PIERRE OUEDRAOGO

Pierre Ouedraogo is the Information society Project manager at INTIF (Francophone institute for information and learning newe technologies) based in Bordeaux - France. INTIF is a subsidiary entity of Agence intergouvernementale de la Francophonie (http://agence.francophonie.org). Since 1998, he has been working at INTIF, in the fields of internet governance, free sofware and human resource development. He has set up many networks of IT experts to coordinate African efforts to develop IT and use it as a tool for development.

The AAUL (African Free Software Users Association - http://aaul.logiciels-libres) is one of those initiatives, and has the objective of structuring the free software users groups to create a unique African resource center in order to bridge the digital divide in the IT knowledge and know-how sectors.

Ten ICT laboratories are running in 10 african countries, giving training and helping for create decision makers awareness. He has been initiating more than 30 IT technical workshops in Africa in various fields: linux initiation, advanced linux servers administration, internet security including fire-walling with Netfilter, building dynamic websites with free software tools, and computer maintenance.

At the African level, he is a founding member of the regional organizations: AFRINIC (the African Internet Registry for IP adresses,), the AfTLD (African Internet Top Level Domain Names Association), AFNOG (African network operators group) and AfrICANN (african network of participants to the ICANN process). He is pressently a member of the ccNSO (country code Names Support Organization) launching group of ICANN, and member of the council of the FOSSFA (free open source software foundation for Africa).

Before joining la Francophonie in 1998, he set up the Burkina Faso national internet node in december 1996 while he was working at ONATEL (national telcom operator) as head of Computer Department. He has been appointed as Burkina Faso IT expert for many international conferences and has contributed to many national projects including the definition of National IT strategies and the IIA (UNDP Internet initiative for Africa) project in Burkina Faso.

Pierre Ouedraogo has a master in physics and chemistry for the University of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), a business degree and a master in information systems at Catholic university of Louvain-La-Neuve in Belgium.