Incommunicado 05 is a two-day working conference to be held in Amsterdam from June 15th till June 17th, 2005, that will attempt to offer a critical survey of the current state of 'info-development', most recently known by its catchy acronym 'ICT4D'. Not too long ago, most computer networks and ICT expertise were located in the North, and info-development seemed to be a rather technical matter of knowledge and technology transfer from North to South. While still popular, the assumption of a 'digital divide' that follows this familiar cartography of development has turned out to be too simple. Instead, a more complex map of actors, networked in a global info-politics, is emerging.
Poster of the Incommunicado conference in Amsterdam
Incommunicado 05 will open with a public event at the Balie in Amsterdam (Netherlands) on June 15 and will hold its working conference from 16-17 June. Incommunicado 05 is organised by the Institute of Network Cultures (INC) and Waag Society in Amsterdam in association with Sarai in New Delhi (India).
At the two days conference the World Summit Award will be present with its road show of 40 worldwide multimedia best-practices selected for the 2003 UN World Summit on the Information Society. On June 17th, 2005, the nominations of the Dutch pre-selection of the World Summit Award will be announced. These nominations will be sent to the Grand Jury in Bahrain, where the selection of products and services for the 2005 UN World Summit on the Information Society will take place. The final nominations will be presented at the Gala in Tunis on November 16, 2005.
The WSA time schedule is:
1 July: deadline for WSA entries from 168 countries
end of August/beginning of September: Grand Jury in Bahrain
16 November: Gala in Tunis (Tunisia)
From December onwards: road show throughout the world.
The World Summit Award (WSA) is a global initiative, launched in the framework of the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). It seeks to demonstrate the benefits of the Information Society in terms of the new qualities in content and applications, by selecting, presenting and promoting the best-practices from all over the world with a special emphasis on bridging the digital divide.
Nicolas Negroponte of MIT rated the World Summit Award once as “the Nobel Prize of the Web awards”. This is of course a nice one-liner. But it is not completely true, as CD-ROMs and DVDs can be entered in the competition as well. In the list of Dutch candidates for the nominations we have some 8 CD-ROMs and DVDs as well as one PDA product and a UMTS phone.
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