We have been conducting awareness programs in educational sector for the past three years. Now, we need to make the government officials and the IT focal points aware about Free/Open Source Software (FOSS). Challenges will surely come in our way, but without the government support, it would be really difficult to move ahead.

Creating Awareness program won't be enough. Government is set to Implement the E-Governance Master-plan in Nepal and Implementation of the FOSS in such a massive project will be a milestone. Awareness Program should be started with the minor FOSS applications like the Web-browser, email clients, Word Processing Suites.

Just to Zest with the above two paragraphs: Both awareness and training has its own positive effect, we should go both way. As a step ahead, as we had been asked by NITC and HLCIT to plan for a workshop (2-3)days for Government officials(focal persons) from departments, I would be great if we could finalize some concept note and request for NITC and HLCIT support for it.

Concept Note for FOSS workshop on policy formulation for Government Officials in Nepal

1. NITC wants to conduct a national level seminar on Intellectual Property Rights somewhere around the first week of May this year.

2. As it seems, the entire cost of the conference will be born by NITC and we will just be a partner for organizing the event.

3. The seminar will be - One day.

4. The participants will be the Secretaries from different govt. agencies and ministries, i.e., 50-60 in number.

5. The main objective of the Seminar is going to be raise awareness about IPR among the participants and draft a rough plan on how to move ahead with IPR in Nepal.

6.NITC wants to have at least one international participant, an expert in IPR, for the seminar:

• It has vowed to sponsor the persons travel and lodging if needed.
• Accommodation will be in 5 star hotel for this particular guest.

7.Further, they want to one person locally working in copyright and one person from our side (Hempal dai) to conduct the seminar.

8. Besides, they want to have the seminar in a five star hotel.

9.The nodal person for this seminar will be Ranjan Baral from NITC.

10.And by this weekend we need to prepare for a concept note to present to NITC .

11.For the one international participant, we need to prepare a list of probable people and shortlist that to invite the best one, and preferably someone who is willing to pay the travel expense.