Fundesco

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Fundesco is a non-profit Spanish institution with the broad mission of stimulating and promoting research into telecommunications and information technologies, their use and social applications. One of our most important projects was the design, implementation and management of a national R&D network for academic and scientific institutions. In 1990, sponsored by the Spanish R&D National Plan, Fundesco established "RedIRIS", a nation-wide network for the Spanish research community. RedIRIS has become thus the academic component of the Internet in Spain which in 1996 still accounts for more than 90% of the total connected hosts. In 1994 RedIRIS was turned over to the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) which presently manages the network and associated services. Fundesco is now a RedIRIS user that, following the aforementioned objectives, considers the Internet as a fundamental infrastructure necesassry to foster information and telecommunication technologies in the society at large, thus contributing to building up the information society of the 21st century.

Our first (informal) contact with Dr. Jose Luis Pardos, the Spanish Ambassador to Canada was at the end of 1994, 8 months into the development of the "Sí, Spain" service on FreeNet. As Fundesco had created one of the first Web servers in Spain, Dr. Pardos asked us advise them in their migration from the original FreeNet service to a Web server.

Through our close ties with the Spanish Internet community Fundesco was able to help the Embassy publicly announce their new service "Sí, Spain" both on-line (newsgroups, listerves, etc) and off line (local and national media). Since then we have kept in contact with the Embassy and Docuweb and have placed a "Mirror" of "Sí, Spain", with daily updates, on our server to provide better access to the service for the thousands of users from around the world.

In November 95, at one of the international seminars Fundesco organizes every year in Cuenca (Spain), the Ambassador Pardos presented "Sí, Spain", via modem, to a captive audience who enthusiastically applauded this new communication service which will transform how our society functions, particularly in the world of diplomacy.

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