The ICB Project Proposal was specifically designed to provide free Internet access to a wide range of people and to enhance creating new technologies resources primarily in educational, cultural, and scientific areas, and to expand opportunities for access to and utilization of the new technologies' benefits. To achieve these objectives the Project implementor, the Public Fund Civil initiative on policy of Internet (CIPI), jointly with its partners, has run the Project as a mechanism reliable work of which depends on availability of its three main following components:

1. Reliable infrastructure of access

•        migration from wireless technology of access to xDSL for both central and regional target group organizations;

1. ICT as a tool but not as a luxury

•        human resource development;

•        more active involvement of target group as a partner in project implementation process, but not as a passive beneficiary;

1. Affordable, Accessible and Adaptable Technologies of Access to and Development of ICT

•        encouraging partner organizations – academic community representatives to do what they are good in – develop national educational, scientific and entertaining content;

•        equipping partner organizations with legally and financially accessible technologies of access to and development of ICT (operating systems, applications, content management systems, etc), without restricting their right of choice;

•        sharing translated into the state language of ICT for education development guidances and manuals.
  

CIPI principle «do not harm», inherited from GIPI, was helpful for implementation of the ICB Project.   From the very beginning, CIPI was determined to make widely use of open standards and free and open source software applications, to the extent of local conditions allow, in order to run project more efficiently and strengthen its future sustainability. Many ICT-oriented projects for education development of the past years in the country would have seriously considered free and open tools as alternative to proprietary ones, if the school information technology (IT) training curriculum had not openly supported proprietary software applications. To change this situation, CIPI approached the education regulator with an initiative to modify acting than IT curriculum, which was supported. It allowed to run ICB Project with focus on free and open source software applications and open standards.

This document describes the Project implementation process, through sharing challenges encountered and achievements gained, which would have been impossible without support and trust of the Project funders and partners.