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Switzerland wanted to promote interaction between
WSIS participants by coordinating the "Summit Events"
– more than 200 workshops, conferences, symposia, discussion
panels, round tables, exhibitions and other forums which offered
a genuine opportunity for communication to all those at Palexpo,
as well as in the city of Geneva and its environs.
Multi-partner events
By launching the idea of multi-partner events organized during the
Summit, the host country set itself four goals: to offer a communication
platform, to help all the participants to establish contacts, to
create an area of informal debate to complement the official debates,
and finally to encourage collaboration and thereby the establishment
of partnerships likely to go far beyond the first phase of WSIS
in Geneva.
The partners who helped Switzerland to make this concept a reality
are all the parties involved in the WSIS process: governments, international
organizations, NGOs, civil society, the private sector, the media
and various bodies representing the countries of the whole world.
Tasked with coordinating this large-scale operation, Ambassador
Daniel Stauffacher, the Swiss Federal Council’s delegate to
WSIS, underlined its characteristics during the meeting devoted
to the "reports on the multi-partner events": "More
than 280 events have been organized in connection with the Summit.
It is important to note the high quality and great diversity of
these events. From the groups to the workshops, from the forums
to the exhibitions, from the symposia to the conferences, from the
online events to the cultural events: this entire program makes
this Summit a really special summit for each of us. In addition,
these events cover a broad range of topics: ICT for development,
the media, connectivity, human rights, knowledge and education,
cultural diversity, gender issues, science, local government, handicaps,
but also investment and infrastructure, youth and young entrepreneurs,
indigenous populations, the voluntary sector, technology and open
sources, and small and medium-sized enterprises. This diversity
of the topics further strengthened the Geneva phase of the Summit."
List
of WSIS events ICT4D platform
Simultaneously an exhibition and a forum, this event, which attracted
more than 30,000 visitors during WSIS, was held in Hall 4 of Palexpo
in December 2003. The organizers – the Swiss Agency for
Development and Cooperation (SDC), in association with the Global
Knowledge Partnership (GKP) – achieved their goal, which
was to make this multi-partner event a shop window for new technologies
in the service of development, as the perfect compliment to the
policy summit taking place in an adjacent hall. Twenty heads of
State visited the platform, which brought together 245 exhibitors
from 80 countries and offered some fifty discussion panels and
70 conferences. The follow-up to this Summit Event will give rise
to activities as part of the process which will lead to Tunis
2005.
Link
to the site of ICT4D platform
The Helloworld Project
An installation combining powerful laser beams and communication
technologies allowed Swiss artist Johannes Gees to create global
dialogue which was both interactive and visual. During WSIS, messages
coming in from the whole world were projected onto the north façade
of the Crystal Palace in New York and, simultaneously thanks to
the internet, onto a mountain in Rio de Janeiro, a large building
in Mumbai, and the liquid curtain of the Water Fountain in Geneva.
The Helloworld Project was developed with the support of the Swiss
Federal Office of Culture to highlight the decisive role of ICT
in achieving the Millennium Goals defined by the United Nations.
Link
to the site of Helloworld
The media at the Summit
In the run-up to WSIS, those in charge of the radio and TV networks
of the whole world for the first time adopted a common platform
which was presented to the UN Secretary-General on the occasion
of the opening ceremony of the World
Electronic Media Forum at Palexpo. From 9 to 12 December 2003
WEMF, chaired by Jean Stock and organized in association with
Shashi Tharoor, Assistant Secretary-General for information and
communication at the United Nations, his colleagues in New York
and Geneva, and the Swiss authorities, brought together more than
600 professionals from 112 countries and 374 organizations.
After noting in his speech that "in many emerging countries,
the new media of the information society means radio" and
also that there are currently more than 400 journalists in prison
throughout the world, Jean Stock particularly emphasized freedom
of expression, which must be defended everywhere, as well as vocational
training for journalists and the independence of the media, which
must be guaranteed. "Radio and television promote cultural
identity and diversity. They are consequently the place for democratic
debate. They constitute spaces which must be opened up to all.
But to fulfill this mission, broadcasting needs editorial independence,
which is the guarantor of its credibility."
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