ambassador's remarks and official statements
Ambassador McEldowney’s Remarks at the Launch of the U.S.-Bulgarian Partnership for Information Technologies and Innovation
U.S. Embassy Sofia
June 5, 2009
Ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to welcome you here to the American Embassy and to this very special event.
It is an honor to be joined on this stage by Minister Nikolay Vassilev of the Bulgarian government, by Mr. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and by Mr. Denny Robertson, our USAID Coordinator and Development Counselor here at the Embassy.
What we are doing today – to put it most simply – is opening a door.
We are opening a door to entrepreneurship and economic development, a door to innovation and ingenuity, a door that will lead inevitably to greater transparency, immediacy, and meritocracy.
The sign on this door reads “US-Bulgarian Partnership for Information Technology.”
As we launch this partnership, as we open this door and walk across its threshold, our goal is to spark an explosion, a virtual explosion, but an explosion nonetheless of opportunity, of creativity and of dynamism.
There are many brilliant minds in Bulgaria that are already focused on seizing the enormous power and unlimited potential of new information technologies.
Our partnership will bring together government, private companies and civil society to support those brilliant minds so that they can harness that power and potential to the benefit of us all.
As we go forward, I think we can fairly take inspiration from a previous exploration of new frontiers, over four decades ago when President John F. Kennedy explained our quest to travel to the moon, and he used these words. He said:
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be used for the progress of all. For space science like all technology has no conscience of its own – whether it will be used for good or ill depends on man.
And indeed it now depends on us.
This is a very exciting project and it is one that we are determined to carry through to great success. With the help of the people in this room, and people just like you all across this country, I am certain that it will succeed.
Thank you very much for being here and I thank you for supporting this endeavor we are launching today.
Now, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Minister for State Administration Nikolay Vassilev, a man who has brought vision and passion and great energy to the task of transforming government through information technology.
Minister Vassilev.
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Our special guest of honor today is a man who embodies everything that we are trying to achieve with our partnership – innovation, creativity and the power of human imagination.
His groundbreaking work with the Wiki Foundation has fundamentally changed the way we think about the world and our role within it.
He has literally thrown open the doors of access to information, to free expression and to the sum of human knowledge.
Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming one of the great intellectual pioneers of our time, Mr. Jimmy Wales.