Bulgarian Foreign Minister starts his blog, meets Paul Twomey and Joichi Ito, and uses CreativeCommons!

Today the Bulgarian Foreign Minister, Mr. Ivailo Kalfin, met with ICANN‘s President/CEO Paul Twomey and Joichi Ito.

The big news:

The Bulgarian Foreign Ministry moved all of its content under CreativeCommons License 2.5 attribution.

The Minister started a blog at http://www.kalfin.eu.

More details from the press-release of the Ministry:

” On Oct. 26th, the deputy Prime minister and Minister of foreign affairs Ivailo Kalfin had a meeting at the Ministry with Dr. Paul Twomey, president of ICANN and Joichi Ito, member of the ICANN Board, and a world-wide known and respected Internet development strategists. Mr. Veni Markovski, chairman of the Internet Society – Bulgaria, was also present at the talks.
Minister Kalfin told Dr. Twomey that the government has on the top priorities list promotion of development of information infrastructure in the country, and development of the information society. He informed the guests about the current statistics about Internet usage by the citizens, companies and government. Minister Kalfin noted the fact that Bulgaria has good traditions in the field of software. He pointed out several international IT-companies that enterBulgaria, and invest in ICT.

ICANN’s President gave high remarks on the policy Bulgaria has for Internet access and usage. He informed Minister Kalfin about the multiple business-oriented applications, and the effect of using IT in different branches of the economy.

Joichi Ito, one of the Internet pioneers in the development of blogs, spoke about the new culture and new opportunities, noting that the blogs are one of the most democratic tools for access to information.

Another topic covered was the improvement of the services about registration of domains in the .bg top level domain.

Minister Kalfin started his own blog, to be found at www.kalfin.eu, where he will be discussion issues about Bulgarian foreign policy, EU membership, etc. The blog is based on open source software – WordPress, and is the first such an initiative by a Bulgarian minister. Mr. Kalfin invited Joichi Ito to become an author at his blog – an invitation that was accepted by the famous Japanese IT-investor and blogger.”

See the full press release of the Ministry (in Bulgarian only)The content, published at the web site of the Foreign Ministry is now under CreativeCommons License – attribution 2.5. That puts the ministry among the firs in the world to use this license. Another ministry to use CC is the Brazilian Cultural Ministry, but it uses CC-attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives.

Before that meeting, Joi Ito was key-note speaker at the American Chamber of Commerce lunch. Among guests were H.E. Koichiro Fukui, Ambassador of Japan to Bulgaria, Neil Buhne – permenant representative of the UN in Bulgaria, Tosho Nedialkov – deputy-chairman of the State Agency for IT and communications and others. (on the picture to the right – Valentin Georgiev, CEO of the AmCham, Joichi Ito and Veni Markovski.
Joir had a lecture, and almost no lunch, because he kept on speaking all the time. AmCham sent a nice “Thank you” note after that to me as the local person responsible for the event.