[Air-l] Incommunicado 05: information technology for everybody else

[Ned Rossiter]

Incommunicado 05: information technology for everybody else

(final intro & program)

June 15: Opening Night
June 16-17: Working Conference
De Balie, Amsterdam, NL

Organization: Institute of Network Cultures, together with Waag Society 
& Sarai.
Supported by: Hivos, Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and IICD.

Information and registration: http://www.incommunicado.info/conference
Wiki: http://www.networkcultures.org/wiki/

Incommunicado 05: information technology for everybody else

Incommunicado 05 is a two-day working conference working towards  a 
critical survey of the current state of 'info-development', also known 
by its catchy acronym 'ICT4D' (ICT for development). Before the recent 
“flattening of the world” (Thomas Friedman, 2005), most computer 
networks and ICT expertise were located in the North, and 
info-development mostly involved rather technical matters of knowledge 
and technology transfer from North to South. While still widely (and 
even wildly) talked about, the assumption of a 'digital divide' that 
follows this familiar geography of development has turned out to be too 
simple. Instead, a more complex map of actors, networked in a global 
info-politics, is emerging.

Different actors continue to promote different - and competing - 
visions of 'info-development'.New info-economies like Brazil, China, 
and India have suddenly emerged and are forming south-south alliances 
that challenge our sense of what 'development' is all about. 
Development-oriented systems (like simputers and MIT’'s $100 computer 
system) emerge and re-emerge. The corporate sector suddenly discovers 
the “bottom of the pyramid” and community computing, in their drive for 
markets beyond those now increasingly stagnant in the OECD countries, 
and among the prosperous and professional in the rest of the world.

However tempting, these new developments and particularly the emerging 
alliances  should not be romanticized in terms of a new 
tri-continentalism. Brazil's info-geopolitical forays are anything but 
selfless. And while China's investments in Africa have already been 
compared to the 19th century scramble for Africa led by European 
colonial powers, many expect it to be soon exporting its 'Golden 
Shield' surveillance technologies to states such as Vietnam, North 
Korea, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, for all of whom it is acting  as a 
regional internet access provider.

However, the cohesion of the new south-south alliances originates in 
part from the shared resistance to an emergent Euro-American front on 
intellectual property rights (IPR) and related matters. In parallel, 
and in eager response to the newfound enthusiasm for ICT4D through 
Public-Private Partnerships (fueled largely by the ongoing UN financial 
crisis and the broader neo-liberal privatization agenda), major 
info-corporations are advertising themselves as “partners in 
development” and are promoting ICTs as the vehicles for “good 
governance and effective service delivery” („e-governance“), but also 
to stake out their own commercial claims, crowd out public-sector 
alternatives, and subvert south-south cooperation.

Ambitious info-development projects struggle to find a role for 
themselves either as basic infrastructures supportive of all other 
development activity or as complement to  older forms of infrastructure 
and service -oriented development. And often they are expected to meet 
a host of often contradictory aims: alleviating info-poverty, 
catapulting peasants into the information age, promoting local ICT and 
knowledge based industries, or facilitating democratization through 
increased participation and local empowerment. Meanwhile, of course, 
info-development also facilitates transnational corporate efforts to 
offshore IT-related jobs and services in ever-shorter cycles of 
transposition, leaving local 'stakeholders' at a loss as to whether or 
not scarce public subsidies should even be used to attract and retain 
industries likely to move on anyway.

Info-development creates new conflicts, putting communities in 
competition with each other. But it also creates new alliances. Below 
the traditional thresholds of sovereignty, grassroots efforts are 
calling into question the entire IPR regime of and access restrictions 
on which commercial info-development is based. Commons- or 
open-source-oriented organizations across the world seem more likely to 
receive support from southern than from northern states, and these 
coalitions, too, are challenging northern states on their self-serving 
commitment to IPR and their dominance of key info-political 
organizations.

