20007 WSA Grand Jury Croatia (10)

Last night the WSA jury and staff as well as 20 members of the press corps were bussed to Rovinic a, a town up the coast of Croatia. We were treated to a an evening of Croatian food and mingled with the press.










When we were back Standa the media activist had opened his bio-oil driven car for an unofficial party with music and photographs of the WSA Grand Jury. It was a very nice happening.

However it was a rude awakening this morning to hear that one of the jurors had been brought to hospital in a serious condition. He is in intensive care and the first reports are unclear. Of course we all hope that he will get better.

Today the e-Summit starts, a conference with high level politician, press and the Grand Jury. This is an initiative of the state secretary Mr Mir Slav Kovacic. The WSA Grand Jury members met him before the meeting starts and had an intensive discussion with him on the e-Croatia programme. It is part of the e-Europe initiative. Especially e-Education and the governmental portal are his priorities presently. And of course the infrastructure. Four years ago Croatia had 643 ADSL subscribers; now it has 300.000 subscribers for a population of 4, 5 million inhabitants. Basic problem for the infrastructure is the lack of competition in the telecom field. But the Croatian government is trying to overcome this with grants. It has now devoted 30 million kuna (I guess some 25 million euro) to special social group so that they can have internet access for free for a year. Also the schools on the islands get grants for wireless internet and smart boards. Croatia is also working on the continuation of the e-Croatia program, code named Croatia 1 2010. Bust as the state secretary thinks that the program will be rather on mobile and should therefore be called m-Croatia with a heavy stress on infrastructure, bridging the digital divide and stimulating e-Participation.

In the Summit I was interested in what Tin Radovani had to say about the BBC as he is a strategy analyst. He was looking at a shift in pattern in news. He cited the speed of news which yielded in the first 6 hours of this day: 1000 photographs, 4000 sms, 20.000 e-mails and 20 videoclips. He compared it with the speed of increase of Technorati, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace. He drew in citizen’s journalism and user generated content. But in the end he granted that BBC was riding on these waves and not initiating trends themselves, except the video plug-in. BBC accepted and integrates the trend. But it sounded almost like citizen’s journalism and user generated content was tolerated by the BBC.

BTW There is an official WSA blogand there will be daily photographs.

Blog Posting Number: 861

Tags:World Summit Award, World Summit on the Information Society