Friday, December 02, 2005
Tunis summit helps information society
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Clifford A. Kiracofe Jr.
Kiracofe, a former senior staff member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, teaches at Virginia Military Institute and Washington and Lee University.
The historic United Nations' World Summit on the Information Society held in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, Nov. 16 to 19 marked a new stage in global cooperation in the age of the digital revolution. As a summit participant, my own interest involved three days of nonstop, nuts-and-bolts discussions with energized representatives of government organizations, the private sector and civil society.
The summit proved a success. The official summit documents clearly demonstrate a firm international consensus in favor of increased cooperation and coordination to advance the digital revolution and to overcome the "digital divide" between rich and poor nations.
Some 20,000 participants at an immense convention center represented 174 countries and more than 800 private-sector businesses and civil society organizations. While governments focused on cooperation and coordination in managing emerging information and communication technology, participants from the private sector and civil society enthusiastically networked in parallel events amidst high-tech marvels on display in a giant exhibition hall complex.
The United States government, Japan, Italy, Finland, Switzerland, Tunisia, Malaysia, Mozambique, South Africa, Egypt, Israel, Iran, Jordan and Cuba, among others, mounted official exhibits. Well-known global corporations such as IBM, Sun, Microsoft, Vivendi, Alcatel, Ericsson and Nokia mounted stunning exhibits in trade fair style. Earnest civil society organizations provided materials on a range of issues such as Internet management, primary education in developing countries and health in rural areas.
The WSIS process started in 1998 during a meeting of the Swiss-based International Telecommunication Union held in Minneapolis. At that meeting, Tunisia, a small North African country intensely committed to modernization, proposed the idea of a world summit on information and communication technology issues. Many countries saw the need for increased cooperation to manage and advance the digital revolution produced by the Internet and by mobile phone technology.
"It is fitting that this stage of our journey ends here in Tunis, the capital of the country that launched the process," said Yoshio Utsumi, secretary-general of the ITU and WSIS. "Uniquely, WSIS was a summit held in two phases. Through this approach, WSIS took place in one developed and one developing country. This helped ensure that the full range of issues of the information society were addressed, while highlighting the critical need to bridge the digital divide."
The WSIS meetings at Geneva in 2003 and Tunis in 2005 emphasized international cooperation and coordination. Issues are complex as the digital revolution impacts on government, business, education and economic and social development. Information and communication technology can increase government efficiency and transparency, increase private-sector profits and advance economic and social development.
Looking ahead, summit participants see increased internationalization of Internet governance and development of regional and national Internet resources. Many hope that information and communication technologies will promote more open and democratic societies.
"In a very real sense, WSIS is about making the best use of a new opportunity and a new tool," Utsumi said. "WSIS reinforces the value of global dialogue and cooperation to address emerging issues in the 21st century. The information society can be a win-win situation for all, provided that we take the right actions."
After the summit, I visited the village of Zouakra, an isolated rural community of about 80 families that is snowed in three months each year. The community is located about three hours from Tunis in a mountainous region in the northwest of the country not far from the border with Algeria. That crisp sunny day, the local primary school received a visit from a caravan of 10 high-tech vans from a new project of the Tunisian education ministry.
Each van, equipped with a satellite dish and gas-powered electric generator, carries several dozen brand new IBM laptops. Inside the two main school rooms, 40 laptops were set up to demonstrate Internet technology. The children, sitting in pairs in front of each laptop, eagerly followed teachers' instructions and were happy to share their bubbly enthusiasm with their curious and delighted, visitor.
Walking out behind the schoolhouse and stepping around some friendly chickens on the dirt road, I saw how one Internet van connected to the computers using its roof- mounted satellite dish to get online. A woman walking by with a donkey paused, smiled at me, and then looked through a window at the children tapping away on the laptops.
The Tunis U.N. summit was a remarkable, if underreported, success. The schoolchildren I saw were doubly happy because the Internet van caravan left behind eight brand new IBM PCs for their school's new computer lab.