Meanwhile lesser-known members of the UN family, such as the World 
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), are beginning to feel the 
heat brought on by “no-logo”-style campaigns that are targeting the 
entire range of public international actors and bring an agenda of 
accountability to the institutions of multilateral governance. As a 
response to the increasingly contradictory (dare one say confused) 
info-political activities of the major agencies like the ITU, UNDP, 
UNESCO, and WIPO, even the UN  has begun to lose its aura. As public 
tagging of a perceived positive UN role in governance, humanitarianism, 
and peacekeeping shifts towards corruption and inter-agency rivalries, 
(carefully guided by neo-conservative think-tanks), the ensemble of 
supra-state apparatuses supposed to sustain visions of a post-imperial 
order suddenly seems mired in a frightening family dispute that 
threatens to spin out of control.

In spite of the neat sociological grammar of declarations and 
manifestoes, increasingly hybrid actors no longer follow the simple 
schema of state, market, or civil society, but engage in cross-sector 
alliances. Responding to the crisis of older top-down approaches to 
development, corporations and aid donors are increasingly bypassing 
states and international agencies to work directly with smaller 
non-governmental organizations. And while national and international 
development agencies now have to defend their activity against both 
pro- and anti-neo-liberal critics, info-NGOs participating in 
public-private partnerships and info-capitalist ventures suddenly find 
themselves in the midst of another heated controversy over their new 
role as junior partner of states and corporations. Responding by 
stepping up their own brand-protection and engaging in professional 
reputation management, major NGOs even conclude that it is no longer 
their organizational culture but their agenda alone that differentiates 
them from corporate actors.

The spectacular world summit on the information society (WSIS), barely 
noticed by the mainstream media but already uniting cyber-libertarians 
afraid of UN interventions in key questions of internet governance, 
will conclude later this year. While many info-activists are assessing 
(and re-assessing) the hidden cost of invitations to sit at 
'multi-stakeholder' tables along with mega-NGOs and corporate 
associations, others are already refusing to allow an organizational 
incorporation of grassroots or subaltern agendas into the managed 
consensus being built around the dynamic of an 'international civil 
(information) society'. Mirroring the withdrawal from traditional 
mechanisms of political participation, there is growing disaffection 
with multilateralism as the necessary default perspective for any 
counter-imperial politics. Unwilling to accept the idioms of 
sovereignty, some even abandon the very logic of summits and 
counter-summits to articulate post-sovereign perspectives.

And alongside this of course, is the day to day reality of those at the 
grassroots and most importantly working as policy, research and 
practice info-intermediaries to find ways of using (and remaking) ICTs 
to be of benefit to the “multitudes”. The challenge for ICT4D is not to 
ensure that everyone has 24/7 access to .xxx, but that the 
opportunities that the Walmarts of this world have so successfully and 
creatively seized to transform the global networks of commercial 
production and supply are similarly the basis for a transformation 
towards creative and open access opportunities for transforming the 
life chances and lived realities of everybody else.

History

The 'incommunicado' project started early 2004 as a web research 
resource combined with an email-based mailinglist. It was founded by 
Soenke Zehle and Geert Lovink, who had earlier collaborated during the 
European Make World and Neuro events, that attempted to develop 
critical work around new media and no border issues.

Incommunicado didn't start out of the blue. It was a merger from two 
lists, Solaris, founded late 2001 by Geert Lovink and Michael Gurstein, 
and a defunct G8 Dotforce list. The Solaris email list was an early 
attempt to develop a critical discourse around the ICT4D policy complex 
and was inspired by the then-newly opened centre Sarai in Delhi, a 
place that embodies new cultural practices beyond the classic 
development models. Beginning in late 2003, the first World Summit on 
the Information Society accelerated the awareness that critical voices, 
inside and outside the Machine, had to gather in order to reflect on 
the circulating metaphors and rhetoric. Poor outcomes of the 
alternative 'WSIS, We Seize' campaign, which positioned itself outside 
of the world conference spectacle, proved that there is a great need 
for a radical critique of notions such as 'information society', 
'e-governance', 'digital divide' or 'civil society'.

At the moment there are 300+ subscribers to the list, and at any given 
moment in time 50-70 users are either reading the incommunicado 
rss-news or searching the collaborative weblog, whose topic areas 
include network(ed) ecologies, ICT for Development, internet 
governance, analyses of the NGO sector, and emerging South-South 
relations. So far, incommunicado has been an exclusively online 
resource and list community, consisting of researchers, ICT 
practitioners, activists and social entrepreneurs. The event in 
Amsterdam in June 2005 will be the first meeting of this emerging 
network. Future plans include the launch of an open-access journal or 
an incommunicado reader.

