memo for next time: please do not push for the wireless network to be set up.

this memo is due to the fact that, as soon as i got online, i got two weeks of actual work, friends, and other commitments pushing on my mailbox and icq account.

today, having eventually got to the office, i discovered there had been an auction of shares of my office time among my colleagues - one had won one hour at 10am to discuss the architecture of a new service, and another one had won another hour at 4pm to discuss a new product, and so on.

plus, tomorrow i will be giving a speech at our local linux day - and i have just started writing the presentation.

anyway, i found the wgig meeting really productive. in the end, and notwithstanding the opposition by many members, it was decided that "onlookers" would have been allowed in the room, mostly from the governments that had been loudly complaining about the "lack of openness" of the process the day before. however, we still reserved ourselves some closed "organizing time" to discuss our internal assignments of work - so we will be having "open plenary meetings" and "closed working plenary meetings".

however, onlookers were requested to keep the secrecy on personal statements as decided during the first day (and positively no media allowed) - and i then made the point that this system advantages those stakeholders who have permanent missions in geneva that can attend meetings physically, and disadvantages other stakeholders who would like to participate remotely. i think that if meetings are open, then they should be truly open - i.e., webcast and totally public. otherwise, they should be closed to everyone.

apart from this, most of the day went in discussing the structure of the report and especially finalizing plans to do the inventory of issues from which then we should pick the ones to be dealt with in depth. i would like this inventory to be complete, since it could be a good chance to put on the global governance agenda some issues that no one ever dared to discuss until now.

for example, why should operating system and application producers be allowed to automatically install "updates" (often, they are completely new versions of the software) on my pc without even letting me know, or letting me know what they do with my hardware and my network connection? microsoft's plans reportedly are that they should be able to check the licensing status of all the software you have installed and perhaps disable it remotely, and record majors were asking for the right to connect remotely to your hard disk, check whether you had what they held to be illegal music, and in this case delete it from your own pc. so, when i buy software and content, am i buying anything, or are the companies i pay acquiring ownership rights on my pc?

but apart from this, i volunteered (together with karen and other civil society people) to deal with the online presence of the wgig, both in terms of internal working methods (that is, a mailing list for the members, and possibly a wiki) and online consultations. i think that a wiki would conceptually be a great tool to develop a cooperative map of the governance issues at stake, but i still have to understand whether it would be simple enough for all wgig members to use.