Iran's Digital Family-Friendly Services Festival Showcases Innovative Technologies for Essential Services Promotion

Iran is launching a digital festival to showcase and support online services that are designed for families, in a bid to boost its domestic internet market and enhance the well-being of its citizens.

According to the Public Relations Department of Iran's Information Technology Organization, The Digital Family-Friendly Services Festival, which is organized by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, will run until February 8th and will feature entries from various sectors, such as education, health, and entertainment.

The festival has three main goals, according to Atefeh Mousavi, the ministry’s advisor on women’s affairs. The first is to encourage collaboration between the public and private sectors to create and integrate family-friendly technologies into essential services, giving Iranian family-centric services a competitive advantage in the region and the world, and creating a family-friendly economy and ecology.

The second is to raise awareness and promote the existing resources and opportunities for families in the digital sphere, through advertising and promotional campaigns.

The third is to provide a platform for smaller actors and startups to innovate and offer new family-friendly technologies that can improve the quality and diversity of domestic services.

Mousavi explained that the festival is in line with the ministry’s role in developing the infrastructure and the soft and hardware technologies for the National Information Network, Iran’s domestic internet system. She added that the Supreme Council of Cyberspace, Iran’s top internet policy body, has tasked the ministry with developing family-friendly technologies.

The festival will also evaluate and rank the essential domestic services according to their family-friendliness, and communicate the results to the public. Moreover, the festival will involve a public vote, in which voters will have to follow the festival’s indicators to assess the entries.

Mousavi said that the festival seeks to collaborate with cultural institutions to achieve mutual growth and not limit this cooperation to the event itself.

The festival is part of the ministry’s efforts to increase internet penetration and its various applications to improve the lives of Iranian families, while addressing the challenges and concerns that come with it.