On Being Incommunicado

The term incommunicado generally refers to a state of being without the 
means or rights to communicate, especially in the case of incommunicado 
detention and the threat of massive human rights violations. The latter 
also implies an extra-judicial space of exception, where torture, 
executions and "disappearances" occur - all-too-frequently in the lives 
of journalists and media activists, online or offline, across the 
world.

After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the bilateral order, 
the discourse of human rights has become an important placeholder for 
agendas of social change and transformation that are no longer 
articulated in third worldist or tricontinentalist terms. Yet despite 
the universalizing implications of human rights, they can also invoke 
and retrieve the complex legacy of specific anti-colonial and 
third-worldist perspectives that continue to inform contemporary 
visions of a different information and communication order.

The term 'incommunicado' was chosen as the name for this research 
network to acknowledge that while questions related to info-development 
and info-politics are often explored in a broader human rights context, 
this does not imply embracing a politics of rights as such. Instead, 
one of the aims of the incommunicado project is to explore tactical 
mobilizations of rights-based claims to access, communication, or 
information, but also the limits of any politics of rights, its 
concepts, and its absolutization as a political perspective.

---

Final program:

::Wednesday, June 15::

Opening Night
20.00-22.30 Main Hall

Situating the workshop agenda in the broader context of the UN Summit 
on the Information Society (WSIS) as well as the controversy over an 
emerging international civil society, the public event on Wednesday 
night will introduce the topics of the work conference to a broader 
non-specialist audience. Offering a working definition of 
info-development/ICT4D, the public event will raise some of the key 
conference issues, including the extent to which this field is indeed 
characterized by a shift from North-South to South-South alliances and 
the role played by info-development NGOs.

Chair: Tracey Naughton (Chair WSIS Media Caucus, South Africa)

With contributions by:
Soenke Zehle and Geert Lovink, introduction to the Incommunicado project
Nnenna Nwakanma (Africa Civil Society for the Information Society, 
Nigeria) : The mirage of South-South cooperation in ICT4D
Jeebesh Bagchi (Sarai New Media Initiative, India): Forgetting 
Development: Cybermohalla Practices and Information Networks
Bernardo Sorj (University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil): Internet in the 
Slums
Anthony Mwaniki (One World, Kenya): Mobile Technology - A Tool For 
Development?
Partha Pratim Sarkar  (Bytesforall, Bangladesh): ICTs at the grassroots 
and intermediaries: who empowers whom?
Anriette Esterhuysen (APC, South Africa)

::Thursday, June 16::

Plenary Lecture 1: Introduction and Overview
10.00-11.00 Main Hall

ICT4D is widely considered a key element in processes of 
democratization, good governance, and poverty alleviation. This plenary 
will situate the rise of ICT4D in the context of the transformation of 
development as a whole, and outline individual workshop agendas.

Chair: Geert Lovink (INC, NL)

With contributions by:
Roberto Verzola (sustainable agriculture campaigner, Manilla): The 
emerging information economy. Respondant: Heimo Claassen (researcher, 
Brussels)
Monica Narula  (Sarai New Media Initiative, Delhi): The Delhi 
decleration, a new context for new media

Workshop A1: NGOs in Info-Development
11.30-13.00 Main Hall

We have become used to thinking of NGOs as 'natural' development 
actors. But their presence is itself indicative of a fundamental 
transformation of an originally state-centered development regime, and 
their growing influence raises difficult issues regarding their 
relationship to state and corporate actors, but also regarding their 
self-perception as representatives of civic and grassroots interests. 
Following a survey of some of the major info-development NGOs and 
networks, this workshop will address questions related to the politics 
of representation pursued by these actors: why should they sit at a 
table with governments and international agencies, and who is 
marginalized by such a (multistakeholder) dynamic of 'inclusion' 
dominated by NGOs?

