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Incommunicado 05: information technology for everybody else
(final intro & program)
June 15: Opening Night
June 16-17: Working Conference
De Balie, Amsterdam, NL
Organization: Institute of Network Cultures, together with Waag Society
& Sarai.
Supported by: Hivos, Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and IICD.
Information and registration: http://www.incommunicado.info/conference
Wiki: http://www.networkcultures.org/wiki/
Incommunicado 05: information technology for everybody else
Incommunicado 05 is a two-day working conference working towards a
critical survey of the current state of 'info-development', also known
by its catchy acronym 'ICT4D' (ICT for development). Before the recent
“flattening of the world” (Thomas Friedman, 2005), most computer
networks and ICT expertise were located in the North, and
info-development mostly involved rather technical matters of knowledge
and technology transfer from North to South. While still widely (and
even wildly) talked about, the assumption of a 'digital divide' that
follows this familiar geography of development has turned out to be too
simple. Instead, a more complex map of actors, networked in a global
info-politics, is emerging.
Different actors continue to promote different - and competing -
visions of 'info-development'.New info-economies like Brazil, China,
and India have suddenly emerged and are forming south-south alliances
that challenge our sense of what 'development' is all about.
Development-oriented systems (like simputers and MIT’'s $100 computer
system) emerge and re-emerge. The corporate sector suddenly discovers
the “bottom of the pyramid” and community computing, in their drive for
markets beyond those now increasingly stagnant in the OECD countries,
and among the prosperous and professional in the rest of the world.
However tempting, these new developments and particularly the emerging
alliances should not be romanticized in terms of a new
tri-continentalism. Brazil's info-geopolitical forays are anything but
selfless. And while China's investments in Africa have already been
compared to the 19th century scramble for Africa led by European
colonial powers, many expect it to be soon exporting its 'Golden
Shield' surveillance technologies to states such as Vietnam, North
Korea, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, for all of whom it is acting as a
regional internet access provider.
However, the cohesion of the new south-south alliances originates in
part from the shared resistance to an emergent Euro-American front on
intellectual property rights (IPR) and related matters. In parallel,
and in eager response to the newfound enthusiasm for ICT4D through
Public-Private Partnerships (fueled largely by the ongoing UN financial
crisis and the broader neo-liberal privatization agenda), major
info-corporations are advertising themselves as “partners in
development” and are promoting ICTs as the vehicles for “good
governance and effective service delivery” („e-governance“), but also
to stake out their own commercial claims, crowd out public-sector
alternatives, and subvert south-south cooperation.
Ambitious info-development projects struggle to find a role for
themselves either as basic infrastructures supportive of all other
development activity or as complement to older forms of infrastructure
and service -oriented development. And often they are expected to meet
a host of often contradictory aims: alleviating info-poverty,
catapulting peasants into the information age, promoting local ICT and
knowledge based industries, or facilitating democratization through
increased participation and local empowerment. Meanwhile, of course,
info-development also facilitates transnational corporate efforts to
offshore IT-related jobs and services in ever-shorter cycles of
transposition, leaving local 'stakeholders' at a loss as to whether or
not scarce public subsidies should even be used to attract and retain
industries likely to move on anyway.
Info-development creates new conflicts, putting communities in
competition with each other. But it also creates new alliances. Below
the traditional thresholds of sovereignty, grassroots efforts are
calling into question the entire IPR regime of and access restrictions
on which commercial info-development is based. Commons- or
open-source-oriented organizations across the world seem more likely to
receive support from southern than from northern states, and these
coalitions, too, are challenging northern states on their self-serving
commitment to IPR and their dominance of key info-political
organizations.
