[WSIS CS-Plenary] summary of yesterday's telecentres caucus

[Andy Carvin]

Hi everyone,

Yesterday I hosted a meeting for members of the telecentres caucus who are
here in Geneva. Around 15 people attended; interestingly, more than half
were new to the caucus and had not previously participated in our online
discussions. The meeting faced a notable challenge in the sense that the
group was evenly divided between English speakers and French speakers, with
several of us not strong enough in the other's language to communicate on
our own. Fortunately, I managed to recruit Stephane Roberge of IDRC to
serve as translator, and he did an excellent job.

Much of the meeting was spent introducing ourselves; we had participants
from South Africa, France, Congo-Brazzaville, Switzerland, the USA,
Lesotho, Tunisia and several other countries. Several participants
described local telecentre initiatives in which they are engaged, including
a project to launch 100 telecentres in France, as well as an initiative to
open telecentres for the disabled in North Africa.

Given the fact that our gathering represented less than 10% of the caucus
membership, we decided to focus less on setting a specific agenda for the
group; rather, we committed to reviewing the initial discussions that took
place online last autumn in the hopes of prioritizing potential goals
previously discussed by the group. Participants also agreed to make a
stronger effort at posting comments to the list in more than one language,
even if it requires using machine translations such as Babelfish. Otherwise
there is the danger that the group could divide into an English language
group and a Francophone group. Fortunately, it seemed the group agreed we
should avoid this happening, and continue to see the caucus as
multilingual, multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder.

So while our meeting was brief and rather small, I feel quite hopeful
afterwards, particularly in the way the caucus email list responded so
quickly to my request to comment on the document presented by me yesterday
morning in the plenary. -ac
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Andy Carvin
Program Director
EDC Center for Media & Community
acarvin @ edc . org
http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org
http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/
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