I was interested to read an article about U.S. outrage that extremist Islamic groups are making modifications to computer games such as "Battlefield 2" to turn them into 'training programs for terrorists'. It's not unusual for savvy game-players/computer programmers to change or customize a game - but the difference here is that now players (represented by characters wearing Arab clothes) attack the U.S. forces who are seen as the bad guys.

One line in the article particularly stuck out for me:
"Battlefield 2 ordinarily shows US troops engaging forces from China or a united Middle East coalition."

Um... do I have this right? It's just fine for games to be a 'training ground' for U.S. kids, inculcating them into a culture of mistrust and violence towards Chinese or (fictional and vaguely muddled) Middle Eastern baddies.. but oh no, it's just not right for Middle Eastern kids to have Americans as the enemy!?

My hypocrisy meter is registering off the scale!

When will, by the way, someone create a cool and compelling game that involves something slightly more aware and socially responsible? Even if it does have to involve the military, how about a game that simulates a protection force for Sudanese refugees? Or better yet, a game where your goal is to stabilize Iraq and get out (rather than just kill everyone!). Any takers?

There's a new report out by Population Action which argues that there is a direct correlation between the amount of unemployed young men, and the likelyhood of conflict in a country. It's quite fascinating stuff.

"Countries in which young adults made up a large proportion of the adult population — 40 percent or more — were more than twice as likely to experience an outbreak of civil conflict during the 1990s as those below this benchmark. These youth-bulge countries are in the developing world, where youth unemployment rates are generally three to five times that of adults."

The Security Demographic: Population and Civil Conflict After the cold War

On Thursday evening I had the wonderful experience of reading One Day, All Children by Wendy Kopp, thanks to Terri's recommendation.

Kopp tells how just before finishing at a top university she realized that all her friends were getting aggressively recruited by management consultants and other large companies. She realizes none of these often talented and vibrant young people will go onto become teachers, particularly in lower income areas - partly, because they are not presented with the option... She dreams up "Teach for America", an organization that would match young graduates with schools around the country for two years of classroom teaching.

Wendy drafts up a brief business plan as her final university essay, and then catches the train into New York every day for weeks to try and get meetings with CEOs to encourage them to support her project. Within a year - with a HUGE amount of dedication and hard work, TFA has raised its $2.5 million budget, received 2500 applicants, and trained and placed 500 new young graduates as teachers. From there, despite significant challenges, TFA continues to grow -- to the point where more than 10 years later it now places 2000 graduates and has an annual budget of $21 million.

The story is inspiring and instructive in a few ways for me. First, it is her passionate belief that the most important thing we can do to improve young people's lives and opportunities is to give them good teachers, people who are themselves deeply committed to their pupils and who make their students “feel smarter”. The most 'clever' countries place a lot of value in education. Too many schools remain under-resourced, too may teachers remain underqualified and particularly under-payed (which is part of the problem). And while it's only touched upon in the book, schools need more than just better teachers: they need new types of teaching and learning methods.

One Day, All Children, had an even bigger impact on me in how Wendy described the process and challenges she experienced in running a fast-growing non-profit organization. Her "fast learning curve" certainly resonated with my experience. Covering such areas as fundraising the $5M annual budget TFA needed when she was 22, making pitches on planes to billionaires, dealing with foundation and government bureaucracy, as well as frenetic growth and huge management challenges while TFA grows from 1 staff member to over 150 people! It would be rather optimistic to suggest that TIG could grow so huge (ever), but I think there are lessons in this book for any person trying to marry vision of "idealism" with its practical realization.

Very highly recommended!

Well here I am in Hong Kong! What an amazing and vibrant city. I flew in last night and had my nose to the taxi cab window all the way to the airport.

I'm here for Asia Telecom, where I am speaking at the Youth Forum. More on that later.

Today I spent the day sleeping in, and then ventured out in search of a power adapter for my computer. Or at least that's the excuse I used for a huge trip around Hong Kong exploring the huge shopping malls, subway network, parks, and busy streets. It wasn't a very nice day, kind of drizzeling the whole time, but that gave it all a bit of a magical feeling. The picture shows the Hong Kong Exhibition Center (where the conference will happen).

Moresoon..

Presented at the Content and Themes Meeting, 16th of September in Geneva, Switzerland by Nick Moraitis, TakingITGlobal, on behalf of the Youth Caucus.

The World Summit on the Information Society. Information Society.

The name of the summit implies a grand agenda – a shift from the industrial society to the information society. Imagine if 200 years ago they’d held a World Summit on the Industrial Society. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see the scope of potential “content and themes” would have been huge! Steam, electricity, and other technologies of the day changed just about everything. It was literally a “revolution”. Now with a new “revolution”, clearly, the WSIS must discuss the implications of technology, communications and information on society, politics, the economy, culture, and the environment.

It’s not as if the information society has suddenly arrived for everyone. Most of the world has never used the Internet. The information society is therefore an evolving process, a new way of life that some of us are already living and most others will experience over the course of the next decades – if we get this right.

