Liveblogging WSIS in Tunisia, continued.

Hacker/entrepreneur/tech aid volunteer David Weekly is in Tunisia this week, attending the World Summit on the Information Society event. Above, snapshot of an Arabic/QWERTY keyboard he used in an Internet cafe nearby. Here's a snip from David's wiki entry for today:

In many ways, this feels like an international version of
COMDEX. The complete lack of theme sensitivity on the part of some
organizations is stupefying – Vivendi Universal has a largish
booth replete with booth babes advertising their latest
video games. It's like the team got lost on their way to E3
and ended up in Tunisia but decided to set up anyhow. (…)

The language used in the documents and speeches here are very
typically UN. They sound good but say nothing. "We support the
inclusiveness of e-participation, encouraging all stakeholders
to engage in the advancement of the information society." Hey,
I actually just made that up, but that's pretty much the tone
of about 95% of the content here. Utterly devoid of real
meaning and real action. Ugh.

It's interesting how whole countries here have booths just like
Sony would have a booth at COMDEX. Rwanda, Ghana, Mali, UAE,
Canada, the US, even Israel are here. There were guards posted
by the Israeli booth, and the US booth, next door to the Israeli
one, was very small – several times smaller than the South
Africa, Canada, or even Bahrain. It's amusing to have whole
countries promoting and advertising themselves, for reasons I
cannot fully put my finger on.