a) Create policies that support the respect, preservation, promotion and enhancement
of cultural and linguistic diversity and cultural heritage within the Information Society,
as reflected in relevant agreed United Nations documents, including UNESCO’s
Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. This includes encouraging governments
to design cultural policies to promote the production of cultural, educational and
scientific content and the development of local cultural industries suited to the
linguistic and cultural context of the users.
b) Develop national policies and laws to ensure that libraries, archives, museums
and other cultural institutions can play their full role of content, including traditional
knowledge providers in the Information Society, more particularly by providing
continued access to recorded information.
c) Support efforts to develop and use ICTs for the preservation of natural and cultural
heritage, keeping it accessible as a living part of today’s culture. This includes
developing systems for ensuring continued access to archived digital information and
multimedia content in digital repositories, and support archives, cultural collections
and libraries as the memory of humankind.
d) Develop and implement policies that preserve, affirm, respect and promote
diversity of cultural expression and indigenous knowledge and traditions through the
creation of varied information content and the use of different methods, including
the digitization of the educational, scientific and cultural heritage.
e) Support local content development, translation and adaptation, digital archives,
and diverse forms of digital and traditional media by local authorities. These activities
can also strengthen local and indigenous communities.
f) Provide content that is relevant to the cultures and languages of individuals in the Information Society, through access to traditional and digital media services.
g) Through public/private partnerships, foster the creation of varied local and national
content, including that available in the language of users, and give recognition and
support to ICT-based work in all artistic fields.
h) Strengthen programmes focused on gender-sensitive curricula in formal and non-formal education for all and enhancing communication and media literacy for women
with a view to building the capacity of girls and women to understand and to develop
ICT content.
i) Nurture the local capacity for the creation and distribution of software in local
languages, as well as content that is relevant to different segments of population,
including non-literate, persons with disabilities, disadvantaged and vulnerable groups
especially in developing countries and countries with economies in transition.
j) Give support to media based in local communities and support projects combining
the use of traditional media and new technologies for their role in facilitating the
use of local languages, for documenting and preserving local heritage, including
landscape and biological diversity, and as a means to reach rural and isolated and
nomadic communities.
k) Enhance the capacity of indigenous peoples to develop content in their own
languages.
l) Cooperate with indigenous peoples and traditional communities to enable them
to more effectively use and benefit from the use of their traditional knowledge in the
Information Society.
m) Exchange knowledge, experiences and best practices on policies and tools
designed to promote cultural and linguistic diversity at regional and sub-regional
levels. This can be achieved by establishing regional, and sub-regional working
groups on specific issues of this Plan of Action to foster integration efforts.
n) Assess at the regional level the contribution of ICT to cultural exchange and
interaction, and based on the outcome of this assessment, design relevant
programmes.
o) Governments, through public/private partnerships, should promote technologies
and R&D programmes in such areas as translation, iconographies, voice-assisted
services and the development of necessary hardware and a variety of software
models, including proprietary, open-source software and free software, such as
standard character sets, language codes, electronic dictionaries, terminology and
thesauri, multilingual search engines, machine translation tools, internationalized
domain names, content referencing as well as general and application software.