Meanwhile lesser-known members of the UN family, such as the World
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), are beginning to feel the
heat brought on by “no-logo”-style campaigns that are targeting the
entire range of public international actors and bring an agenda of
accountability to the institutions of multilateral governance. As a
response to the increasingly contradictory (dare one say confused)
info-political activities of the major agencies like the ITU, UNDP,
UNESCO, and WIPO, even the UN has begun to lose its aura. As public
tagging of a perceived positive UN role in governance, humanitarianism,
and peacekeeping shifts towards corruption and inter-agency rivalries,
(carefully guided by neo-conservative think-tanks), the ensemble of
supra-state apparatuses supposed to sustain visions of a post-imperial
order suddenly seems mired in a frightening family dispute that
threatens to spin out of control.
In spite of the neat sociological grammar of declarations and
manifestoes, increasingly hybrid actors no longer follow the simple
schema of state, market, or civil society, but engage in cross-sector
alliances. Responding to the crisis of older top-down approaches to
development, corporations and aid donors are increasingly bypassing
states and international agencies to work directly with smaller
non-governmental organizations. And while national and international
development agencies now have to defend their activity against both
pro- and anti-neo-liberal critics, info-NGOs participating in
public-private partnerships and info-capitalist ventures suddenly find
themselves in the midst of another heated controversy over their new
role as junior partner of states and corporations. Responding by
stepping up their own brand-protection and engaging in professional
reputation management, major NGOs even conclude that it is no longer
their organizational culture but their agenda alone that differentiates
them from corporate actors.
The spectacular world summit on the information society (WSIS), barely
noticed by the mainstream media but already uniting cyber-libertarians
afraid of UN interventions in key questions of internet governance,
will conclude later this year. While many info-activists are assessing
(and re-assessing) the hidden cost of invitations to sit at
'multi-stakeholder' tables along with mega-NGOs and corporate
associations, others are already refusing to allow an organizational
incorporation of grassroots or subaltern agendas into the managed
consensus being built around the dynamic of an 'international civil
(information) society'. Mirroring the withdrawal from traditional
mechanisms of political participation, there is growing disaffection
with multilateralism as the necessary default perspective for any
counter-imperial politics. Unwilling to accept the idioms of
sovereignty, some even abandon the very logic of summits and
counter-summits to articulate post-sovereign perspectives.
And alongside this of course, is the day to day reality of those at the
grassroots and most importantly working as policy, research and
practice info-intermediaries to find ways of using (and remaking) ICTs
to be of benefit to the “multitudes”. The challenge for ICT4D is not to
ensure that everyone has 24/7 access to .xxx, but that the
opportunities that the Walmarts of this world have so successfully and
creatively seized to transform the global networks of commercial
production and supply are similarly the basis for a transformation
towards creative and open access opportunities for transforming the
life chances and lived realities of everybody else.
History
The 'incommunicado' project started early 2004 as a web research
resource combined with an email-based mailinglist. It was founded by
Soenke Zehle and Geert Lovink, who had earlier collaborated during the
European Make World and Neuro events, that attempted to develop
critical work around new media and no border issues.
Incommunicado didn't start out of the blue. It was a merger from two
lists, Solaris, founded late 2001 by Geert Lovink and Michael Gurstein,
and a defunct G8 Dotforce list. The Solaris email list was an early
attempt to develop a critical discourse around the ICT4D policy complex
and was inspired by the then-newly opened centre Sarai in Delhi, a
place that embodies new cultural practices beyond the classic
development models. Beginning in late 2003, the first World Summit on
the Information Society accelerated the awareness that critical voices,
inside and outside the Machine, had to gather in order to reflect on
the circulating metaphors and rhetoric. Poor outcomes of the
alternative 'WSIS, We Seize' campaign, which positioned itself outside
of the world conference spectacle, proved that there is a great need
for a radical critique of notions such as 'information society',
'e-governance', 'digital divide' or 'civil society'.
At the moment there are 300+ subscribers to the list, and at any given
moment in time 50-70 users are either reading the incommunicado
rss-news or searching the collaborative weblog, whose topic areas
include network(ed) ecologies, ICT for Development, internet
governance, analyses of the NGO sector, and emerging South-South
relations. So far, incommunicado has been an exclusively online
resource and list community, consisting of researchers, ICT
practitioners, activists and social entrepreneurs. The event in
Amsterdam in June 2005 will be the first meeting of this emerging
network. Future plans include the launch of an open-access journal or
an incommunicado reader.
