June 27,2002

CEO presents at Bamako 2002

The African Regional Preparatory Conference for the World Summit on the Information Society was held in Bamako, Mali, from May 28 to 30, 2002.

The conference was preceded by preparatory meetings that discussed a number of related issues. Cybersoft CEO, Assefa Dagne, had been officially invited by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) to participate in the pre-conference workshops as well as at the regional conference. The CEO was also invited to make a presentation on matters relating to Ethiopic based computing in one of the pre-conference workshops that was deliberating under the theme "African Languages and Internet". During his presentation, Assefa shared Cybersoft experience including challenges and achievements in the developing systems based on the Ethiopic language and made valuable recommendations. It is to be noted that Cybersoft has developed multilingual systems that are cable of working both in Latin and Ethiopic based languages.

Although the presentation was made at short notice in response to a last minute request from the organizers and after the start of the workshop itself, it was well received by all the participants. Following this presentation, the CEO was interviewed by Radio Netherlands and he was also invited by UNECA to give the presentation for publication in its bulletin.

During the main conference, the CEO was again invited to prepare a presentation and to serve as a panelist on the workshop entitled "What Africa brings to the Information Society?" The discussions held in both pre-conference as well as the conference workshops were of the highest standard.