Brussels

I've been to Brussels to map it up workwise. Two days of training with mainly interesting lectures, on the Constitution, on Competitiveness and the Lisbon Agenda. A visit to the Parliament just before Ms Merkel arrived. Then a third day of personal meetings in the Commission and the Council - bumped into our minister of Agriculture just as the meeting on sugar finished. It's a completely different thing to be there and to hear the talk, than to browse Europa... and I have no regrets that I wasn't present at the ministerial eGovernment conference in Manchester. If there was a pulse in Tunis last week, I guess it's just the every day life in Brussels. But why is it still so distant from Stockholm although 10 years of membership? A paper column mentioned Sweden as the nation that joined the Union when people long at last realized that the Union actually would not join Sweden...

WSIS in Tunis

Arrived to the hotel in the outskirts of Tunis after a very long trip. Arrangements and organisation for the World Summit on Information Society are impressive and security is rigorous. Information material on the web before the conference focused mainly on arrangements and how to organise things, and not on what would be treated in the seminars so we needed some orientation time on the floor. However, after the first hours of desorientation I found several quite interesting meetings; seminars and stands - relevant for my work in e-government. I was told that 17000 people was expected and 28000 registered for the summit. In such a crowd you surely find something of your taste. Some of the content was a repetition from the European IT Forum in Paris (see postings from September), like Nicholas Negropontes 5 minute speech in the plenary session on the "one lap top per child" project. In the following afternoon, the stand was crowded.