WSA 07 Awards in Venice (1)

It is Sunday morning and I am in Venice, being woken up by church bells; and when they stop tolling you will hear the base buzz of the enigines of the canal boats. I arrived on Friday night and straight got into the Venice pace of life; you need patience and walk a lot. I had to wait for the boat to take me from the airport to the Lido and then walk to the hotel for some 20 minutes. People must be healthy of all this walking and this boat riding. Of course with sunshine like we had on Saturday Venice is not a bad place to be.

I am here for the World Summit Award (WSA) ceremony and the Global Forum. The two organisations teamed up in order to strengthen each other. And so far they did, thanks to the efforts of Professor Alfredo Ronchi, an eminent expert of the WSA. They got beautiful places for the WSA Award Winners’ Conference and for the Global Forum, respectively the Palazzo Franchetti (left on the photograph) and the island San Giorgio Cini, an island with a restored abbey of the Roman Catholic Benedictine order. Besides these places we will be invited to the Palazzo Pisani Moretta, near the Frari Church, but also by the invitation of the mayor of Venice we will have a concert of the Venice Maestri at the Teatro della Fenice and a dinner at the Apollinee Hall. This is all great stuff to locate on Google maps or even better at Google earth. It will give you a good idea of how compact the city of Venice is.

On Saturday the WSA07 Winners Conference was opened by the president of the Global Forum, Ms Sylviane Toporkoff of France. She told the reason why the Global Forum was held in Venice. The mayor of Venice is studying plans to stimulate the creative industry in the city. Of course Venice has already some major cultural milestones such as the Biennale and the Venice Film festival. But these are all aggregating events from foreign efforts. Now the mayor wants to go further and stimulate the creative industry in the city itself. It is a foreward look on local policy and Sylviane thought that WSA could be very helpful in this process given its track record of three editions (almost as the award ceremony will be on Monday evening).

The teams of the winners have been arriving from all parts of the world: from the Fiji islands to Venezuela, From Russia to New Zealand. It is interesting to see the people behind the entries and to hear their story about the product. There are many enlightening talks, but there is also networking going on behind the scene. Besides the winners there are also jurors present, so that the dialogue between the winners and jurors can start. I will be reporting on the WSA 07 Winners Conference and on the Global Forum in the coming days. After these reports I will go through all the categories with almost forty products and the winners and end up with some interviews with very special people in the jury and among the winners.

Blog Posting Number: 913

Tags: multimedia competition