That’s what makes this UN Summit rather special. We are not simply trying to respond to a pressing global problem. This isn’t directly about finding an urgent solution to global warming. Or directly about fighting the scourge of AIDS. For some, that might mean it is less important, just another one of many meetings of the UN in Geneva, but that would be short sighted. The world community should not always have to be reactive. WSIS is indeed an opportunity to be proactive, discussing the type of society we want to live in: and providing a road-map (or an “Information superhighway map”) to get there. It is an opportunity to be visionary, perhaps even ‘bold and entrepreneurial’ with our international policy.

I want to thank the Chairman of the Content and Themes Subcommittee for his work preparing the ‘non-papers’ and in convening this meeting. And I also want to commend to you the work of the Civil Society Coordinating Committee in producing a significant discussion paper. This document provides a relatively comprehensive, scholarly, and useful framework that we should also take very seriously. Certainly, the Youth Caucus has had significant input to this document, drawing upon and extending previous youth platforms on these issues elaborated at a range of consultations and international youth summits over the last two years.

While Pradip will fully explain this document, I want to briefly emphasize a few areas that are particularly important to the Youth Caucus.

As I mentioned, this Summit must be about future solutions rather than past problems. But if we do not take a proactive stance now, some of these issues could indeed become problems. The issue of access to information technologies and the ability to communicate in particular must be addressed, otherwise the digital divide will create an even larger social divide between North and South. A divide where some can tap into the benefits, efficiencies and power of technology for development, and others are ever more marginalized and excluded from an information based global economy, global society.

At the same time, the youth caucus would argue that the social rather than the digital divide is the divide that really counts. Protecting our environment, fighting AIDS, better healthcare, more investment in education, increased donor aid for humanitarian assistance, an end to bitter conflicts, better governance, more transparency, increased democracy, respect for human rights -- All these actions are important components of and indeed pre-requisites for the information society. There is much talk about aligning WSIS with the Millennium Development Goals. And ICTs can certainly act as an enabler for poverty reduction and the other MDG targets. But youth stress that broader action to reach the Millennium Development Goals will equally act as an enabler for the information society.

We also want to stress that we do not see this purely as a Summit with a focus on development. On creating infrastructure. On providing access. The applications should not simply be about reaching MDGs on poverty reduction. That’s not to say it shouldn’t explore in-depth how we can apply technology to build an information society. It absolutely must. But it must also be about what that information society is like once we get there. And this will help make the Summit relevant to those countries that are already living in some sort of information society, but need guidance on what kind of information society, and how to navigate and govern it effectively given the changed realities. If this is in-fact the World Summit on Laying Telephone Lines and Building Telecenters for an Unidentified Purpose (the acronym is W.S.L.T.L.B.T.U.P. for those interested) young people would be very disappointed, but we should at least be honest.

In my experience – and that of the Youth Caucus, two particularly important ‘experiences’ young people who have grown up with the information society have are its global dimension, and its participatory nature.

First, the concept of a global village is becoming a reality, as our daily interaction is just as likely to be with people on the other side of the world as next door. This provides particular hope for intercultural understanding and international cooperation – having a friend who lives in a war zone makes the four second video grab of the country on the average nightly news somewhat less than satisfying. My bet is that the average young person connected to the internet communicates regularly with people in at least four other countries, and as many as twenty or fifty. WSIS must encourage projects that help young people understand and relate to this new larger ‘world community’ they are citizens of. At the same time it must support multilingualism and cultural diversity to avoid the threat of global cultural homogeneity.

Participatory nature – the information society, I’m sorry to say, is perhaps a misnomer for the particular age we are entering. Indeed, we’ve been able to collect and store large amounts of information ever since the old Library of Alexandria. But it wasn’t until we were able to communicate, to share our information that we were inundated with info – that we even coined the term information society. Should this really be a Communications Society we are discussing? Certainly the difference between the television and the book - and the Internet is interactivity. And as technology has become cheaper and cheaper, the barrier that exists to producing your own content has become almost negligible. Consumers of other’s information have become creators of communication. Participants. It’s the fact that we humans can participate and interact within it that allows us to call it a ‘society’ at all.

And it’s perhaps the participatory nature of the information society which has driven its remarkable innovation. So many people are actively involved, setting up local community networks, building webpages, creating new open source software tools, setting up amateur radio stations, starting small and successful technology business, a few of which grow into multinational empires, sharing art and expression online, meeting new people around the world, teaching their peers, selling goods to new international markets, helping others get online.

Who is leading this innovation? Think about your community. Picture their faces. They’re in government, business – maybe, probably. But they are young people, right? For a long time, us young people have often been thought of as an economic burden that need to be taught something.. reading, writing… good manners…. But now, we not only know something to teach everyone else – quite often we are experts this new society.