On Being Incommunicado
The term incommunicado generally refers to a state of being without the
means or rights to communicate, especially in the case of incommunicado
detention and the threat of massive human rights violations. The latter
also implies an extra-judicial space of exception, where torture,
executions and "disappearances" occur - all-too-frequently in the lives
of journalists and media activists, online or offline, across the
world.
After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the bilateral order,
the discourse of human rights has become an important placeholder for
agendas of social change and transformation that are no longer
articulated in third worldist or tricontinentalist terms. Yet despite
the universalizing implications of human rights, they can also invoke
and retrieve the complex legacy of specific anti-colonial and
third-worldist perspectives that continue to inform contemporary
visions of a different information and communication order.
The term 'incommunicado' was chosen as the name for this research
network to acknowledge that while questions related to info-development
and info-politics are often explored in a broader human rights context,
this does not imply embracing a politics of rights as such. Instead,
one of the aims of the incommunicado project is to explore tactical
mobilizations of rights-based claims to access, communication, or
information, but also the limits of any politics of rights, its
concepts, and its absolutization as a political perspective.
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Final program:
::Wednesday, June 15::
Opening Night
20.00-22.30 Main Hall
Situating the workshop agenda in the broader context of the UN Summit
on the Information Society (WSIS) as well as the controversy over an
emerging international civil society, the public event on Wednesday
night will introduce the topics of the work conference to a broader
non-specialist audience. Offering a working definition of
info-development/ICT4D, the public event will raise some of the key
conference issues, including the extent to which this field is indeed
characterized by a shift from North-South to South-South alliances and
the role played by info-development NGOs.
Chair: Tracey Naughton (Chair WSIS Media Caucus, South Africa)
With contributions by:
Soenke Zehle and Geert Lovink, introduction to the Incommunicado project
Nnenna Nwakanma (Africa Civil Society for the Information Society,
Nigeria) : The mirage of South-South cooperation in ICT4D
Jeebesh Bagchi (Sarai New Media Initiative, India): Forgetting
Development: Cybermohalla Practices and Information Networks
Bernardo Sorj (University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil): Internet in the
Slums
Anthony Mwaniki (One World, Kenya): Mobile Technology - A Tool For
Development?
Partha Pratim Sarkar (Bytesforall, Bangladesh): ICTs at the grassroots
and intermediaries: who empowers whom?
Anriette Esterhuysen (APC, South Africa)
::Thursday, June 16::
Plenary Lecture 1: Introduction and Overview
10.00-11.00 Main Hall
ICT4D is widely considered a key element in processes of
democratization, good governance, and poverty alleviation. This plenary
will situate the rise of ICT4D in the context of the transformation of
development as a whole, and outline individual workshop agendas.
Chair: Geert Lovink (INC, NL)
With contributions by:
Roberto Verzola (sustainable agriculture campaigner, Manilla): The
emerging information economy. Respondant: Heimo Claassen (researcher,
Brussels)
Monica Narula (Sarai New Media Initiative, Delhi): The Delhi
decleration, a new context for new media
Workshop A1: NGOs in Info-Development
11.30-13.00 Main Hall
We have become used to thinking of NGOs as 'natural' development
actors. But their presence is itself indicative of a fundamental
transformation of an originally state-centered development regime, and
their growing influence raises difficult issues regarding their
relationship to state and corporate actors, but also regarding their
self-perception as representatives of civic and grassroots interests.
Following a survey of some of the major info-development NGOs and
networks, this workshop will address questions related to the politics
of representation pursued by these actors: why should they sit at a
table with governments and international agencies, and who is
marginalized by such a (multistakeholder) dynamic of 'inclusion'
dominated by NGOs?
Chair: Anriette Esterhuysen (APC, South Africa)
With contributions by:
Loe Schout (HIVOS, NL): Internet connects world citizens, but does it
breed new ones, too?
