizza and talking and talking and talking and laughing with our new friends.
We have made great friends with a crew from Senegal (French speakers) and a lovely- and extremely talented - Italian man who took us for dinner with his family last night after the awards ceremony and concert at la Fenice.
This conference is amazing. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves in for. Some teams have press crews and there were posses of police guarding the guests at the forum, and photographers everywhere. There are Ministers and Heads of State and CEOs from everywhere, and the man who headed the Microsoft Trust Inquiry is here, and the man who developed the 3C model which our digital strategy is based on is here (and loves Kete and wants to take a good look at it) since he has now added a 4th 'C' to the model: community!
Kete was up against a project funded by the Sultanate of Oman, another from the Kuwait higher education authority etc etc. Our project had 1 developer and cost about $80,000 NZD. Other projects have 100 fulltime developers working on them!! Kete is amazing, I think it was the only web 2.0 project here and is truly collaborative and community based and that we were even able to compete - let alone get a Special Mention is pretty impressive!
There are some truly inspiring projects here I would like to follow up on:
| ATM Express Government (Mexico, e-government) | ATMs offering automated, 'clean', uncorruptable government services to citizens of the state of Chiapas, Mexico. Services include: paying taxes, obtaining birth certificates, drivers licenses, vehicle plates! Contact : gsarmiento@planeacionchiapas.gob.mx |
| MAPLight.org (USA, e-government) | A mashup type product that makes the connections very obvious between donations given to politicians and how they voted.... amazing stuff. |
| HAFSS (Egypt, e-learning) |
A brilliant programme whereby a religious Muslim can learn the corect pronunciation of the Koran.. very cool as Arabic language appears difficult to read digitally. |
| Musicbus (Italy, e-learning) | An online aid to learning music. includes self assessments, fingering guides, karaoke function etc...by a music teacher who couldn't find what he wanted so he taught himself how to write a computer programme! fantastic. |
| Numeropolis (Venezuala, e-learning) |
Website which makes learning maths fun by teaching basic concepts through games and challenges ... my 9 year olds would love this. |
| Intangible Cultural Heritage in Fiji (Fiji, e-culture) |
Amazing project: a 3D model is made of the island by school children, tribal elders come in and name landscape features, then IT geeks create digital maps. Would love to learn more about this for use by our local Maori. Contact: rambaldi@cta.int |
| Interactive site for Guatemala (Guatemala, e-culture) |
Multimedia technology used to brilliant effect to showcase the country's rich and gorgeous, culture and history. Contact: marialuisa2fundacion-ca.org |
| Geneious Pro (New Zealand, e-science) |
Woo hoo - another Kiwi product!! A web based programme that enabvles researchers to search, organize and analyze genomic information... very, very cool. |
| Higher Education Admission Centre (Oman, e-inclusion) | A streamlined enrolment interface for students to enrol for college and universities no matter where they live in the country. Portal checks required information, including academic prerequisites, and allocates places according to exam results and program preferences. |
| Eureka K12 Science and Maths 3D Educational Movies. |
Posted on November 23rd, 2007 at 10:18 AM
Jo Ransom
said Blog post from Jo in Venice!
We are here and loving it! Took 43 hours of travelling to get to a place where we could lie down . uneventful trip, excellent weather, cool but clear .. warm during day. Room basic but fine.
We got horribly lost in the dungeons at the Doges Palace today .. round and round, and up and down stairs in the bloody dungeons .. it was like a nightmare . I started whinging but it didnt help at all! We did see another couple who were equally lost so we didnt feel so foolish. we nearly bought a tee shirt from the shop that had a maze on the front (clearly other people get lost too!)
Then, we got lost again somewhere over the Rialto bridge .. so lost in fact that we couldn't even find the right page on our maps ... so we asked a nice policeman who had got his boat stuck under a bridge. but he couldn't help because he was lost too ... and so we went back to his boat driver to ask him but he had gone and left the policeman behind ... so we were all lost together and so had a nice gelato icecream to make us feel better.
Tags: WSA, world summit award