artha has worked to co-found one of the major citizen's etwork- Bytes for All in South Asia that experiments, highlights and organizes debate on the relevance of ICT to development activities. This network also runs a popular discussion forum - Bytes for All readers forum from where the content is being aggregated to different other community network. Started in June, 1999, Bytes for All is operating in a region where countries are politically hostile (to each other) and hosts the largest constellation of poor people in the World. Therefore Bytes for All talks about computing and the Internet in the majority world.

Partha has extensive experience of working and doing research on grassroots ICT projects particularly in South Asian countries. As a researcher to telecentre.org at IDRC, he is now working to examine the social implication of multimedia content & tools in telecentre experiments. He has worked or consulted with different international organizations including UNESCO Asia Pacific Office in Delhi, Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP), Association for Progressive Communication (APC), Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) etc. and authored different research papers, articles. His work has been featured in different international publications and one of his earlier web based work - drik.net that he used to maintain received Stockholm IT Award back in 1999. Partha can be reached at: partha@bytesforall.org

Session: Surfing the rolling cloud of connectivity: ICT and the developing world