Maartje OpdeCoul (One World, NL): Evaluating ICT4D projects
Michael Gurstein (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA): Civil
Society or Communities: The Contradiction at the Core of the
Information Society
Maja van der Velden (University of Bergen, Norway): Cognitive Justice
Partha Pratim Sarkar (Bytes4all, Bangladesh)
Toni Eliasz (Ungana-Afrika, South Africa): What CSOs bring to ICT
Policy Processes
Workshop A2: After WSIS: Exploring Multistakeholderism
11.30-13.00 Salon
For some, the 2003-5 UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)
is just another moment in an ongoing series of inter-governmental
jamborees, glamorizing disciplinary visions of global ICT governance.
For others, WSIS revives 'tricontinentalist' hopes for a New
International Information and Communication Order whose emphasis on
'civil society actors' may even signal the transformation of a system
of inter-governmental organizations. Either way, WSIS continues to
encourage the articulation of agendas, positions, and stakes in a new
politics of communication and information. Following the effort to
actively involve civil society actors in WSIS activities, the idea of
an emergent 'multistakeholderism' is already considered one of the key
WSIS outcomes. This workshop will take a critical look at different
approaches to the idea of multistakeholderism.
Chair: Neeltje Blommestein (IICD, NL)
With contributions by:
Lisa McLaughlin (Mass Communication and Women's Studies, Miami
University-Ohio, USA): Introduction: Issues in Multi-stakeholderism.
Ralf Bendrath (University of Bremen, Germany): Experiments in
Multi-Stakeholderism—Lessons learned from WSIS.
Beatriz Busaniche (Fundacion Via Libre, Argentina): WSIS and
Multistakeholderism: Could we call them "best practices"?
Ljupco Gjorgjinski (Center for Dialogue and Democracy, Macedonia):
multistakeholder partnerships–cybernetic Governance for the information
society
Stijn van der Krogt (IICD, NL): The Polder model applied to ICT4D in
the South-- lessons learned from IICD's multi-stakeholder processes
Sally Burch (ALAI, Equador)
Paul Maassen (HIVOS, NL): Civil society as a stakeholder: the dilemma
of constituency
Ned Rossiter (University of Ulster, UK): Post-Representation & the
Architecture of Net Politics
Nnenna Nwakanma (Africa Civil Society for the Information Society,
Nigeria): Partnerships and Networks: the African Civil Society
Perspective
Workshop A3: Open Source, Open Borders
11.30-13.00 Cinema
Chair: Jo van der Spek (radio maker, NL)
Some of the organizations active in the WSIS process lost their
accreditation because participants used their visa to say goodbye to
Africa. Widely reported, the anecdote suggests that media and migration
form a nexus that is nevertheless rarely explored in the context of
ICT4D. In this session, we will survey some of the work on migrant and
refugee media. It will also introduce the agenda of the wireless bridge
project, a sister event of the incommunicado work conference that will
take place in Tarifa (Spain) later in June.
Presenters:
Florian Schneider (kein.org, Germany)
Roy Pullens (researcher, NL): IOM and border control as info development
Nnenna Nwakanma (Africa Civil Society for the Information Society,
Nigeria): An Anecdote of a would-be illegal immigrant.
14.00-16.00 Open Sessions
Main Hall:
14.00-15.00 Solomon Benjamin (urban researcher, CASUM-m, Bangalore
India): case study on ICT and real estate in Bangalore (including video
documentary, produced for Incommunicado 05)
15.00-15.30 Francois Laureys (IICD) in conversation with Sylvestre
Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso)
15.30-16.00 Sally Burch (ALAI, Ecuador): Social movements,
communication and ICTs
Salon: E-Waste
14.00-16.00
E-Waste: Special session on electronic waste, organized by Waste,
advisors on urban development and development.
In this session, a highly diverse group of people from the development,
ICT, recycling, finance, insurance, and waste management worlds
consider strategies and approaches in relation to preventing, reusing
or recycling WEEE, or waste from electronic and electrical equipment in
the Netherlands. The impulse behind the session comes from a twinning
project between Stichting WASTE, in the Netherlands, and the NGO
ACEPESA, in Costa Rica. The goal of the session is to arrive at ideas
for interventions in both the Netherlands and Costa Rica.
