The Arab eContent Award is a unique initiative! It recognizes the outstanding achievements of content producers, application developers and new media providers who use the Internet to create exceptional value for users and are leaders for the region.

The Winners of the Arab eContent Award 2011 have succeeded in a unique competition. They were evaluated by the Grand Jury of the World Summit Award which convened in Hong Kong in April to select the world’s best econtent and creative use of ICT from over 150 United Nations member states.

The World Summit Award is a unique activity. It was initiated by the Republic of Austria as intervention into and contribution to the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society in 2003 and it continued as a flagship initiative of the UN and its Global Alliance for ICT and development recognizing that digital divides in the area of content, usage and costs need to be closed as much as those in access, infrastructure and technology.

The Winners of the Arab e-Content Award 2011 are truly the best in eContent and Creativity from the WSA 2011 entries from the Arab speaking world. They do proud to a region where language and culture have developed to the highest level of human achievement through the traditional print media, including books and newspapers.

The Arab Winners of 2011 demonstrate what the new technologies allow in terms of interactivity, multimedia and hyperspace, taking the Arabic speaking users worldwide into an entirely new experience. The Grand Jury of WSA has done the evaluation and the selection of the winners based on the published criteria (www.wsis-award.org).

The Arab eContent Award implements the vision of the World Summit Award and shares the awareness for the need for local digital content. It is local content, offered in the mother-tongues of people and in an easily accessible way, which makes a real difference, which brings about change and development.

Apps and websites addressing local demand in a way fitting the culture and language of the place are - and will be - the most successful in developing a high quality information society. Social media and content have added the opportunity for people worldwide to connect. They are tools to interlink across borders and oceans.

Being aware of the important interrelations between local content and international exchange, I am glad to see that a lot of this year’s winners of the Arab eContent Award provide their content in Arabic as well as other languages such as English, French and more. This way the Arab e-Content Award and its winning products take on an ambassadorial function beyond the mere preservation of Arabic cultural traditions and help to spread messages from this region to the world. The World Summit Award serves to make strong the winners and their companies successful.

Peter A.Bruck