Hacker/entrepreneur/tech aid volunteer David Weekly is in Tunisia this week, attending the World Summit on the Information Society event. He's got a wiki with daily updates, and a Flickr stream with some incredible snapshots.
Above: a restaurant camel prop, some graffitti that reduces American culture to the simplest of equations (here's more), and the widowed grandma of David's local host. "The blue patterns on her face are a permanent tattoo given to young Algerian women to make them more attractive," says David, "they are no longer considered stylish but it makes Jamil's grandmother looks almost otherworldly."
David brought along his IBM T42 laptop, a Canon PowerShot S45, a Sony-Ericsson T610 worldphone, and "a sense of adventure." Snip from an IM session with David in Tunis earlier today (he was using a 'net cafe wifi connection):
This conference is insane. The whole country has transformed for it. All of the airlines & buses say WSIS. Already there are huge throngs of badged WSIS folks running around — 17,000 registrants. They even repainted the planes! And there are separate lines through customs. They have banners and signs and flags through the entire city for WSIS, and a fleet of free, nearly 24/7 buses. The line for badging yesterday (some four days before the conference is to begin) at 11am was a few hundred people long. There are attendees from every corner of the planet. They're closing whole highways for the duration of this conference for security purposes.
Link to David Weekly's Tunis WSIS summit wiki, here is an RSS feed, and here is his Flickr stream.