Chair: Anriette Esterhuysen (APC, South Africa)

With contributions by:
Loe Schout (HIVOS, NL): Internet connects world citizens, but does it 
breed new ones, too?
Maartje OpdeCoul (One World, NL): Evaluating ICT4D projects
Michael Gurstein (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA): Civil 
Society or Communities: The Contradiction at the Core of the 
Information Society
Maja van der Velden (University of Bergen, Norway): Cognitive Justice
Partha Pratim Sarkar (Bytes4all, Bangladesh)
Toni Eliasz (Ungana-Afrika, South Africa): What CSOs bring to ICT 
Policy Processes

Workshop A2: After WSIS: Exploring Multistakeholderism
11.30-13.00 Salon

For some, the 2003-5 UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) 
is just another moment in an ongoing series of inter-governmental 
jamborees, glamorizing disciplinary visions of global ICT governance. 
For others, WSIS revives 'tricontinentalist' hopes for a New 
International Information and Communication Order whose emphasis on 
'civil society actors' may even signal the transformation of a system 
of inter-governmental organizations. Either way, WSIS continues to 
encourage the articulation of agendas, positions, and stakes in a new 
politics of communication and information. Following the effort to 
actively involve civil society actors in WSIS activities, the idea of 
an emergent 'multistakeholderism' is already considered one of the key 
WSIS outcomes. This workshop will take a critical look at different 
approaches to the idea of multistakeholderism.

Chair: Neeltje Blommestein (IICD, NL)

With contributions by:
Lisa McLaughlin (Mass Communication and Women's Studies, Miami 
University-Ohio, USA): Introduction:  Issues in Multi-stakeholderism.
Ralf Bendrath (University of Bremen, Germany): Experiments in 
Multi-Stakeholderism—Lessons learned from WSIS.
Beatriz Busaniche (Fundacion Via Libre, Argentina): WSIS and 
Multistakeholderism: Could we call them "best practices"?
Ljupco Gjorgjinski (Center for Dialogue and Democracy, Macedonia): 
multistakeholder partnerships–cybernetic Governance for the information 
society
Stijn van der Krogt (IICD, NL): The Polder model applied to ICT4D in 
the South-- lessons learned from IICD's multi-stakeholder processes
Sally Burch (ALAI, Equador)
Paul Maassen (HIVOS, NL): Civil society as a stakeholder: the dilemma 
of constituency
Ned Rossiter (University of Ulster, UK): Post-Representation & the 
Architecture of Net Politics
Nnenna Nwakanma (Africa Civil Society for the Information Society, 
Nigeria): Partnerships and Networks: the African Civil Society 
Perspective

Workshop A3: Open Source, Open Borders
11.30-13.00 Cinema

Chair: Jo van der Spek (radio maker, NL)

Some of the organizations active in the WSIS process lost their 
accreditation because participants used their visa to say goodbye to 
Africa. Widely reported, the anecdote suggests that media and migration 
form a nexus that is nevertheless rarely explored in the context of 
ICT4D. In this session, we will survey some of the work on migrant and 
refugee media. It will also introduce the agenda of the wireless bridge 
project, a sister event of the incommunicado work conference that will 
take place in Tarifa (Spain) later in June.

Presenters:
Florian Schneider (kein.org, Germany)
Roy Pullens (researcher, NL): IOM and border control as info development
Nnenna Nwakanma (Africa Civil Society for the Information Society, 
Nigeria): An Anecdote of a would-be illegal immigrant.

14.00-16.00 Open Sessions

Main Hall:

14.00-15.00 Solomon Benjamin (urban researcher, CASUM-m, Bangalore
India): case study on ICT and real estate in Bangalore (including video 
documentary, produced for Incommunicado 05)

15.00-15.30 Francois Laureys (IICD) in conversation with Sylvestre 
Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso)

15.30-16.00 Sally Burch (ALAI, Ecuador): Social movements, 
communication and ICTs

Salon: E-Waste

14.00-16.00
E-Waste: Special session on electronic waste, organized by Waste, 
advisors on urban development and development.
In this session, a highly diverse group of people from the development, 
  ICT, recycling, finance, insurance, and waste management worlds 
consider strategies and approaches in relation to preventing, reusing 
or recycling WEEE, or waste from electronic and electrical equipment in 
the Netherlands. The impulse behind the session comes from a twinning 
project between Stichting WASTE, in the Netherlands, and the NGO 
ACEPESA, in Costa Rica. The goal of the session is to arrive at ideas 
for interventions in both the Netherlands and Costa Rica.

