Blogging and The World Summit on Information Society

Robert Guerra of Privaterra has started a weblog for his notes on the World Summit on Information Society.

Last year, the DailySummit was the main place to get information for we 'not-NGO-people'. You know. The people that are supposed to be represented. It's not like there's a lot of information about the WSIS at present - as Robert pointed out to me, even the Wikipedia Entry for WSIS suffers from a lack of information.

Maybe that's because nobody seems to really know what's going on. I'm on a few of the Civil Society lists, and I'm not particularly sure what is actually going on either. There are a lot of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) participating within the process - but it's sad that they appear to be participating so much *without* the process. In other words - where are they communicating with the community which they are supposed to be representing?

Robert brought this up on his weblog - Blogs, Wiki's, WSIS and Open Source.. (Disregard the rant on zealots, I'll post about that another time):

...Andy's come up with the proposal , one which I support - to create a space on the Digital Divide Network and use it as a common WSIS wiki space and RSS feed aggregator. With a bit a luck and help from the support staff at DDN it looks like this will happen - yey! ...

Mobcasting

Of course, the Andy he is referring to none other than Andy Carvin. And he's talking about the DigitalDivide.net space. Certainly there's no excuse for people NOT to use these things... But offers like this have been made in the past, and haven't been taken. Why? Well, that's for the silent NGOs and even the World Summit on Information Society folks to answer.

Of course, Andy came up with the term mobcasting which is irksome to me. This whole 'Smart Mob' thing grates on my nerves, the concepts are older than 'smart mobs' - outlined in quite a few books actually - but we live in a world where a good catch phrase means more than what it actually does. Fortunately, Andy's idea holds true to what the ideas have always been (unlike other people). And I'll back Andy up, because he's not making a buck off of this, like some people who spout out trademarks to sell books (SellMobs (Tm)).

But mobcasting is good. And it's an idea for the WSIS, among other things (like ARCTX. As soon as DigitalDivide.net gets rid of some tech problems, we'll return to that). And then there's the potential to use trackbacks for translations.

Comments for Would-Be WSIS Bloggers

Trackbacks are important, folks. They can do useful things.

And so can COMMENTS, for that matter. Don't tell me about comment spam, I use software like Drupal which makes it quite controllable. If you're just broadcasting what you have to say and not allowing discussion, that's bad.

So - will people in Civil Society even use this stuff? It remains to be determined. I mean... if they aren't even USING what they are supposed to be talking about, what are they doing there?

And, the disclaimer on my rants related to phrases like 'Smart Mobs:

Obviously I have some distaste not for 'Smart Mobs', not that it's a bad new idea - but because it's a good old idea that people have neglected until someone came along and hit them over the head with a book they would read and gave them a catch-phrase that they can add to their dialect. If people read the right books from the start...and avoid 'new and improved' canned ideas... Well, I can dream, can't I?