IGF Nov 15-18 2009 in Sharm
I’ve been involved with the UN Internet Governance Forum as W3C representative since before it was created, and I’ve attended most of the plenaries (Athens, Rio) and most of the prep meetings in Geneva, so for me, the IGF community, inclusive of UN staff like Markus Kummer and his team,…
Internet Governance Forum 2009
A Ghanaian Farmer and the Value of Information
To complement my public report on our recent WF/BBC Ghana trip, I’d like to tell in more details the story of my encounter with Kutcho, the Adawso plantain farmer we interviewed as part of the Digital Revolution series. I’ll try to put an emphasis on his challenges and how I hope WF will be able…
Read MoreWF’s first trip to Ghana
As announced in a recent posting Tim Berners-Lee and I visited Ghana a couple of weeks ago. Here’s my personal account of our activities in and around Accra between Friday 18th of September and Monday 21st.
Some context first. We’ve been working on scheduling a series of WF staff visits in Africa in the coming…
The IGF Success Story
The World Summit on Information Society, or WSIS for short, was a multi-year initiative of the UN that culminated on Nov 16-19th 2005 in Tunis, Africa, with close to twenty thousands people from all over the world gathered to discuss various societal and policy-making aspects of the Internet and the Web.
A noticeable follow-up to this…
WebSci’09 in Athens
A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to join the Web Science movement in Athens, Greece, and celebrate the first “f2f” of this new research group or community, a decentralized group really, with several fields of interest (from graph theory to online democratic practices), with a focus for the three days of…
Read MoreToward an Open ICT Standard Initiative
The issues technologists and policy makers face today with Open ICT Standardization (Information and Communications Technologies) are similar to the issues W3C went through about 12 years ago when we started managing large initiatives cutting across several fields of expertise, like the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative for people with disabilities): missing definitions and tools which…
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