I had an amazing time. I won't do it justice, but it was inspiring - moving - to see people come together for a short period of time and work on a document that represented their values and hopes for ICT as well as their well thought-out criticism of the current system. It's not that people necessarily believed that the conference in Tunisia is going to be world-changing, or even particularly effective - but we were all gathered here, and people were intent on doing a good job at least on this leg of the larger process. It was certainly a useful exercise for civil society to let the government know of their intentions, and as well as for civil society to do some intense identity-forming.
It was also inspiring to see a bunch of academics working to 2 in the morning two nights in a row - I'm used to seeing them act in a very dispassionate, removed matter. Seeing them do something that they're perfectly qualified for and believe in was fantastic. I love when you scratch the academic enough and find an activist underneath.
Which brings me to the technology. I setup the wired and wireless network. I used three routers to cover an area that only needed one network - to share load (not bandwidth, but # of client connections to the router) and for some redundancy (I wanted to be able to enjoy the conference in peace without doing tech-support). More interestingly, the document was put on a wiki, and then when that wasn't working so well, we moved to Subethaedit. None of the academics had used it before, but they self-seperated into three groups - two doing content, and one doing editing and were working away - simultaneously and effetively.
Robert Guerra was responsable for the wiki and the Bonjour (and a pseudo-blog leading up to the event). Very cool guy, with a remarkable ability to getting groups to work together effectively.
The climax of the summit (for me) was when I stood up to the mike at the last session, surrounded by 200 people that are experts in the field, and made a case for including a mention on spectrum managment in the doc: How it is a public good, and as such, should be managed in the interests of communities. How it was extrememly important, and will become more so, for community organizations and for community media. Shifts in RF technology are happening very soon (as well as the move to digital TV which is going to leave a lot of spectrum for other uses) which is going to require serious re-thinking of the current framework for spectrum allocation. It was very well received (which is impressive when you realize how non-technical this group was) and 4-5 people came up to me after to mention their support for it's inclusion (like the officer from Industry Canada). So it's going to be in the doc - I'll just have to wait to see in what form. It felt really good because I know that if I had not been here, it would never have been brought up.
So that's it. Now I gotta go find a place to stay for the next few days before I ship out to Banff.
Source : mtl3p, 15.05.2005
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