[WSIS CS-Plenary] Quick Thoughts on WSIS Geneva
Rik Panganiban
rikp at bluewin.ch
Sat Dec 13 20:05:19 GMT 2003
Greetings to all,
I just wanted to share some quick thoughts immediately after
WSIS-Geneva:
The Good
* ICT4D Exhibitions. I found it quite inspiring seeing the hundreds and
hundreds of great exhibitions and stands in the ICT4D. Comparing this
fair to the Geneva Telecom 2003 last month, one can see how colorful
and vibrant are the many activities being engaged in by civil society,
governments, international institutions and businesses. It makes me
think that we need more frequent gatherings where people and groups
developing ICT applications to meet real human needs can assemble and
celebrate each others work.
* Civil Society Declaration. Great work all around assembling such an
ambitious document, representing a diverse assemblage of views and
vision of hundreds of groups of civil society. Kudos to Sally Burch
and Bill McIver for guiding the process, all the drafting committee
folks, and caucus and working groups for their input and refinements.
* Parallel CS Events: It was incredibly frustrating knowing that there
were at any time several interesting meetings going on that I wanted to
attend. I hope that groups will make reports, powerpoints, videos and
other materials available on wsis-online.net and their own websites, so
I can see a flavor of what I missed. I went to lots of great events,
including the CPSR meeting on ICT governance, the AMARC community media
forum, the TRP meeting on "democracy, freedom and digital divide" and
the UBUNTU meeting on global governance and WSIS. Congrats to all the
organizers for your great work.
The Bad
* Overpasses: Turns out there was PLENTY of room in the plenary hall,
hundreds of available seats. So making us come up with these complex
distribution systems, fight with each other, and put poor Robert
through the wringer, was all for nothing.
* WIFI / Internet Access. This was abyssmal how substandard our
internet access was. I confess to being guilty of assuming that at the
information society summit that we would have in place adequate
information technology. WIFI barely worked, even after having to pay
exhorbitant amounts for it. SMTP NEVER worked, so sending email was
impossible for most of us.
* Noise. The noise factor was a significant and constant nuisance the
entire week, with no soundproofing of any meeting spaces and frequent
loud music, booming noises, and the overall buzz of a thousand
conversations. Many people commented that they had never been at a
meeting of this stature where the noise level was so bad.
* Official Roundtables. I understand that the roundtable speakers only
got 3 minutes to make their interventions. What exactly was the point
of bringing all this expertise together if no actual dialogue was going
to happen?
Anyway it was all in all a wonderful week spent seeing old friends,
making new contacts, going to interesting events, and getting renewed
energy to work on these important civil society concerns. I wish you
all a much-deserved rest, and I look forward to getting back to work
with all of you in the coming year.
In Peace,
Rik Panganiban
WFM
PS My pictures from WSIS will be online soon at
http://mypage.bluewin.ch/rikp/WSISpics/WSISpics.html
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Rik Panganiban email: rikp at bluewin.ch
Special Adviser Mobile: +41 76 473 3274
World Federalist Movement www.wfm.org
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