Session organisers: Anne Scheinberg, Kiwako Mogi, Stichting WASTE,
Gouda (www.waste.nl). Session chair: Jeroen IJgosse, WASTE. Confirmed
Discussants: Portia Sinnott, Micro Services Plus, California, Joost
Helberg, Vereniging Open Source Netherlands, Stephan Wildeboer,OS-OSS,
Angela Jonker, Flection Netherlands, dhr Herben, Province of Limburg,
Netherland
Cinema:
14.00-14.20 Kim van Haaster (INC researcher, NL), The University of the
Future: Software Development in Revolutionary Cuba.
14.20-14.40 T. B. Dinesh (BangaloreIT.org, India): Observations on the
impact of IT on Society, in Bangalore.
14.40-15.00 Toni Eliasz (Ungana-Afrika, South Africa): on lacking ICT
capacity among small development organizations and networks
15.00-15.20 Enrique Chaparro (Fundacion Via Libre, Argentina ): on the
hidden prices for ICT4 aid.
15.20-15.40 Oliver Vodeb and Jerneja Rebernak, art & ICT4D, a
presentation of the Memefest 2005 competition.
15.40-16.00 Jo van der Spek and others: info solidarity with Iraq
(www.streamtime.org)
Plenary Session 2: After Aid: Info-Development after 9/11
16.30-18.00 Main hall
What is the status of aid in the promotion of ICT4D, and how have ICT4D
actors responded to the politicization and securitization of aid,
including the sale of security and surveillance technologies in the
name of info-development? To what extent does info-development overlap
with new info-infrastructures in the field of humanitarian aid
(ICT4Peace)? Are global trade justice campaigns a response to classic
development schemes?
Chair: Ravi Sundaram (Sarai, India)
With contributions by:
Enrique Chaparro (Fundacion Via Libre, Argentina),
Glen Tarman (Trade Justice Campaign, UK): Join the band: ICTs, popular
mobilization and the global call to make poverty history
Steve Cisler (librarian, USA): Outside the Church of ICT
Shuddha Sengupta (Sarai, India): Knowing in your Bones: Politics,
Anxiety and Information in Delhi, 2005
20.30: Screening, part 1, co-curated by De Balie
::Friday, June 17::
Plenary 3: ICT4D and the Critique of Development
10.00-12.00 Main Hall
The critique of development and its institutional arrangements - of its
conceptual apparatus as well as the economic and social policies
implemented in its name - has always been both a theoretical project
and the agenda of a multitude of 'subaltern' social movements. Yet much
work in ICT4D shows little awareness of or interest in the history of
such development critique. Quite the contrary, the ICT4D debate, whose
terms are reproduced in the members-only loop of a few major NGO
networks like APC, OneWorld, or PANOS, along with a small number of
states and influential donor organizations, remains surprisingly
inward-looking, unable or unwilling to actively challenge the hegemony
of an ahistorical techno-determinism.
Even many activists believe that ICT will lead to progress and
eventually contribute to poverty reduction. Have development skepticism
and the multiplicity of alternative visions it created simply been
forgotten? Or have they been actively muted to disconnect current
struggles in the area of communication and information from this
history, adding legitimacy to new strategies of 'pre-emptive'
development that are based on an ever-closer alliance between the
politics of aid, development, and security? Are analyses based on the
assumption that the internet and its promise of connectivity are
'inherently good' already transcending existing power analyses of
global media and communication structures? How can we reflect on the
booming ICT-for-Development industry beyond best practice suggestions?
