Sarbuland Khan, of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs at the UN, announced today in an e-mail that the UN Secretary General has formally approved the creation of the Global Alliance for ICT and Development. I have blogged in the past about the Global Alliance as an interesting idea that was still ill-defined. It…
Category: Information Society
A Planetary Early Warning System?
The United Nations recently concluded an international conference on early warning in Bonn, Germany. Over 1,200 participants from 140 countries participated in the gathering, that concluded that a "people-centered" approach was needed to build effective early-warning systems to prevent the loss of human life from natural disasters such as floods, tsunamis and pandemics. As a…
Democracy Player: Roll Your Own TV Channel
I have been playing around with the Democracy Player, a nice little program that aggregates various online videos into “channels” that you can easily surf through, view and subscribe to. They bill themselves as “a new kind of browser for watching videos– grab webpages with video and video RSS feeds (including podcasts, video blogs, and…
Green.tv: the first broadband TV channel on the environment
Today was the launch of Green.tv, the first "broadband TV channel" on environmental issues. Sponsored by the UN Environment Programme and a host of other sponsors, the site will carry films from around the world produced by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community filmmakers, public sector bodies and companies with a firm interest in protecting the environment….
Freedom to Connect Conf in DC April 3-4
Just found out about the "Freedom to Connect" or F2C conference happening from April 3-4 in DC. Sounds like it will be an important gathering of policy-makers, experts and activists on internet public policy. The goal of F2C:Freedom to Connect is to bring a wide range of thought leaders to Washington, DC to share experience,…
Learning about grassroots media activism
I’m at a media reform activist event at the New America Foundation in Washington DC. This series of panels is sponsored by the Media and Democracy coalition, which is being facilitated by Consumer’s Union. The first panel this afternoon is on “Telecommunications and Media Around the World.” The star-studded array of panelists included Jonathan Lawson…
Network-centric views on policy change
I attended an interesting briefing at the Ford Foundation yesterday that featured a couple of researchers who take a network / systems perspective to advocacy and policy change. The first was Richard Rogers, who teaches New Media at the University of Amsterdam. Richard spoke about "issue networks," which he defined as a set of actors…
UNESCO launches online consultation on WSIS implementation
UNESCO has just launched an online space for various actors to post recommendations and proposals on how to implement the various action lines of the WSIS Plan of Action. Basically it’s a discussion board, which I suppose I should be excited about. What’s interesting is see what areas of the WSIS agenda UNESCO sees itself…
APC: the Unsung Hero of the WSIS
I just finished reading a "reflection" report of the Association for Progressive Communications on the World Summit on the Information Society. It’s a nice flyover of the main issues faced by civil society and how APC navigated through a difficult international policy space. Entitled "Pushing and Prodding, Goading and Hand-holding," the report issued last month…
Kofi releases new UN management reform report
The United Nations reports that Secretary-General Kofi Annan presented to Member States his proposals for a fundamental overhaul of the United Nations Secretariat called “Investing in the UN”. He states that the organization’s rules, systems and culture need significant retooling and investment if the UN is to fulfill growing expectations and demands placed on it…