ECDL Foundation Blog
Increasing Diversity on the World Wide Web
July 20, 2011
Last month saw an occasion of historic importance in the development of the Internet. On 20 June, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the not-for-profit organisation which controls the assignment of internet domain names, voted to launch between 400 and 800 new generic top-level domains at their conference in Singapore. Top-level domains (TLDs) are the part that appears at the end of a domain name - .com, .net, .org – and represent the highest level in the Domain Name System (DNS) hierarchy.
Working Towards Gender Equality in ICT
July 05, 2011
In a recent speech, Vice-President of the European Commission and European Digital Agenda Commissioner, Neelie Kroes, warned that the gender imbalance within the ICT sector must be addressed if the European ICT sector is to continue to grow over the coming years, and if Europe is to experience a period of sustained economic growth. Speaking at the Women in Science, Innovation and Technology conference, held to mark the 100th anniversary of International Women’s day in March of this year, Vice-President Kroes highlighted the fact that the European ICT sector will face a shortfall of 700,000 qualified workers by 2015 – a figure that is partly attributable to the lack of female engineering and computing graduates.1
