This Fourth Workshop is part of a series of events that OSILAC organizes annually as a response to regional and international requests for having technical seminars with National and Regional Organizations in charge of statistics, in order to discuss the issue of the information society measurement. These requests have been stipulated in goal 26.3 of the Plan of Action eLAC2007, which will be reviewed during the Second Ministerial Conference on Information Society, to be held in San Salvador from February 6 to 8, 2008. OSILAC will develop the Fourth Workshop after the approval of the new Plan of Action eLAC2010, which will allow focusing its work and that of the Statistical Offices in the most relevant topics for the information society in the region.

The main purposes of the forthcoming workshop are:
(1) to highlight the progress made in the elaboration and analysis of indicators on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) access and usage, in the countries of the region,
(2) to present the first phase of the OSILAC information system which contains harmonized information on ICT from household surveys (http://www.eclac.cl/tic/flash/default.asp?idioma=IN),
(3) to discuss difficulties in harmonizing defined core indicators and to agree on next steps to continue the implementation process of questions required to elaborate new indicators,
(4) to agree on the delivery of business surveys information to the OSILAC information system,
(5) to plan the future activities of the group, including relevant work in order to monitor advances towards Latin American and Caribbean information societies.