Just another quick entry to say that the link to the IFLA IGF report is fixed, and that all those interested in the public domain and intellectual property should immediately read IP Watch’s interview with Jamie Boyle. Excellent stuff.
Everything finished rather early in the end. The Chair, Nitin Desai, called time on the meeting at the end of the morning session, despite it being scheduled to last all day. It seemed that all of the comments on moving forward had been aired, and we were instructed to go out and enjoy the sunshine. [...]
Today we get down to the point. The IGF was an outcome of the WSIS summits in Geneva (2003) and Tunis (2005). I briefly explained it here. Its mandate extends for five years, and already we are three years into this period following forums in Athens, Rio and Hyderabad. As I have mentioned, next year [...]
We have reached the end of the day. There has indeed been consultation, as the title of this meeting suggested, but a lot of the comments from the floor have sounded very similar to me. I’ll elaborate a bit more on this tomorrow when we ‘look forward’ in the morning session, but suffice to say [...]
As you can imagine in a meeting like this, every other delegate has a laptop open in front of them, multi-tasking on all manner of things (from my position at the back I can see other people’s screens of email, Word documents, websites and Sudoku). I am one of these people, and am firing off [...]
If it’s Monday, it must be Geneva. I left Berlin and the Presidential meeting on Friday, headed back to The Hague for the weekend and this morning boarded my Sleazyjet flight to Switzerland at 8am. An hour later than scheduled, I have arrived.
I’m here for two days of meetings to follow up the Internet Governance [...]
The second and final day of the meeting. Still snow outside, this time with added rain for that slushy feeling. I witnessed both the President of the Italian IFLA Conference Committee and the Secretary General outwitted by a cunning deep puddle on the way in this morning. It’s that kind of weather.
Yesterday finished up with [...]
So the first session after lunch was entitled “Building Infrastructures in a Global Knowledge Society” with presenters tackling the challenges librarians face in a world where technology changes so rapidly. The moderator, Dr THomas Burger from the Regional Library of Saxony, posed the question: ‘Can the Internet be shaped with content provided by libraries?’
The presentations [...]
Another participant here, Patrick Danowski from IFLA’s Libraries and Web 2.0 group, is also blogging. If you can read German, go here immediately.
It’s lunchtime in Berlin. Snow outside, and very cold. I’m at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs along with a big crowd of library-related people – well over a hundred by my reckoning. We’ve had the first session and now from where I sit in the deserted main conference hall I can hear everyone outside enjoying [...]