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Fernando Henrique receives Information Society Program's "Green Book"

Final version of the document is available online

After a lot of expectation, Information Society Program's (Socinfo) "Green Book" has finally been released. This morning, the final version of the document was given to President Fernando Henrique Cardoso by the Minister of Science and Technology, Ronaldo Mota Sardenberg. The Green Book is also available for public consultation on the site of the Ministry of Science and Technology (MCT).

Created on December 15,1999, after a study made by the National Council of Science and Technology ( Conselho Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia), the Information Society Program is coordinated by MCT. Its main objectives are making people's access to information technologies more democratic and contributing to increase the competitiveness of the country on the global market. According to minister Sardenberg's declaration to the online publication Último Segundo, Brazil is expected to have 36 million Internet users by 2003.

With the release of the Green Book, the second stage of Socinfo's implantation proposal is achieved. The first stage included the creation of the program and the elaboration of the Green Book. Now this document will be publicly discussed , while studies and basic projects are developed. The discussion will be followed by the publication of the so-called "White Book," Information Society's Program definite plan of action. The third stage will also consist of the formation of a Board of Directors and the specification of operation mechanisms for the next five years.

The Green Book was the result of the dedication of over a thousand people, divided in 12 theme groups, with the support of another thousand individuals. For ten months, the team participating in the project tried to come up with "a tentative proposal of concrete actions, made up of specific planning, budget estimates, operation and support ." The preliminary version of this work was handed to the Minister of Science and Technology on August 9 and presented during the South American Presidential Meeting.

The Program will be carried out following seven major lines of action:

• Job market and opportunities
  promotion of competitiveness in national enterprises and of the expansion of small and average-sized businesses, support to the implantation of e-commerce and offer of new forms of work, by means of intensive use of information and communication technologies.
  
  
• Universalization of services and citizenship formation
  promotion of the universalized access to the Internet, looking for alternative solutions based on new devices and means of communication; promotion of models of collective or shared access to the Internet; and fostering of projects encouraging the formation of citizenship and social cohesion.
  
  
• Education in the information society
  support to learning strategies, continued education and distance learning based on the Internet and other networks, encouraging schools, teacher formation, self-learning and ample certification on information and communication technologies ; implantation of curricular modifications aimed at the use of information and communication technologies in teaching and learning activities, in all the levels of formal education.
  
  
• Contents and cultural identity
  promotion of the production of contents and applications emphasizing Brazilian cultural identity as well as articles of local and regional relevance; fostering of digitization schemes in order to preserve the arts, culture, history, scientific and technological information, in addition to research and development (R&D) strategies generating technologies that can be applied to projects of cultural relevance.
  
  
• Government acts available to everyone
  promotion of computer automation in public administration and of the use of defaults in its applications; conception, prototyping and fostering of the applications in governmental services, specially the ones involving great spread of information; fostering the specialization in communication and information technology management in public administration.
  
  
• R&D, key-technologies and applications
  identification of strategic technologies for industrial and economic development and promotion of R&D projects applied to these technologies in universities and in the productive sector; conception and induction of mechanisms of technological difusion; fostering pilot applications which demonstrate the use of key-technologies; promotion of the mass formation of professionals, including researchers, in all the areas of communication and information technologies.
  
  
• Advanced infrastructure and new services
  implantation of basic national information infrastructure , integrating the several specialized network structures - governmental, private and R&D ones; adoption of security and privacy policies and mechanisms; fostering the implantation of networks, high performance processing and experimentation of new protocols and general services; quick transference of network technology from the R&D sector to other networks and encouragement of their operational integration.
  

[RNP, 10.24.2000]