Session organisers: Anne Scheinberg, Kiwako Mogi, Stichting WASTE, 
Gouda (www.waste.nl). Session chair: Jeroen IJgosse, WASTE. Confirmed 
Discussants: Portia Sinnott, Micro Services Plus, California, Joost 
Helberg, Vereniging Open Source Netherlands, Stephan Wildeboer,OS-OSS, 
Angela Jonker, Flection Netherlands, dhr Herben, Province of Limburg, 
Netherland

Cinema:

14.00-14.20 Kim van Haaster (INC researcher, NL), The University of the 
Future: Software Development in Revolutionary Cuba.

14.20-14.40 T. B. Dinesh (BangaloreIT.org, India): Observations on the 
impact of IT on Society, in Bangalore.

14.40-15.00 Toni Eliasz (Ungana-Afrika, South Africa): on lacking ICT 
capacity among small development organizations and networks

15.00-15.20 Enrique Chaparro (Fundacion Via Libre, Argentina ): on the 
hidden prices for ICT4 aid.

15.20-15.40 Oliver Vodeb and Jerneja Rebernak, art & ICT4D, a 
presentation of the Memefest 2005 competition.

15.40-16.00 Jo van der Spek and others: info solidarity with Iraq 
(www.streamtime.org)

Plenary Session 2: After Aid: Info-Development after 9/11
16.30-18.00 Main hall

What is the status of aid in the promotion of ICT4D, and how have ICT4D 
actors responded to the politicization and securitization of aid, 
including the sale of security and surveillance technologies in the 
name of info-development? To what extent does info-development overlap 
with new info-infrastructures in the field of humanitarian aid 
(ICT4Peace)? Are global trade justice campaigns a response to classic 
development schemes?

Chair: Ravi Sundaram (Sarai, India)

With contributions by:
Enrique Chaparro (Fundacion Via Libre, Argentina),
Glen Tarman (Trade Justice Campaign, UK): Join the band: ICTs, popular 
mobilization and the global call to make poverty history
Steve Cisler (librarian, USA): Outside the Church of ICT
Shuddha Sengupta (Sarai, India): Knowing in your Bones: Politics, 
Anxiety and Information in Delhi, 2005

20.30: Screening, part 1, co-curated by De Balie

::Friday, June 17::

Plenary 3: ICT4D and the Critique of Development
10.00-12.00 Main Hall

The critique of development and its institutional arrangements - of its 
conceptual apparatus as well as the economic and social policies 
implemented in its name - has always been both a theoretical project 
and the agenda of a multitude of 'subaltern' social movements. Yet much 
work in ICT4D shows little awareness of or interest in the history of 
such development critique. Quite the contrary, the ICT4D debate, whose 
terms are reproduced in the members-only loop of a few major NGO 
networks like APC, OneWorld, or PANOS, along with a small number of 
states and influential donor organizations, remains surprisingly 
inward-looking, unable or unwilling to actively challenge the hegemony 
of an ahistorical techno-determinism.

Even many activists believe that ICT will lead to progress and 
eventually contribute to poverty reduction. Have development skepticism 
and the multiplicity of alternative visions it created simply been 
forgotten? Or have they been actively muted to disconnect current 
struggles in the area of communication and information from this 
history, adding legitimacy to new strategies of 'pre-emptive' 
development that are based on an ever-closer alliance between the 
politics of aid, development, and security? Are analyses based on the 
assumption that the internet and its promise of connectivity are 
'inherently good' already transcending existing power analyses of 
global media and communication structures? How can we reflect on the 
booming ICT-for-Development industry beyond best practice suggestions?

