That's an amazing piece of Internet Governance history!

Glenn & Evan, thanks for sharing. :-)

On Mon, May 19, 2025 at 12:52 PM Evan Leibovitch via NA-Discuss <na-discuss@icann.org> wrote:

On Sun, May 18, 2025 at 12:09 PM Glenn McKnight via NA-Discuss <na-discuss@icann.org> wrote:

Hi 

Enclosed is the link to the proceedings dating back to Geneva in 2003 for the first WSIS. Evan and I had a booth at the conference at that time in Geneva . My primary memory of the event was the translator's conflict with Richard Stallman ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman)  over the use of Open Source and Libre . Perhaps Evan can recall any of the WSIS proceedings,  It dates us long before involvement in ICANN.

https://www.itu.int/net/wsis/

Glenn and I were most certainly there, but more about the advocacy of Open Source software than anything specifically to do with governance. I led a delegation of 21 people from 13 countries (page 155 in the list of participants). To be honest we spent more time involved with the ICT4D activities adjacent to WSIS in the same Palexpo building. I recall the meeting, run by the French government, in which Stallman got into a shouting match with the interpreters. I also recall that our delegation submitted an end-of-conference declaration that broke sharply from the Civil Society statement that was more about saying the right words than actually advancing the Information Society.

But what I remember most warmly was booth 502 on the ICT4D Platform floor. Organizers had kindly given us a booth such that all WSIS delegates had to walk past us on their way in and out of the conference. To demonstrate that Open Source advocacy was both a global and local phenomenon, the Geneva Linux Users Group facilitated our acquisition of a refrigerator and enough beer to keep it stocked through the conference. As a result, we distributed more than 9,000 Linux CDs and our booth stayed open well past the end of the WSIS meetings each day. I later wrote a debrief called "Upstairs Downstairs" in World Summit on Reflection which was published by Harvard's Berkman Center.

- Evan

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