Access 2 Knowledge

I was lucky enough to be invited back to speak at the Yale Law School's Access 2 Knwoledge conference in April this year. A bit of hectic travelling, flying in and out of the States just for this conference, after all was worthwhile.
With last year's post-conference stop-over stint flooding my memory cells, this year was basically a weekend of sitting in grand Yale auditoria, listening in on policy panels ranging from issues as diverse as new internationalised domain names (I.D.N.) for teh internet, to Brazil's flourishing homegrown music and media market, which has nothing at all to do with large record companies, big promo budgets or copyright laws.

Surrounded by spiffy Apple iBooks, and ubiquitous wifi, at times I wondered whether i was the only one listening, I mean *really* listening. All non-speakers appeared so caught up with simultaneous parallel activities such as checking and answering emails, surfing the net, sending immediate contact and follow-up emails to interesting speakers - it made me wonder what price is paid in terms of attention and participatory discussion after such panels for always-on access to internet and personal mobile computing technology.



It was good to be back in an academic environment once again, exposed to policy makers, researchers and practitioners from a dazzling diversity of disciplines, mainly joined by a common interest in enabling access to information to realise basic human rights as agreed to in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I will be posting more on this on the work blog, so won't get into too much detail here.
I did find that many of the discussions seemed rather far removed from the daily work that educators or health care workers do in 3/4 of the world, and that policy making that is currently going on at WIPO could use a larger injection of real world needs.
Thank goodness the wavemakers from Yale's Information Society Project think the same :) let's how we can bring this new social movement home.

So that's a little bit of what I've been up to of late, for those that may be wondering..
There is more to come, I'm home for a good two weeks, some of that time really should be spent blogging..