Chair: Kees Biekart (ISS, NL)

Contributions by:
Ravi Sundaram (Sarai New Media Initiative, India): Post-Development and 
Technological Dreams: An Indian Tale
Solomon Benjamin (urban researcher, CASUM-m, Bangalore India): 
E-Politics of the New Civil Society
Jan Nederveen Pieterse (University of Illinios, USA): Digital 
capitalism and development
Tracey Naughton (Chair WSIS Media Caucus, South Africa): Putting 
Lipstick on Pigs

Workshop C1: ICT corporations at the UN
13.00-15.00 Main hall

The controversial agreement between Microsoft and the UNDP, issued at a 
time when open source software is emerging as serious non-proprietary 
alternative within ICT4D, is generally considered in terms of a 
public-private partnership, to be assessed on its own terms. But it 
should also be considered in the broader context of rising corporate 
influence in the UN system, from the almost-no-strings-attached Global 
Compact, widely criticized as multilateral collusion in corporate 
'bluewashing', to the Cardoso Panel on UN-Civil Society Relations and 
its controversial definition of civil society.

Chair: Soenke Zehle (Incommunicado, Germany)

With contributions by:
Lisa McLaughlin (University of Illinois, USA): Cisco Systems, the 
United Nations, and the Corporatization of Development
Michael Gurstein (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA): Critiquing 
Apple Pie: What We Can Say and Not Say About the UN These Days
Manuel Acevedo (consultant, Spain): ICT4D partnerships at face value: 
experiences from the multilateral trenches
Steve Cisler (librarian, USA): PPPP: problems of public-private 
partnerships

Workshop C2: FLOSS in ICT4D
13.00-15.00 Salon

Pushed by a growing transnational coalition of NGOs and a few allies 
inside the multilateral system, open source software has moved from 
margin to center in ICT4D visions of peer-to-peer networks and open 
knowledge initiatives. But while OSS and its apparent promise of an 
alternative non-proprietary concept of collaborative creation continues 
to have much counter-cultural cachet, its idiom can easily be used to 
support the 'liberalization' of telco markets and cuts in educational 
subsidies. What is the current status of OSS as idiom and 
infrastructural alternative within ICT4D?

Chair: Paul Keller (Waag Society, NL)

With contributions by:
Dorkas Muthoni (Linux Chicks Africa, Kenya): Chix Presence: A strategic 
partner in increasing the efficiency of FOSS for the benefit of society
Felipe Fonseca (MetaReciclagem, Brazil): MetaReciclagem: technology 
re-appropriation and collective innovation"
Ednah Karamagi (Brosdi, Uganda)
Bill Kagai (FOSSFA, Kenya)
Nnenna Nwakanma (Africa Civil Society for the Information Society, 
Nigeria)
Enrique Chaparro (Fundacion Via Libre, Argentina ): ICT are not (just) 
tools
Seppo Koskela (Applied Linux Institute, Helsinki): Free Software, ICT4D 
and Finland - the Short Story.
Sylvestre Ouéadraogo (executive President of Yam Pukri Burkina Faso)
Alexandre Freire (Digital Cultures/Ministry of Culture, Brazil)

Workshop C3:  Culture and Corporate Sponsorship in the ICT4D Context
13.00-15.00 Cinema

Introduction: Solomon Benjamin (Bangalore)
Open informal discussion.

What is the aim of Western cultural organizations in the context of 
ICT4D projects? Think of the hip design event Doors of Perception in 
Bangalore and Delhi, our own Waag-Sarai Platform, Beijing and its new 
media arts inside the Millennium Dome, or the German media festival in 
Chiang Mai (Thailand). What is the agenda of these organizations? Is 
the ‘electronic art’ they are exporting merely paving the way for the 
big software and telecom firms to move in, or should we reject such a 
mechanic, one-dimensional view?

Workshop D1: New Info-Politics of Rights
15.30-17.00 Main Hall

Recent framings of ICT as an object of civil society politics have 
resulted in the coupling of ICT with the notion of “rights”: issues of 
the spread, use and adaptation of these technologies are increasingly 
defined in terms of human, civil, communication and information rights, 
et cetera. This session questions the choice, perhaps the tactical 
optionality, of making ICT-related issues into matters of rights. The 
rights-frame  formats ICT for particular modes of the institutional 
processing of issues. At the same time, ICT and the discourses knitted 
around this object themselves can be seen to spread the rights frame. 
Considering that counter-cultural engagements with new media were 
previously framed as tactical undertakings, the question is whether the 
rise  of “rights” does not thwart the potential of a creative, 
aesthetic, affective politics of the tactical. Or is the case that 
networks have a better use for rights than institutions? This is the 
context in which we ask: what are rights for, how are they used by 
NGOs, when does the coupling of ICT with rights work, and when does it 
fail?

