[WSIS CS-Plenary] Quick Thoughts on WSIS Geneva

[Rik Panganiban]

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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