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.

World Summit on the Information Society

I just got the accreditation for the UN WSIS phase 2 coming up in November. "In the second phase of WSIS efforts are being made to put the Plan of Action into motion and working groups have been set up to find solutions and reach agreements in the fields of Internet governance and financing mechanisms." Looking forward to that. Carl Bildt made some comments on his blog. Will be interesting to go there.