Science and technology play a central role in our society. They are part of everybody’s life, they help to tackle the grand challenges of humankind and they create innovation and jobs and improve quality of life. Science and technology are part of our culture, and in essence define us as a species that “wants to know”–hence why we are called Homo sapiens. But do we really give science its proper value when it comes to taking political decisions?

The explosion of the information world has been a benefit for our organisation, but has raised its own set of new problems.

In 2002 Henry Copeland, chief of Blogads and Pressflex.com, wrote about how blogs, largely unknown at the time, would change web writing and publishing forever. He was right. Then in 2008 in these pages, he told us to bet on Twitter several months before it took off (the OECD opened its first accounts in April 2009). So where is the information world taking us now? Henry provides some fresh thoughts.

The rise of IT and the Internet have been boons to Asia, but not everyone has benefited. There are challenges to overcome, not least in the area of governance.

People create policy, but underpinning their work, and in some ways hidden from view, is a well-developed, smart information and communications infrastructure. It is a fundamental driver of progress.

The media is changing, but must assume a leading role in the unfolding narrative of the information world. That includes building trust and involving new voices in the discussion.

Did you know that the organisation that brought you the Higgs Boson (“god particle”) also brought you the world wide web? Robert Cailliau, one of its founders, and James Gillies, a first-hand witness, retrace the story.

Education is one OECD department that has embraced the information revolution.

Taking as many long-haul flights as possible could hold the answer to your knowledge management problems.

Translators are at the forefront of global communications and knowledge. Yet their work has not always been helped by the information revolution. Here are the challenges.

The future will be inherently knowledge-based. Are we moving in the right direction? What must we know to be able to get there? Understanding knowledge-based capital is an important first step.

Did you know that, according to the UN Global Pulse, more data was created in 2011 than in the whole of human history, or at least, since the invention of the alphabet?

Nearly two decades ago, in May 1994, Mexico became the first Latin American country to join the OECD. Not long after, in 1996, the secretary general of the OECD at the time, Jean-Claude Paye and the then Mexican minister of foreign affairs and current secretary-general, Angel Gurría, opened the OECD Mexico Centre. Initially, our job was to promote OECD publications in Mexico and throughout Latin America. But that mission has grown since, to include “disseminating, promoting and making accessible better policies, to governments, economic and social actors throughout Latin America, for better lives of their citizens”. 

Democracy is a good thing; transparency is too, and so is openness. Nothing too controversial in this statement, you might think. The veil of ignorance is slowly but steadily being lifted from the eyes of the general public across the world thanks to thriving media, innovation in global communications and the pressure on governments to open up and reach out.

The Internet is much more than a multi-billion dollar industry. The world’s economy now depends on this global “cloud”, which was once little more than a means of connecting different computers over a phone network. Today, the digital age has vast new potential to serve as a force of progress in the global economy, but better, smarter public policies will be needed for that potential to become reality.

The OECD Observer is celebrating its 50th anniversary: no better time than to turn our focus to the currency of information itself.

Though mobile technology is making waves in Africa, airwaves still count.

Politicians have long called on the services of public relations firms, design experts and advertising agencies to help them communicate. What impact do they have, and how has their role changed? We asked one of the very biggest in the business, Saatchi & Saatchi, for some insights.

Social media is being exploited by advertisers, politicians and headhunters. Government tax offices are also weighing in.

Have you ever followed a tax official on Twitter, or “liked” your tax office’s Facebook page? From the US to New Zealand, tax authorities are raising their social media profiles by providing advice on filling out tax forms, sharing information on budget changes, promoting e-tax forms and, of course, with reminders of payment deadlines. 

You say that "in the UK, the Home Office estimates that ID fraud costs £1.7 billion (US$330 billion) to the UK economy, nearly 50% up on 2002." ("Online identity theft", in No 268, June 2008) If everyone is given a "place" on the net where people can be contacted, that also creates an opportunity for people to protect themselves. But this "place" must be made safe, and therefore must be seen by governments as part of their country's normal infrastructure. Integrity is the key word.

A weekly catch from behind the headlines on oecd.org, No 1

Leaders et the OECD; Jobs; Spanish bull; Web sense; Fish

As technology progresses, so do labour market needs. For economies today, maintaining competitiveness means that skills must adapt and keep pace. 

