World Summit on the Information Society

From 10 to 12 december, the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society took place in Geneva. I should be interested in this kind of stuff, but the whole thing gives me an uneasy feeling.

First of all, the website doesn’t validate. This is no surprise, considering it has been created using Microsoft FrontPage 4.0 (view the source and look for the meta tags).

The summit adopted a Declaration of Principles and a Plan of Action. Both of these are only available as Microsoft Word documents. I will resist the temptation to explain in detail why this is a bad idea. Just compare the price of a Microsoft Windows and a Microsoft Office licence with the average yearly salary in the developing world. Is this how we seek to close the digital divide? Is this how the UN is going to create an open, inclusive information society that benefits all people?

Thes is probably the most important conference on the information society. Yet, they are using the worst possible web authoring tool to create a non-standard compliant website where they are publishing their most important documents in a non-standard, inaccessible, closed and proprietary file format.

But, what really amazed me was the absense of reliable wireless internet connectivity, as noted by Lawrence Lessig:

Here was a conference devoted to the information society. No expense was spared in this extravaganza — glitzy video presentations through out, bags full of junk, etc. Yet despite the millions spent to bring thousands from across the world, the organizers decided not to provide robust and simple Internet access. There were kiosk computers which were constantly used. But if you tried to connect your computer to the wireless network provided by Swiss telecom, then you experienced the worst of wireless connectivity. First, to connect, you needed to have an access card. Each time I connected, it took me at least 10 minutes to get through the sign-on process. More than 50% of the time, the system didn’t work at all — wildly under deployed, despite the high cost of access cards (after an initial ‘free 2 hours’ which was timed from the first moment you signed on, regardless of how much time you actually used). Then, if you were lucky enough to connect, the network was inevitably pudgy. The experience of everyone was the same: if this is wireless, then what’s all the fuss?