Chisinau, February 13 (Infotag). For the first time international experts from the USA, Germany, Romania and Russia will be in the jury composition of the WebTop-2006 sixth national contest. The organizers of the contest said it on Monday at a press conference in Infotag.

Member of the Organizing Committee Alexandr Colţ said that the WebTop-2006 contest will be conducted in accordance with a new concept this year.

“For the first time in the history of the WebTop contest the works will be selected in two stages: preliminary selection and main contest. The methods to be used will correspond to the international practice that will make the contest more objective and transparent. For the first time, the virtual exhibition of websites will take place, the trends for the development of information technologies will be analyzed”, Colţ said.

He remarked that for the first time the contest includes 14 topical web-pages, public governance websites and personal pages.

“The registration in a half of the categories (civil society, education and science, public governance) is free. For the remaining categories the fee is 300 lei.

Soros-Moldova representative Dumitru Chitoroagâ remarked that the contest was organized by the DNT company, which won the tender for the conduct of the WebTop-2006 national contest.

“We allocated $10 thousand for conducting this contest. It is clear that this sum will not be enough, that is why, it is not known, what will be the size of each premium to be awarded (three premiums in each category of web-pages). It is clear that the premiums will not be only monetary, interesting surprises can be expected, Chitoroagâ said.

He remarked that the Soros-Moldova cannot finance this contest endlessly and hopes that in several years the contest can become popular and self-financed.

Those wishing to participate in the contest can register themselves on the contest’s official site www.webtop.md. Sixteen websites have been already registered. The registration deadline is March 10, 2007. The ceremony of handing awards to the winners will take place from April 23 to 29, 2007 in the course of the week of information technologies and other important IT-actions will be held in the frame of the contest.

The WebTop national contest is organized in Moldova from 2001. At first 49 websites of two topical categories participated in it and in 2005 - 283 websites in 15 categories.

In accordance with the survey, carried out by the UNDP Moldova, in 2006 more than 28% of the Moldovan population had an access to computers and 16% were Internet users.