 Susan Thatcher, thank you so much for taking the time for this interview. First, can you introduce yourself to the audience and tell us about the work you're doing in ITU? Yes, good afternoon. My name is Susan Thatcher. I'm head of the Market Information and Statistics Division in the ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau. So, can you tell us about the World Telecom Development Report which was released in the WTDC 2010? This is our latest edition of the World Telecommunication University Development Report, the 2010 edition. And it has a special theme that is focusing on monitoring the WIS's targets. These are the targets that were identified by governments at the World Summit on the Information Society, which took place in Geneva in 2003 and in Tunis in 2005. And we chose this theme because 2010 is the midpoint between the conclusion of the summit in 2005 and 2015, which is the target date that has been determined to achieve the targets in line with the target date of the Millennium Development Goals. So, the report in a way is a midterm stock-taking assessment of where do we stand on each of the 10 targets that have been identified at the summit at the time. So, for some of our audience who may not know about the WIS's targets, can you elaborate on the different targets and what are they centered about? There are a total of 10 targets and several of them relate to connecting people and institutions. So, for example, we have a target that calls for connecting villages. We have one about connecting schools, connecting hospitals and health centers, connecting governments, connecting museums, archives, post offices and cultural centers. We have two targets about education, one, well, connecting schools and then also to teach ICT in schools and make the curriculum ICT-based. We have a target about developing language diversity on the Internet and more local content. We have a target about making available access to radio and TV to everybody. And the last target calls for half of the global population should have access to ICTs within their reach by 2015. So, there are a range of different targets. Some of them have not been very precise. So, what we also do in the report is we make some positions to the targets, for example, connect all schools so that by 2015 all schools should be connected and we identify a set of measurable indicators for each target because how do you monitor them, right? You need to first say, okay, what is our indicator which we can then use to see where we stand and whether we have achieved it or not. So, for each of the targets we identify some indicators that can be collected and then we make an assessment where we now stand midway through. And will you be changing these indicators or indexes over time or will they be fixed? We think that that is a very good basis for the measurement but we want to involve the wider community to consult on the indicators because we would like to develop an agreed monitoring framework for the targets. So, we work very closely with other organizations and partners who are also involved and interested in the subject matter and we will consult with our members. So, in the end we are having sort of an agreed upon list of indicators but this is going to be a very good basis because a lot of work has gone already into identifying the indicators and many of them are based on indicators that are actually collected now already because the data availability of course plays an important role. Okay, you mentioned part of the findings that you mentioned was Internet growth. So, can you highlight on this briefly on how Internet growth has been taking place in the recent years? So, Internet usage has doubled since the conclusion of the summit between the end of 2003 and the end of 2009 because that's our reference time framework has doubled. It has grown everywhere as we know in developed developing countries. In fact, the share of developing countries has grown also significantly during the past few years. Nevertheless, there is still a lot of work to do in terms of bringing more people online and in fact, at the end of 2009 there were still three out of four people were still not online globally speaking and four out of five in the developing world were still not online. So, there are important challenges that need to be addressed in the years to come. Broadband growth is also one of the interesting areas you touched on today. So, also can you tell us more about it? Broadband is now becoming more and more important because to access a lot of the applications that are available online you need high-speed connections. So, this is now becoming a very, very important part in all of the countries when you talk about Internet use. So, broadband access also in developing countries is still not very advanced, unfortunately. This is an area that we have to work a lot on and this is also one of our key missions in ITU. We have just launched the Broadband Commission which is giving an impetus into the rollout of more broadband infrastructure especially in developing countries and what we have set as a target in the report is and I'm coming back to the target 10 which says that in 2015 half the population should have access to ICTs. Indeed, our main recommendation is that by 2015 half of the population should have access to broadband Internet. This is very, very important. So, this is one of the main recommendations that we put forward in the report. So, going to some of the detailed findings of the report can you tell us more about government connectivity and what are the major findings in that area that you came across? Government connectivity, that is one of the targets to connect governments to provide websites and services online for citizens. So, we have looked into that and have assessed the progress and we have found that most of the central governments and ministries are online today. So, almost all countries have central government websites now. That is very good progress. But if we go to a different level of government, let's say within the country, state or regional or local level then of course the connectivity doesn't look quite differently. Also, what is important is not only putting up a website but the kind of online services, public services that are being made available to citizens like can they access information or can they actually fill out a tax form or apply for a driver's license. So, it's not just putting up information, general information and perhaps an email address, but government, e-government needs to go further and provide interactive services, transactional services for citizens so they can actually become more efficient by using the online services. Also, school connectivity is a very interesting area. Can you tell us more about it? Yes, we have worked on this also closely with our co-authors from UNESCO. We have looked into data on schools connected to the internet and to broadband and we don't have a global figure, but for the developing countries where data are available some have done a very active promotion of connecting schools in the country but then in many countries, again if you go outside the major cities where internet access becomes much less available and especially broadband access also the schools don't have internet access and they don't have a lot of ICTs, computers for example in schools or ICTs are not yet part of the curriculum in terms of teaching so that is an area where policy can make a big difference and ITU has the Connected School Connected Community Initiative so we are working very closely with our members to enhance the availability of internet in schools. So one of the most interesting areas we want to discuss with you in detail is online content since it's part of the WSIS target. So first can you tell us what is your vision regarding the relationship between online content and the digital divide? Are they closely connected or are they not? Well, we are saying in the report that the digital divide is also a content divide because if we look at languages for example English is still the dominant language on the internet although estimates say that only 15% of the world population understand it yet still most of the content is in English however relatively speaking English content is declining because not absolutely speaking because the growth of content is just incredible overall however you can see now also a