Garbage in, garbage out

The spate of conferences on ICT and its relevance to society held in Cape Town last week generated little more than verbal garbage that emphasised the irrelevance of the participating organisations, rather than real issues surrounding technology.

During the much-touted Information Society Week, organisations representing government, civil society and others met to hammer out "important" declarations, documents and whatever.

Some of these are supposed to be part of this country`s submissions to the World Summit on Information Society - the second round of which is to be held in Tunis in November.

The three conferences were the SA Non-Governmental Network "Thetha" conference, the Community Informatics Research Network conference and the Women`s "Mutingati" in ICT Conference.

I don`t think any of these deserve to go down in the history books as earth-shattering; at best they should get a mention for the time wasted and quantities of food consumed.

Paul Vecchiatto

I don`t think any of these deserve to go down in the history books as earth-shattering; at best they should get a mention for the time wasted and quantities of food consumed.

Cape Town had the honour of hosting the conferences, because the Western Province is the only region to have actually done something to implement e-government and the development of an ICT sector has received political backing.

Before the conferences started, a senior City of Cape Town official warned: "Academics and civil society are great at talking and coming up with ideas, but are really bad at practical implementation."

Conferences of such nature must be judged by the documents they produce. So far, their products have left me extremely disappointed.

For instance, last Friday at the conclusion of the women`s conference, their "Declaration of Principles" was proudly presented to me.

I was at least hoping to see a strong statement about child pornography on the Internet and cellular phones, but was told this was hinted at under the principle of the "unintentional consequences of ICT".

Similarly, the Thetha conference produced its own version of gobbledygook. Its "key thoughts" were masterfully obtuse. They include such gems as "training and awareness will be fundamental to the success of implementing an information society that works for all" and "a forum for multi-stakeholder participation, government, civil society and the private sector, which develops national and regional strategy with regards to content capability and the right to connect, is needed".

Where are the strong statements about costs of connectivity being the biggest inhibitor to widespread telecoms use? Or the statements about the failure of the multi-purpose community centre projects because people want their own computers and devices at reasonable cost?

One will not find such statements being produced from groups of people where words such as "profit", "competition", and anything else to do with business and wealth creation are banned. Rather a covert political agenda including such phrases as "we will all develop together" and the "need for regional and global planning" are the approved terminology.

Then there were the less subtle political messages made during commentary and speeches.

Speaking off-the-cuff during the women`s conference, minister of communications Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri said: "ICTs could be accessed through the constituency offices." One can easily take that to mean ANC constituency offices and with local elections just around the corner, a very convenient way to politic the proletariat.

Of course, one of the main justifications for these conferences was the "networking" involved.

But the obvious retort to that is cheap connectivity would allow for all these conferences to be held virtually and so no public, private or donor money need be wasted on the travelling, accommodation and food expenses for these events.

Ultimately, the only common ground between these conferences and ICT is the old computer adage: "garbage in, garbage out".