Intel hosts the UN, RiOS informs GAID Leadership

A little more than three months have passed since the Silicon Valley Challenge Summit, and the UN is already back in town. That's good news for RiOS Institute, which signed a ten-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the UN's Global Alliance for ICT and Development (GAID) back in November. As a result, RiOS Executive Director, Paul Braund, is a high-level advisor of the GAID, which was set up in 2006 by Kofi Annan as a multi-stakeholder forum to bring together all parties working globally to bridge the global digital divide. The GAID is based at UN headquarters in New York, and chaired by Dr. Craig Barrett, Chairman of Intel. So there is the UN - SV connection right there. RiOS was the second official partner of the GAID here in the San Francisco Bay area, and is working to develop the largest GAID-SV network possible.

Building Common Ground
The first project of the GAID - RiOS partnership is a working paper published by RiOS for the second meeting of the GAID strategy council which took place here in SV last Tuesday (02/27/07). Entitled Building Common Ground: The UN Connecting with Silicon Valley, the paper presents a brief analysis of the relationship between the UN and SV (taking off from William Easterly's The White Man's Burden). RiOS also invited expert commentary on the topic from notables such as Annalee Saxenian, Dean of the iSchool at UC Berkeley; Jim Fruchterman, CEO of Benetech; Zohre Elahian, co-founder of the Global Catalyst Foundation, and Djordjja Petkoski of the World Bank Institute. After Sarbuland Khan, the UN's Executive Coordinator of the GAID, read a draft of the paper, he sent a digital copy to all Strategy Council members in preparation for the meeting (which also ensured that it did not get lost in the mountain of publications that invariably accompany such events). The publication was very well received and praised for its balanced perspective. A set of recommendations for how to make the GAID successful included, amongst others, establishing clear guiding principles to ensure GAID's inclusiveness and legitimacy and launching a couple of achievable pilots with clear deliverables and high visibility to establish trust and inspire further actions. We believe that these recommendations show real possibilities for how to make the GAID work for the people in developing countries it is meant to serve, and for Silicon Valley.