While the quality of online education is a subject of intense debate among educators, parents and students alike, what is no longer open to debate is the need for digital literacy. A recent report in The Guardian affirmed that adults with Internet skills are 25% more likely to get work and to earn as much as 10% more than their colleagues who don’t have such skills.

That the health of citizens in OECD countries is improving is not in question. How sustainable healthcare systems are, however, is more of an issue. How can information technology help?

According to European Union data, around 20% of jobs in Europe are either in the information and communication technology sector or require skills in that field. How prepared are today’s students for living and working in a digital world? The OECD’s New Millennium Learners project explores what drives students to use computers, and how computer use affects education performance. Its study, Are the New Millennium Learners Making the Grade? Technology Use and Educational Performance in PISA, shows that there is not a simple correlation between using computers and doing well in school. Rather, there is evidence of a second “digital divide” emerging–not between students who do and don’t have computers, but between those students who have the skills to benefit from computer use and those who don’t.

Can you remember life before the Internet? Though quite a new technology, already a world without the web has become as unthinkable for many of us as a world without telephones. But what of the future? Can the benefits of this extraordinary technology be multiplied, and how can the thornier challenges be met?

The agenda for the ministerial conference on The Future of the Internet Economy is built around three themes.

The Internet has permeated people’s lives and has become a cornerstone of our physical, economic and social infrastructures. What does this mean for policy?

The Internet’s open standards have accelerated the convergence of voice, data, video and wireless services, generating new business models, products and services, as well as vibrant new markets. Prices have fallen and functionality has risen. Few sectors exemplify this convergence more than television.

The excitement over new media and their vaunted utility is easy to understand. What is more difficult to grasp is why conventional wisdom holds that the rise of digital media must mean the “decline” of newspapers, which have now been around for more than 400 years. Because the conventional wisdom is wrong.

The advent of the Internet has revolutionised the compilation, assessment and distribution of information relating to healthcare. This has modified the traditional doctor-patient relationship in a number of significant ways.

The Internet has come a long way since it entered the public domain some 15 years ago. One man who has made it his business to follow Internet’s development is Henry Copeland, founder and director of Blogads, one of the world’s largest blog-specific advertising companies, and Pressflex, a web-hosting company dedicated to the needs of small journals and magazines such as this one, and larger commercial titles, such as FT Business. As Mr Copeland points out, all his business grew organically, without the help of business angels, but with offices now in North America and Europe, and clients or users in every continent. We interviewed him in his home base in the US, by email of course.

Social network websites such as Myspace and Facebook that have come on the scene in the last few years may be hugely popular, but they are not without their dissenters. Here is a humourous view from French writer and businessman, Jacques Rosselin.*

In most European countries, the volume of Internet and other e-commerce sales transactions has risen since 2004, with Denmark, the UK, Ireland and France reporting the highest shares. The increase in the share of e-commerce sales between 2003 and 2006 has been sharpest in Denmark, with 10 percentage points, Norway (8), Portugal (7) and Spain (5). Ireland saw a slight drop in its volume, albeit from a high base.

The great 20th century sinologist, Joseph Needham, once drew up a list of 24 technical innovations brought from China to the West. They ranged from gunpowder and the wheelbarrow to printing, cast iron, the magnetic compass and the chain suspension bridge. By 1600 the torch of innovation had passed to the West.

A statue of Korea's legendary General Lee Soon Shin stands guard outside the Ministry of Information and Communications in central Seoul. A poster announcing a major international joint Korean/OECD ministerial conference on the Future of the Internet Economy to be held on 17-18 June hangs at the front of the building.

“Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error.” So remarked Cisco’s chief, John Chambers, in an article in The New York Times in 1999. But even the boss of a company that produces technology for the Internet might not have guessed just how large e-education would become.

The OECD is a world leader in statistics, but keeping up that lead demands innovation. The statistics services of the OECD already provide smart databases online at www.oecd.org/statistics, while graphs and tables in many of our publications are backed up with our new StatLink service, a link allowing access to source Excel files at a click. Now the OECD has gone another step by opening its data out to websites that specialise in lively use and presentation of the statistics, and reader interaction.

The history of human progress is also a history of innovation, and OECD countries have been rediscovering what this means for the global economy. Consider the US. For two decades the world’s largest and most advanced economy has been driving forward the frontiers of technical progress. Yet whether in information technology, pharmaceuticals or biotechnology, the US knows it must innovate to stay in front.

As the 8th annual OECD Forum in May showed, everyone agrees that innovation is important, but not everyone agrees on the reasons why.