[WSIS CS-Plenary] Virtual Participation - Establishment of working group?

[Robert Guerra]

I ask , again, that if you are interested in contributing to the 
discussion - to the options, and strategy for using a VARIETY of 
different virtual participation tools to help facilitate collaboration 
among civil society groups involved in the wsis process - to visit and 
enter your details on the following Wiki page.

<http://cms.privaterra.org/WSIS_WG_Virtual>


 - This preliminary, informal (non-meeting) has as it's objective :

(1) Introduction - of attendees

(2) To ascertain IF there's enough interest to establish a working group 
to assess, discuss and develop strategy to bring  a VARIETY of different 
virtual participation tools to help facilitate collaboration among civil 
society groups involved in the wsis process.

My initial message has generated a great deal of discussion, both 
private and public - so, i gather there's a great deal of interest.

I do recognize that those amongst us use a variety of different OS 
platforms, and as to not enter into a religious debate as to which one 
is best, ideal , more appropriate or more consistent with a certain 
ideology or another my intention is to help bring people together in a 
constructive way to move from discussion to concrete actions and perhaps 
even deliverables in the weeks and months ahead.


(3) A demonstration of some of well known collaborative conferencing 
suites.

10:00 - 10:30 Windows based OS tools
10:30 - 11:00 Linux based tools

NOTE:  By showing one tool vs. another, or one before another, by no 
way, means or form  will it be taken to endorse their adoption by anyone.

(4) Discussion of next steps -

- how can those interested collaborate
- next tools to evaluate

- what, if any, sub-working groups need to be created to accommodate, 
respect linguistic, operating system, cultural and philosophical 
diversities which may exist in this subject area.

- how working group (and it's sub-groups) can engage the software 
development and technical community to enhance, refine and build 
existing tools

(5) scheduling of next (virtual) meeting


The next (virtual) meeting is scheduled as follows:

* March 17th, 10:00 - 11:00 EDT (New York Time)

Info:

a. (virtual) place: details to be posted on the Wiki address mentioned 
above.

b. I'll also be available via Instant messaging on the following systems:
- yahoo : rguerra
- jabber: rguerra
- ICQ: 10266626
- AOL/AIM/ichat: cryptocobi
- MSN: privaterra at hotmail.com

See you all tomorrow!



regards,

-

thanks

Robert