i wish i could send more reports from here. however, today i couldn't even force myself to wake up at 7:15, and decided to skip the gnso public forum to sleep one hour more and have a shower. presently i'm on stage for the gnso council - webcast at
http://media.icann.org/ramgen/encoder/capetown.rm.

and it's not particularly nice to be one day late with birthday celebrations for your brother, since you cannot remember any more which day of the week and which day of the month it is today :(

anyway, i still owe you some notes about the wsis workshop we had here on wednesday.

the workshop went on quite smoothly, and was interesting enough. desai made a long speech particularly focused on the need for involvement of developing countries, and on the different approach they might have to the internet, much more government-led. an interesting panel of african people gave some local perspective, and eventually we had the usual row of statements by the various icann constituencies, including ours - i restated the need for icann to continue and conclude its evolution from a small homogeneous club for american businessmen to a truly global organization in culture and procedures.

the nice thing for me was being able to get to know a person which really impressed me: monsieur adama samassekou, former president of the prepcoms for the first phase of wsis, and now president of the african academy of languages. i hope that his interventions will be published.

also, i was positively struck by the speech given by the south-african minister of communications at the opening ceremony. basically, she insisted on the fact that icann has to change, and has to turn from a small club of the digitally connected to a broader and more diverse community, that takes care of the needs of the disconnected. it was interesting that, notwithstanding this, many people in the audience saluted the minister with a standing ovation - which makes me think that many here have understood that icann still has to change.

but coming back to the workshop, the only disturbing thing was that twice, while peter dengate thrush from .nz was speaking, and at the exact time when he was commending the "bottom-up nature" of this workshop, someone from the audience came up with a loud and totally artificial laughter.

i don't have any problem with criticism, but i think that there are proper ways to express it. especially, i note that certain ways of free expression which might be common in certain environments and cultures are very, very rude in others. not all the world is used to pointing fingers, shouting or ridiculizing each other in public, as a normal way of stating one's opinions. and there are cases where form matters.

anyway, given that there was not enough time to accommodate all comments, i asked vint (who accepted) to set aside one hour for general public discussion of the wsis and wgig processes during today's public forum, which should start at 16:30 (15:30 in Europe). i hope that some of you will be able to attend remotely, using icann's facilities - it would really prove that all our fuss about online remote participation actually makes sense.