 Program 6 is our information and communication project and we subtitle it Convening a Global Research Community. It grew out of our strategic planning exercise where we realized that it's imperative for ERI as a research and development organization to make sure that the information that we gather in research and the information gathered by other laboratories on research, on rice research in particular flows through to our partners in research in national programs and extension and eventually to farmers. New advances in information and communication technology offer us an opportunity to do this in new ways which we haven't done before and an obligation to do things in new ways. One of the most important issues to emerge in research and information is an imperative to provide equitable sharing and access to knowledge and information collected by researchers around the world. This hasn't been technically possible before but with the new technologies in information and communications with the internet, with the price of mass storage declining very rapidly, this now becomes possible and we need to think of ways to make it happen. We would like to see ERI convening wide communities of researchers and extension workers coalescing around the real problems in rice research and development. At ERI we've decided to adopt an open source technology called JUMLA which enables the development of portals and we have also spent some time in curating a list of our contacts, alumni and other communities in ERI which we hope to draw into the portals and allow them to interact with us and with each other on rice science. We've also developed infrastructure which is called access grid infrastructure which allows multi-way video conferencing and that has been useful for scientific meetings over the past year. Program 6 is in its first year, full year of activity in 2007, is working towards its major goals of optimum stewardship of information and knowledge, sharing this knowledge in an equitable way with our partners throughout the world and acting as a conduit of research from basic and advanced research institutions to national research institutions, extension services and even farmers. We're also working towards setting a role at ERI to serve as a convener of communities and dialogues concerning rice and development and towards building the next generation of rice researchers in Asia and around the world.