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December 17, 2003
Back from WSIS
It's Wednesday morning in Washington DC, and I've been back from WSIS for a few days. My brain is still on Geneva time, so I've been going to bed by 9pm and up by 5am, which has allowed me to get into work by around 7am and catch up on all of the emails that accumulated during my absence.
It's been really interesting watching all the Monday-morning quarterbacking that's been going on since the summit wrapped up. In general, most of the news stories I've seen seem to take the position that the summit was a mixed bag. I thought one headlines from the Guardian newspaper was particularly entertaining: UN Summit Fails to Bridge Digital Divide. Like there was anything that could have happened at the summit, even under the most idealized circumstances, that could have literally bridged the digital divide then and there.
Meanwhile, the BBC World radio service is running a 15-minute segment on the information society; I managed to do an interview with them, and get quoted twice in the interview, at the 3:10 and 11:20 mark. (Since it's a RealAudio file, you can click and drag the play arrow to exact points in the recording, in case you only want to listen to me and ignore what everyone else said.) I'm not sure how long the recording will be on their website, so enjoy it while you can...
Lastly, some of the folks who were heavily involved in the civil society work at the summit have compiled The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of the Summit. Rik Panganiban and Ralf Bendrath, the authors of the document, offer some keen insights on what went well and what didn't.
Posted by acarvin at December 17, 2003 8:23 AM
Listen to a computer-generated podcast of this article
