Early Start, My foot! Pure Hubbub

Couldn't get out of bed his morning. I ended up arriving later than anticipated. I''m currently at the Cyber Espace are, where a predominant number of us, clad in suits and whatnot, are standing up checking our mails and whatnot, whlst a minority sit down. The cyber-espace place is cleverly darkened, as if it were lit, stands to reason that we would all be feeling rather hot.

I am getting rather pessimistic about this meeting; it is not because BBC World, in its characteristically objective reporting from its correspondent in Tunis opined that the meeting may "run the risk of being bogged down...as there will be too much communication anad little action", but the fact that there are TOO many things to attend to. All interesting, and mostly going on around the same time.

Not to mention the sheer number of people milling around. There are several varieties: the lost and confused kind; the lost and concerned; the lost yet determined kind. I fall somewhere among all three!!:-)

A meeting started at midday, called "ICT and the Global DevelopmentSystem: The Transformative Potential of ICT for "Development for All" ". Look at me! It's gone almost twenty minutes past, yet here I am typing this...I best be off. There's another at 1pm that is more relevant, so I might just wait for that instead of rushing to this one that ends at 1.30pm...

You see, this is the type of scenario many of us are facing. The stands, whilst very psychedelic and interesting, offer a showcasing of company's products--not to mention government ones--that is fine, but I reckon they are more distractions than anything. The only one I have found really useful was the UN stand that provided many publications on substantive issues around WSIS.

Ofcourse, knowing the voluminous nature of UN publications, I would need an extra suitcase to carry them all back to Accra...we'll see.

My colleague just called me to find out where I am...we have a rendez-vous that I am not looking forward to. I sincerely hope this meandering of minds and ideas becomes subsumed by concrete outcomes.

It's time for the UN to reclaim the world stage--yet again!! And, please not without "deliverables", and "programmes of actions", but RESULTS. Please, we SO need that...