Jamaica's Team Node420 wins regional code sprint in Suriname

A group of Jamaican developers won top regional honours in a regional hackathon, held as part of the Caribbean Week of Agriculture in Suriname.

Team Node420 beat seven other teams of young developers in the #agrihack, held in Paramaribo from October 5 to 9.

Their winning app is designed to give farmers real-time weather analysis, allowing more efficient agricultural planning.

The Guyanese Minister of Agriculture presented the 5,000 Euro prize.

A team from Barbados walked away with 4,000 Euros—presented by the Director General of  the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture—for their app. Called Crop Guard, it aims to enhance food security by helping farmers to protect their crops through pest diagnosis, monitoring and control.

Third-place winners Unicode of Suriname received a 3,000-Euro prize from Michael Hailu, director of event organisers, the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA)​.

Contestants presented their products before a regional panel and an audience that included participants of the Caribbean Week of Agriculture.

Each team competing at the regional event worked with a tech hub, an organisation that gave the team advice and helped them to fine-tune the apps they developed.

Node420 was supported by SlashRoots, Crop Guard were supported by the National Council for Science and Technology of Barbados, while Unicode  got help from Telesur Multimedia Innovation Laboratory.

Those tech hubs also won 3000 Euros each, to facilitate business incubation for the top three winners.

The AgriHack Talent Caribbean was organised by the CTA and various partners to support youth ICT innovations and entrepreneurship in agriculture. This activity is supported by the Agriculture, Rural Development and Youth in the Information Society (ARDYIS) project of CTA.

Eight teams from six Caribbean countries were at the finals. In addition to the regional prizes, each won 800 Euros, as the national-level prize.

The three regional winners are now looking forward to six months of business incubation, also part of the prize-package, during which time they will have access to guidance and support to develop their winning business ideas.

From T&T Guardian

Caribbean voices joining global Internet debate

The Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)—the entity that controls key bits of the Internet—gathers in Los Angeles this week to tackle an array of hot issues, in particular, governance of the Internet. “Governments want to exert control over the sweeping transnational power of the Internet that is affecting their policies, politics, social fabric and/or their economic conditions,” ICANN chief executive Fadi Chehade told the media, days before this week’s ICANN 51 meeting, which will continue through October 16.

The dynamic between ICANN’s policies and the national or international laws regulating human society is complex, and is overseen by a dedicated committee within ICANN. “ICANN receives input from governments through the Governmental Advisory Committee, or GAC,” explained Albert Daniels, ICANN’s stakeholder engagement manager for the Caribbean.

Many Caribbean voices were recently welcomed to the GAC, clearing the path for the region to more effectively take part in high-level discussion on the future of the Internet.

“Within the last 12 months several Caribbean territories and one regional organisation have been admitted as members to the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC),” Daniels said.

“The new territories with official GAC representatives are Dominica, Grenada, Barbados, Dominican Republic and Saint Lucia.”

The Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU) became a GAC observer in 2013, he added.

“With the addition of these new GAC members, the Caribbean region has an expanded opportunity to impact global policy related to matters of Internet governance with input from one of the important stakeholders—governments, and in particular governments from the Caribbean.”

The new GAC members join Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Cayman Islands and Montserrat who were previously members of the GAC.

From T&T Guardian

T&T "very active" in global Internet debate, says ISOC boss

T&T has come in for praise from the international community supporting the global Internet.

Raul Echeberría, vice president of global engagement at the Internet Society, described T&T as “very active” in high-level international debates on issues related to the governance of the global Internet.

“ISOC has a long history of working in the Caribbean, and the Trinidad and Tobago community is vibrant in the international community. There are people here who are very active in international organisations that work to promote the open development and evolution of the Internet for the benefit of everyone around the world,” he said.

Echeberría was speaking with the T&T Guardian at the opening day of the organisation’s INET TT Forum, held at the Telecommunications Authority (TATT) office in Barataria on October 8 and 9.

The wide range of meeting participants bore out the ISOC executive’s words. Represented at the event were Packet Clearing House (PCH), the Latin America and Caribbean Network Information Centre (LACNIC), and the Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU), which is headquartered in Port of Spain.

Echeberría also identified the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) multi-stakeholder fora and the International Telecommunications Union’s Internet Governance Forum as examples of the far-reaching involvement of T&T nationals in the international debate.

INET TT was ISOC's first INET Forum in the Caribbean. The local and regional technical fraternity's high level of participation in international debates must continue, Echeberría said, to ensure that Caribbean users of the Internet continue to enjoy open access to the Internet and freedom of online expression.

He warned that in T&T and other countries, political interests could threaten the basic principles of freedom of information and freedom of expression.

“There are some challenges from the political side. There are some governments that think that they should have more control of the Internet, even motivated by very understandable objectives like to fight cybercrime. But we continue pushing for an Internet that is free for everybody so that access to information is not restricted and freedom of expression is not repressed,” he said.

“We think that the Internet should be a tool for improving the way that people exercise human rights.”

Sebastián Bellagamba, ISOC regional bureau director for Latin America and The Caribbean, also highlighted the importance of keeping the evolution of the Internet open.

“ISOC is not pursuing technology for the sake of technology. We strongly believe in the capability of the Internet to improve people’s quality of life,” Bellagamba said.

“When we have national INETs, like this one in Trinidad and Tobago, our goal is to bring some expertise from ISOC and the international technical community but also to learn from the local community, to enrich the global debate on relevant issues such as Internet governance. That’s the way that we believe in moving things forward. It’s the Internet model,” he said.

About 50 stakeholders from different sectors gathered for the two-day event. Beyond the technical community, the event brought together government officials, academic researchers, non-governmental organisations and private sector companies.

Participants used the forum to find out more about important technology-related issues such as Internet governance, online identity and privacy, cyber security, mobile broadband connectivity, and the deployment of the new Internet Protocol (IPv6).