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.
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 <https://www.itu.int/net/wsis/docs/geneva/summit_participants.pdf>). To be honest we spent more time involved with the ICT4D activities <http://web.archive.org/web/20040905041802/http://www.wsis-online.net/smsi/or...> 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 <https://cyber.harvard.edu/node/92758> which was published by Harvard's Berkman Center. - Evan