WSIS kicks off in Tunisia

The second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) began today in Tunisia. Colin Daniels is there for the Highway Africa News Agency (HANA), so take a look at his photo's if you are interested. The summit has included a panel discussions and presentation with Dan Gilmor on open-source "citzen" journalism so far, and the Creative Commons crew is there too.

WSIS is a United Nations initiative which provides a platform for discussion about the "digital revolution" i.e. the new ways of creating knowledge, educating people and disseminating information, driven by the Internet, new media and information and communication technologies (ICT's). It also seeks to address problems of the digital divide, which leaves much of the underdeveloped world out of this "revolution", and find ways of drawing the periphery into this massive, speedy surge into the digital future. The first phase summit was held in Geneva in 2003.

The Tunis summit has a live webcast on their website which you can tune into if you want to listen to the plenaries. Hopefully some good ideas for the development of ICT's in Africa will come out of this, especially in terms of restructuring the way the world conducts economic and business practices, runs governments and engages politically with the continent.

posted by Cat Murray @ 11:31