lot of growth in other languages although it's still a few languages the chapter on the target that looks into language diversity and online content illustrates how few languages are represented on the internet and the large number of languages that exist in the world so there's a huge gap yet if you want to bring more people online they have to have meaningful information on the internet but that's why the issue of language diversity and content in local languages is a very important issue that will be there until we have managed to bridge this gap So when we speak about online content the internalization of internet domains how do you think this impacts the quantity and quality of e-content? Well we think this is a very important step in a direction to bring more content in local languages on the internet this can be sort of a process that will be driven then from the bottom let's say because once you can make this content available in those languages then a lot more people will put up content and this will drive the process so we highlight that this is a very important step in the right direction and so we think it will improve through this in the near future So when we always speak about e-content the language diversity always is on the surface of the discussion so can you tell us about the major top languages that are really popular and then how do you think we can overcome the problem of language diversity if it's a problem? Okay, here I'm holding up the chart that shows you the top languages on the internet as of 2009 you can see here that English is still the top language but if Chinese is following closely if we would have looked at that a few years ago the distance would have been much bigger between English and the other languages so of course with the number of Chinese users this is growing very quickly this is followed by Spanish, Japanese, French, Portuguese, German, Arabic, Russian, Korean so these are just the top languages but then you can see it becomes very few further down so these are just a few languages given that we have hundreds and thousands of local languages and if you really want to reach out to local populations we need to make sure that there is content on the internet that is meaningful and useful for them so one of the number of ways of how this can or is likely to improve one is let's say we also look into the report in terms of making content available that is now in libraries, museums or cultural center by digitizing locally available content this is also very important in preserving actually heritage and some countries have started to do that they have digitized content, information they have in libraries or in museums or in other local cultural centers that they would then upload and make available on the internet that's one part that is a good step in the right direction another interesting development is of course voice video and other content that is now increasingly becoming important on the internet and here then of course you can have local language available very easily because we are talking about voice and that's a development that will increase also in the future this is more user driven but you have to look at all the components of course where is the content coming from and that is also something that is a positive development where more users will find information but again the connection and the broadband will play an important role here because that is also very heavy in size in terms of capacity of the connection that you have to have so in order for a country to increase its local content does it have to be government driven or user driven or both how do you see it based on the experiences or the different experiments of different countries that you have came across just briefly well it should be both because of course you will have the user driven content that you have everywhere and this is something that will eventually also come in the countries where internet use is just starting to develop but governments should also play an active role because we talked already about e-government that is very important content and the governments can do a lot to have important and meaningful content made available online to their citizens that will be highly appreciated so that's an area where governments definitely can play a very important role and then when we talk about public institutions and making content available on certain applications be it in education, be it in health be it in digitizing information that is available that is something where governments can play a very important role so both of them will grow together and complement each other So the provision of software and local languages how do you think that relates to increasing e-content for any country? Well that goes of course hand in hand because if you have applications for example they need to be based on software but if you want to have applications in local languages then you also have to have the corresponding software in local languages so I mean one in a way doesn't go without the other that is a very important aspect of it So my final two questions how do you think you mentioned in the report that there are technical barriers to the spread of online content so what are these technical barriers that you referred to and how can a country try to overcome these barriers? Yeah we talked already a little bit about the internationalization of the domain names So the opening up to non-Latin script characters for example this has just happened now this was a major issue to put up more content in languages other than that are not following the Latin scripts So this was an important issue that is now being addressed and which has to continue in the future other technical barriers are more hardware and software related for example if we talk about translations or for example voice assisted services we talk about software models that go into modifying character sets, language codes electronic dictionaries and other terminology multilingual search engines for example that need to be available translation tools, machine translation tools and then software generally that is available in local language so that you have applications that can go with it So these are areas that are still being developed they are being addressed and they all will help to have more language diversity available on the internet So my final question as we look forward for the next five years you mentioned that one of the two of the upcoming steps are promoting digital literacy and also establishing an e-culture so can you highlight on both topics and tell us how you envision them and what is ITU doing in these areas? In fact we highlighted three main policy areas Indeed in the report for each of the targets we have a set of policy recommendations on how to achieve that particular target So for each of the targets there are very specific recommendations but to summarize we have three main areas where we see that action should be taken One is on the broadband deployment because a lot of it is about connecting institutions, connecting people and we have included a broadband indicator in most of the targets So this is one very important area and it's also something where ITU of course plays a very important role The other two areas are building ICT literacy because we have seen that that's a very important part of the information society is how literate are people to actually make use of the internet of the content, of the applications and often that's a major barrier even literacy itself is already a barrier because we have a lot of illiterate people all together and ICT literacy is another barrier that also needs to be addressed So this is something that can be addressed in schools, in other training Countries here also will have to play an important role in helping their citizens to become more ICT literate And then the other area is related to content providing more content to make the internet meaningful to users This is, as we discussed before, this is something that goes hand in hand in terms of user driven and government driven So both will play an important role here and with the development of more user relevant content also the uptake of internet will increase and people will be able to benefit more from the possibilities that the internet offers Thank you so much for your insights and we wish you the best of luck and see you soon in Doha