Chair: Kees Biekart (ISS, NL)
Contributions by:
Ravi Sundaram (Sarai New Media Initiative, India): Post-Development and
Technological Dreams: An Indian Tale
Solomon Benjamin (urban researcher, CASUM-m, Bangalore India):
E-Politics of the New Civil Society
Jan Nederveen Pieterse (University of Illinios, USA): Digital
capitalism and development
Tracey Naughton (Chair WSIS Media Caucus, South Africa): Putting
Lipstick on Pigs
Workshop C1: ICT corporations at the UN
13.00-15.00 Main hall
The controversial agreement between Microsoft and the UNDP, issued at a
time when open source software is emerging as serious non-proprietary
alternative within ICT4D, is generally considered in terms of a
public-private partnership, to be assessed on its own terms. But it
should also be considered in the broader context of rising corporate
influence in the UN system, from the almost-no-strings-attached Global
Compact, widely criticized as multilateral collusion in corporate
'bluewashing', to the Cardoso Panel on UN-Civil Society Relations and
its controversial definition of civil society.
Chair: Soenke Zehle (Incommunicado, Germany)
With contributions by:
Lisa McLaughlin (University of Illinois, USA): Cisco Systems, the
United Nations, and the Corporatization of Development
Michael Gurstein (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA): Critiquing
Apple Pie: What We Can Say and Not Say About the UN These Days
Manuel Acevedo (consultant, Spain): ICT4D partnerships at face value:
experiences from the multilateral trenches
Steve Cisler (librarian, USA): PPPP: problems of public-private
partnerships
Workshop C2: FLOSS in ICT4D
13.00-15.00 Salon
Pushed by a growing transnational coalition of NGOs and a few allies
inside the multilateral system, open source software has moved from
margin to center in ICT4D visions of peer-to-peer networks and open
knowledge initiatives. But while OSS and its apparent promise of an
alternative non-proprietary concept of collaborative creation continues
to have much counter-cultural cachet, its idiom can easily be used to
support the 'liberalization' of telco markets and cuts in educational
subsidies. What is the current status of OSS as idiom and
infrastructural alternative within ICT4D?
Chair: Paul Keller (Waag Society, NL)
With contributions by:
Dorkas Muthoni (Linux Chicks Africa, Kenya): Chix Presence: A strategic
partner in increasing the efficiency of FOSS for the benefit of society
Felipe Fonseca (MetaReciclagem, Brazil): MetaReciclagem: technology
re-appropriation and collective innovation"
Ednah Karamagi (Brosdi, Uganda)
Bill Kagai (FOSSFA, Kenya)
Nnenna Nwakanma (Africa Civil Society for the Information Society,
Nigeria)
Enrique Chaparro (Fundacion Via Libre, Argentina ): ICT are not (just)
tools
Seppo Koskela (Applied Linux Institute, Helsinki): Free Software, ICT4D
and Finland - the Short Story.
Sylvestre Ouéadraogo (executive President of Yam Pukri Burkina Faso)
Alexandre Freire (Digital Cultures/Ministry of Culture, Brazil)
Workshop C3: Culture and Corporate Sponsorship in the ICT4D Context
13.00-15.00 Cinema
Introduction: Solomon Benjamin (Bangalore)
Open informal discussion.
What is the aim of Western cultural organizations in the context of
ICT4D projects? Think of the hip design event Doors of Perception in
Bangalore and Delhi, our own Waag-Sarai Platform, Beijing and its new
media arts inside the Millennium Dome, or the German media festival in
Chiang Mai (Thailand). What is the agenda of these organizations? Is
the ‘electronic art’ they are exporting merely paving the way for the
big software and telecom firms to move in, or should we reject such a
mechanic, one-dimensional view?
Workshop D1: New Info-Politics of Rights
15.30-17.00 Main Hall
Recent framings of ICT as an object of civil society politics have
resulted in the coupling of ICT with the notion of “rights”: issues of
the spread, use and adaptation of these technologies are increasingly
defined in terms of human, civil, communication and information rights,
et cetera. This session questions the choice, perhaps the tactical
optionality, of making ICT-related issues into matters of rights. The
rights-frame formats ICT for particular modes of the institutional
processing of issues. At the same time, ICT and the discourses knitted
around this object themselves can be seen to spread the rights frame.