Chair: Richard Rogers (GovCom/University of Amsterdam, NL)

With contributions by:
Soenke Zehle (Incommunicado, Germany): Politics of Info-Rights meets 
Tactical Media
Jodi Dean (HWS Colleges, USA)
Noortje Marres (University of Amsterdam, NL): Why is this happening to 
ICT? Info-rights as a special case of issue hybridisation
Magela Sigillito (Third World Institute, Montevideo, Uruguay)
Thomas Keenan (Bard College Human Rights Program, USA): On some 
dilemmas in claiming rights: persistence, elasticity, instrumentality
Mike Hayes (Mahidol University, Thailand) and Ned Rossiter (University 
of Ulster, UK): Organised Networks and the Situation of Rights

Workshop D2: Digital Bandung: New Axes of Info-Capitalism
15.30-17.00 Salon

We are witnessing a shift from in the techno-cultural development of 
the web from an essentially post-industrialist euro-american affair to 
a more complexly mapped post-third-worldist network, where new 
south-south alliances are already upsetting our commonsensical 
definitions of info-development as an exclusively north-south affair. 
One example of this is the surprising extent to which a 'multilateral' 
version of internet governance has been able to muster support, another 
is the software and intellectual property rights reform (WIPO 
Development Agenda). info-development, that is, has ceased to be a 
matter of technology transfer and has become a major terrain for the 
renegotiation of some of the fault lines of geopolitical conflict - 
with a new set of actors. But does this really affect the established 
dependencies on 'northern' donors, and if so, what are some of the new 
alliances that are emerging? What is this new ‘post-Bandung’ movement?

Chair: Ravi Sundaram (Sarai, India)
Open informal discussion

Workshop D3:  Nuts and Bolts of Internet Governance
15.30-17.00 Cinema

One of the few areas where WSIS is likely to produce concrete results 
is internet governance (IG). The IG controversy revolves around the 
limits of the current regime of root server control (ICANN/US) and 
possible alternatives, but it is also significant because it signals 
the repoliticization of a key domain of a technocratic internet culture 
that long considered itself to be above the fray of ordinary 
info-politics. The sense that IG has info-political implications and 
should be subject to discussion beyond expert fora is, however, much 
more widespread that actual knowledge of the techno-cultural dynamic 
actually involved in governing the internet. This workshop with be a 
nuts-and-bolts session for non-techies.

Chair: Reinder Rustema (Internet Society, NL)

With contributions by:
Enrique Chaparro (Fundacion Via Libre, Argentina)
Danny Butt (Independent Consultant; Researcher, New Zealand): Cultures 
of Internet Governance: From global coordination to trans-cultural 
dialogue"

Plenary 4: Closing Session
17.30 – 18.30  Main hall

Moderated by Soenke Zehle and Geert Lovink
Plus: WSIS Awards, Dutch nominations, announced by Jak Bouman

Video Session
Rethinking 'underdevelopment or revolution' through ICTs.
Live videoconference with San Francisco, coordinated by Sasha Constanze 
Chock

18:30-19:00   Cinema

This session is focused on appropriation of ICTs by social movements 
that don't fit into the public private development industry framework. 
Rather than consider the success or failure of strategies to patch ICTs 
into a 'development' framework that means binding peripheral locations 
and populations more tightly to service of the metropole, we'll discuss 
ICTs and revolutionary activity in Brazil, Korea, Bolivia, and 
elsewhere. With remote participation from, amongst others, Dongwon Jo 
from MediACT in Seoul, Dorothy Kidd from University of San Francisco, 
Pablo Ortellado/Indymedia Brazil and members  from ERBOL and CMI 
Bolivia.

20.30: Screening, part 2, co-curated by De Balie