Latin America and the Caribbean suffers from a dramatic scarcity of comparable statistical data on matters related to the information society. The statistics available are usually based on methodologies that are not very sound, are sometimes influenced by vested interests and are often one-off calculations that are not repeated over time in a fashion that would serve to assess the real progress of the information society. Any analysis based on such data therefore tends to be incomplete and may even be misleading.

These shortcomings mean that important decisions in the region may be being made on the basis of conjecture. Governments wishing to develop comprehensive national plans are forced to look for information -which may not even be reliable- in a piecemeal fashion in their own markets and in other countries.

To address these matters, ECLAC created OSILAC in 2003 in collaboration with the Institute for Connectivity in the Americas (ICA), a programme being incubated at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). OSILAC made significant headway in several areas in its first year. Now in its second phase, it has been joined by the European Commission, through the @LIS programme, and by the PAN Americas corporate project, also an IDRC-partnered venture, and continues to seek information society solutions with these partners.

A number of international calls have been made for mechanisms to monitor the status and impact of ICTs in all countries, such as the Declaration of Florianópolis, paragraph 16 and the Bavaro Declaration, paragraph 2. These led to the creation of the Observatory for the Information Society in Latin America and the Caribbean (OSILAC), and continue to underpin its efforts (see Report of the Second Meeting of the Statistical Conference of the Americas of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, paragraph 58.

The Observatory is allied with the process of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). The first phase of WSIS took place in December 2003 in Geneva and the second will be held in Tunis in November 2005. The WSIS Plan of Action sets forth suggestions on the development of indicators that can be used to monitor the status of ICTs and ways to benchmark the implementation of the Plan in order to track global progress in ICT use (WSIS Plan of Action, 12 December 2003, Section E "Follow-up and evaluation", paragraph 28).

OSILAC seeks to (i) provide support for the production, compilation, processing and dissemination of data, indicators and methodologies, standardizing and harmonizing ICT statistics collected at the subregional, national and local levels; (ii) build up the capacities of the technical staff in national statistical institutes and other agencies working on ICT issues to use the methodologies and techniques required to collect and process data on the information society and economy; and (iii) prepare methodological and conceptual frameworks in an interactive and participatory manner, in order to implement ICT statistics in surveys conducted in the countries of the region, while both contributing to and learning from similar developments at the global level.

To this end, OSILAC: (i) has built and continues to roll out a database containing information on the main indicators and statistics that report on the status of information society technologies; (ii) produces documents containing statistical information on the status of ICTs; (iii) is in permanent contact with the staff responsible for implementing ICT statistics in national statistical institutes in the region, sharing with them tools developed to carry the issue forward, inviting and addressing their methodological concerns, and compiling information on the metadata included in the questionnaires and the data generated by surveys; (iv) during its second phase, it will conduct technical assistance missions to a number of national statistical institutes in the region that are interested in implementing ICT statistics, while continuing to foster that interest through interactive participation in online discussion forums and regional coordination and training workshops, of which one was held in November 2003 in Santiago, Chile; and (v) prepares methodological studies and conceptual documents on the measurement of the information society.

As a project devoted to improving information on technologies that form part of the information society, OSILAC involves all the actors engaged in producing official statistics in the Latin American and Caribbean countries that are members of ECLAC, as well as other regional agencies working in this area. The staff who take part are usually those who deal with the methodological and operational aspects of surveys that may include questions on ICTs (such as household, quality of life, labour and expenditure surveys) in firms, government agencies, educational establishments, research centres, and so on.