Considering that counter-cultural engagements with new media were
previously framed as tactical undertakings, the question is whether the
rise of “rights” does not thwart the potential of a creative,
aesthetic, affective politics of the tactical. Or is the case that
networks have a better use for rights than institutions? This is the
context in which we ask: what are rights for, how are they used by
NGOs, when does the coupling of ICT with rights work, and when does it
fail?
Chair: Richard Rogers (GovCom/University of Amsterdam, NL)
With contributions by:
Soenke Zehle (Incommunicado, Germany): Politics of Info-Rights meets
Tactical Media
Jodi Dean (HWS Colleges, USA)
Noortje Marres (University of Amsterdam, NL): Why is this happening to
ICT? Info-rights as a special case of issue hybridisation
Magela Sigillito (Third World Institute, Montevideo, Uruguay)
Thomas Keenan (Bard College Human Rights Program, USA): On some
dilemmas in claiming rights: persistence, elasticity, instrumentality
Mike Hayes (Mahidol University, Thailand) and Ned Rossiter (University
of Ulster, UK): Organised Networks and the Situation of Rights
Workshop D2: Digital Bandung: New Axes of Info-Capitalism
15.30-17.00 Salon
We are witnessing a shift from in the techno-cultural development of
the web from an essentially post-industrialist euro-american affair to
a more complexly mapped post-third-worldist network, where new
south-south alliances are already upsetting our commonsensical
definitions of info-development as an exclusively north-south affair.
One example of this is the surprising extent to which a 'multilateral'
version of internet governance has been able to muster support, another
is the software and intellectual property rights reform (WIPO
Development Agenda). info-development, that is, has ceased to be a
matter of technology transfer and has become a major terrain for the
renegotiation of some of the fault lines of geopolitical conflict -
with a new set of actors. But does this really affect the established
dependencies on 'northern' donors, and if so, what are some of the new
alliances that are emerging? What is this new ‘post-Bandung’ movement?
Chair: Ravi Sundaram (Sarai, India)
Open informal discussion
Workshop D3: Nuts and Bolts of Internet Governance
15.30-17.00 Cinema
One of the few areas where WSIS is likely to produce concrete results
is internet governance (IG). The IG controversy revolves around the
limits of the current regime of root server control (ICANN/US) and
possible alternatives, but it is also significant because it signals
the repoliticization of a key domain of a technocratic internet culture
that long considered itself to be above the fray of ordinary
info-politics. The sense that IG has info-political implications and
should be subject to discussion beyond expert fora is, however, much
more widespread that actual knowledge of the techno-cultural dynamic
actually involved in governing the internet. This workshop with be a
nuts-and-bolts session for non-techies.
Chair: Reinder Rustema (Internet Society, NL)
With contributions by:
Enrique Chaparro (Fundacion Via Libre, Argentina)
Danny Butt (Independent Consultant; Researcher, New Zealand): Cultures
of Internet Governance: From global coordination to trans-cultural
dialogue"
Plenary 4: Closing Session
17.30 – 18.30 Main hall
Moderated by Soenke Zehle and Geert Lovink
Plus: WSIS Awards, Dutch nominations, announced by Jak Bouman
Video Session
Rethinking 'underdevelopment or revolution' through ICTs.
Live videoconference with San Francisco, coordinated by Sasha Constanze
Chock
18:30-19:00 Cinema
This session is focused on appropriation of ICTs by social movements
that don't fit into the public private development industry framework.
Rather than consider the success or failure of strategies to patch ICTs
into a 'development' framework that means binding peripheral locations
and populations more tightly to service of the metropole, we'll discuss
ICTs and revolutionary activity in Brazil, Korea, Bolivia, and
elsewhere. With remote participation from, amongst others, Dongwon Jo
from MediACT in Seoul, Dorothy Kidd from University of San Francisco,
Pablo Ortellado/Indymedia Brazil and members from ERBOL and CMI
Bolivia.
20.30: Screening, part 2, co-curated by De Balie
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