The BRIC thesis is based largely on 20th century economic assumptions and trends.  It predicts that China and India will become the dominant suppliers of manufactured goods and services and that Brazil and Russia will become similarly dominant suppliers of raw materials, but it says nothing about Information Technology (IT) per se.  This oversight in the original thesis has not been overlooked by the leaders of the BRIC countries, who each recognize the strategic value of IT in a 21st century economy, and who each have initiated ambitious IT agendas on a national basis.  But are the plans ambitious enough?

Just as the BRIC countries are rewriting the world economic order, Free / Open Source Software is reordering the IT industry.  The goal of the BRIC Summit Think Tank at the Open World Forum is to convene national-level IT policy-makers as well as Free / Open Source leaders and Competence Centres from around the world to discuss and define the requisite set of common IT competencies necessary to support—and benefit from—the  enormous changes anticipated by the BRIC Thesis.  The BRIC Summit Think Tank is also an ideal context in which to define a process of collaboration to ensure that the future currency of information technology is transparent and well-diversified, stable and secure, and has predictable performance.