The city of San José, Costa Rica, hosted the second edition of the 'Taller Cepal-Cetic.br de Metodologías de Encuestas TIC' (Cepal-Cetic.br Workshop on ICT Survey Methodologies, in Portuguese) on November 4th and 5th, 2014. The event, organized by the Regional Center for Studies on the Development of the Information Society (Cetic.br), a part of the Brazilian Network Information Center (NIC.br), in collaboration with the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Ministry of Science, Technology and Telecommunications of Costa Rica (MICITT), included participation from representatives of government agencies, ministries, and national statistical institutes from 10 countries in the region.

José Luis Cervera, a statistical consultant specializing in development and science and technology indicators, conducted two sessions of the course. The first focused on the role of statistics in evaluating the impact of public policies aimed at information and communication technologies (ICT), and the second discussed issues related to the regional and international coordination necessary for producing comparable data.

On the second day of the course, Saadia Sánchez Vegas, director of the UNESCO office in Quito and representative for Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, emphasized the importance of evaluating and monitoring ICT public policies concerning the methodologies employed and the objectives that guide this process. Complementing this, Carla Valverde, manager of the economic analysis and markets department of MICITT, presented some numbers related to telecommunications in the country. Alexandre Barbosa, manager of Cetic.br, concluded the day's activities by discussing the experience of adapting international methodologies used as references for data collection undertaken by the Center.

Cooperation with Latin American countries is part of Cetic.br's scope of work, whose mission is to contribute to building inclusive information and knowledge societies in the region's countries and those of Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa (PALOP). Conducting workshops in survey methodology is one of Cetic.br's lines of action, which, in conjunction with ECLAC, works to train different actors in producing ICT statistics, essential for monitoring information societies.