Liveblogging WSIS in Tunisia, continued.

Hacker/entrepreneur/tech aid volunteer David Weekly is in Tunisia this week, attending the World Summit on the Information Society event. Above, snapshot of an Arabic/QWERTY keyboard he used in an Internet cafe nearby. Here's a snip from David's wiki entry for today:

In many ways, this feels like an international version of COMDEX. The complete lack of theme sensitivity on the part of some organizations is stupefying - Vivendi Universal has a largish booth replete with booth babes advertising their latest video games. It's like the team got lost on their way to E3 and ended up in Tunisia but decided to set up anyhow. (...)

The language used in the documents and speeches here are very typically UN. They sound good but say nothing. "We support the inclusiveness of e-participation, encouraging all stakeholders to engage in the advancement of the information society." Hey, I actually just made that up, but that's pretty much the tone of about 95% of the content here. Utterly devoid of real meaning and real action. Ugh.

It's interesting how whole countries here have booths just like Sony would have a booth at COMDEX. Rwanda, Ghana, Mali, UAE, Canada, the US, even Israel are here. There were guards posted by the Israeli booth, and the US booth, next door to the Israeli one, was very small - several times smaller than the South Africa, Canada, or even Bahrain. It's amusing to have whole countries promoting and advertising themselves, for reasons I cannot fully put my finger on.

Link, and here's David's photostream.

Previously: Liveblogging WSIS inTunisia, 11/14/05