Comments on id21 viewpoints
World Summit on the Information Society
What did it achieve for ICTs and Development?
What did it ignore?

Very sensible comments by Richard Heeks, and very concise and elaborate. I agree with him that I hope there will be similar events in future.

Still, it was a strange experience - comparing WSIS I (Geneva) with WSIS II (Tunis). I have been to both and in general I liked the Geneva one better, not only because it was taking place closer to home and therefore the whole thing was less expensive.

One part I liked best about Richard Heeks' article was this one: "Private firms extolling the virtues of their technical solutions; NGOs praising the development benefits of their ICT projects; donors congratulating themselves on their ICT programmes.". Very true. Too many chiefs, too little indians, perhaps.

I wonder if the Tunis summit was perhaps a little bit too crowded. I also wonder why all the private sector stands were there - they seemed to be a little bit ill placed at a "development summit" and better suited for one of the hundreds of commercial ICT fairs there are.

Eberhard Blocher
4 December 2005

I thought Richard Heeks' comments were thoughtful and probably on the right track. $100 laptops are fine, for example, in places where electricity is constant and affordable and where technicians are at hand to repair them, as they will certainly go wrong (all computers do!). I can all too easily imagine piles of barely-used anti-environmental laptops littering the planet. But I was surprised that he advocated another 17,000 strong conference, having admitted at the start that it achieved very little. Can't we move on beyond the huge conference syndrome to something more environmentally-friendly: using computers maybe?

Wendy Tyndale

29 November 2005