Our hope is that this – this World Summit – will focus the attention of world leaders on the greatest untapped resource in developing countries, indeed all countries. And it’s not technology. No, the greatest untapped resource in the world is youth. Those of us under 25 equal more than half the world’s population. Almost two-thirds of the population in many developing countries are aged 14-25. In the information society, young people are at the forefront.

This Summit needs to mainstream the opinions and needs of young people throughout its documents. We here must commit to providing young people with relevant access and training in technology. We must work out how to make educational systems more relevant to youth who can get information easily from the net but need guidance on how to turn it into ‘knowledge’. We must ensure that information and technology is used for the benefit rather than destruction of our natural world, the heritage we pass to future generations.

But we at the Summit must also consider youth as a central theme of their own, recognizing their role as pathfinders, the gatekeepers, the inventors of the information. What is the role of young people, what can my generation contribute? Through employment, advocacy, peer-based mentoring, inter-generational cooperation? How can we be supported in overcoming barriers to action?

This Summit, to an extent probably greater than almost any other UN conference, must engage with young people in preparing its outcomes. Without by-in from youth and concrete strategies as a special theme to co-opt our energy, expertise, indeed leadership, the Summit will fall down in implementation. Who will implement the Action Plan if young people don’t?

The good news is that young people, particularly my colleagues in the vibrant WSIS Youth Caucus stand ready for this task and look forward to working in partnership with everyone here to achieve our mutual vision of an inclusive, empowered, exciting information society.

Thank-you very much.

I'm getting a little tired of this World Summit. It sucks energy out of you. It's not only the depressing lack of progress being made (behind closed doors today... even to accredited members of major groups) at the Convention Center where leaders don't seem to care about the need for renewable energy and reducing poverty. It's also the fact that the conference venues are so far apart, that you can't find people, that discussions here at Ubuntu are a bit like a glorified trade fair. Hmm... I feel like going back to the hotel and falling asleep.

Of course it's not all bad. In fact, somethings have been very positive and a lot of fun. On Friday I spoke on a panel about "ICTs for sustainable development" and had the opportunity to meet with Pierre Gagne, Executive Director of the upcoming World Summit on the Information Society in December 2003, as well as Charles Bassett - an extremely approachable and interesting Vice President of the Canadian International Development Agency. Yesterday, I went to a series of interesting sessions at the Swiss stand on WSIS, the Global Knowledge Partnership, and practical applications of ICTs for sustainable development - from community networking to community radio. And then last night I went to an event for young canadians involved in sustainable development promoting IISD's internship program which sends young Canadians overseas to work on SD projects. Turns out the government might cut funding for this fantastic program - which would be really sad.

Three days to go. I feel a little powerless and lost in this massive event, but hopefully it will all work out for the best.

I'm standing on my hotel balcony, looking out over the cars on Pretoria Avenue. Across the five-meter-high barbed wire fence, past the road, three perhaps homeless men lie on the grass. Some women try and make a few Rand selling newspapers on the street corner near the traffic lights (or "robots"). Beyond the lights, a Mercedes Benz dealer glimmers of new chrome and shiny credit cards. Welcome to Sandton, Johannesburg, South Africa. For the next two weeks, this place is home to the World Summit on Sustainable Development.

It's a decidedly strange place - and the paranoia about (and reality of?) crime is only part of the mix. Strange in that it mixes all the luxuaries our world has to offer with grinding poverty. Five star hotels, a huge convention center, multi-storey houses on individual leafy blocks, and a whopping shopping mall containing everything from The Body Shop to designer clothing boutiques. But go to any number of neighbouring Joburg suburbs and you'll find where the majority black population live without proper access to drinking water, the air polluted, the people often unemployed.

Yet in another sense, it's not so strange at all. As a city, Joburg mirrors the wider nature of our planet Earth. As in Joburg, a majority live poor, if not in poverty, while a minority live rich, consuming most of the resources; the two separated from each other by immigration procedures and fortress-like borders. The difference here in Johannesburg, and what makes it unusual as far as global cities go, is that these two realities physically intersect.

While it may be uncomfortable for diplomats used to the refined boulevards of Geneva (those trekking from New York might be a little bit more at home), hopefully, the location will help galvanize them to the ambitious but vital task at hand. That is to find a way to bring about an end to poverty and create prosperity without sacrificing nature or wasting the scarce resources of our planet in the process. The stark contrast in Johannesburg is therefore a strong reminder of the inequalities that face our world, and it makes the city a fitting place to host the World Summit.

Well, I've arrived in Joburg! 25 hour trips are never fun, and especially when you forget your passport and the hotel says "Sorry, you don't have a reservation. There must be some mistake". But I'm here! The city is really focused around the WSSD - lots of television advertisements and newspaper articles. At the airport literally 17 (I counted) different people helped me get to my hotel, so it seems rather more organised than I had thought. Have spent the morning creating a spreadsheet of the different events happening so that I have some idea where I'm meant to be at different times. And am now going out to explore the conference. Talk to you all soon!