With accordance to The UN General Assembly Resolution 56/183, the Second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society£¬which is organized by the International Telecommunication Union with the purpose of developing plans for the coordinated development of information society and realizing the UN Millennium Development Goals and going beyond digital divide by using information and communication technologies, took place in Tunis from 16 to 18 November 2005, hosted by the Government of Tunisia (Background Material) .The international community attached great importance to and put high expectations on the Tunisia phase which leaders of more than 70 countries, including Vice Premier of the State Council, People¡¯s Republic of China, Huang Ju, and about 2,000 delegates of governments, businesses and non-governmental organizations attended. The summit was composed of one organizational meeting (Video), one opening (Video), 8 penalty debates (Video), some roundtables, and some panels. (Agenda of the Summit)
The Tunisia meeting is the second phase of WSIS, focused on discussing issues of promoting development through constructing the information society (Theme List and relevant discussions). The summit is to ensure that the benefits of information and communication technologies are accessible to all while promoting specific advantages in areas such as e-strategies, e-commerce, e-governance, e-health, education, literacy, cultural diversity, gender equality, sustainable development and environmental protection. Vice Primer of the state Council of the People¡¯s Republic of China, Huang Ju delivered an important speech at the Summit to comprehensively expound the Chinese government's proposition on pushing forward the construction of information society.
President of the Republic of Tunisia, Ben Ali, made a passionate statement. He emphasized the importance of building the knowledge and communication society in order to guarantee a better future for all humanity and expressed his hope that the Tunis Summit would constitute a propitious opportunity to find adequate solutions to the issues pertaining to information and communication. He showed his belief that building an information society guaranteeing the individual right of access to information and ensuring the free flow of information and knowledge, without restrictions or constraints, it¡¯s necessary to set universal ethical standards that will stand as a rampart protecting our societies against negative uses of modern communication means. (Statement)
Mr Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the UN, delivered a statement on Nov16, 2005, calling for more international participation in the procedure of constructing information society and generating new momentum towards developing the economies and societies of poor countries, and transforming the lives of poor people. He pointed out that it¡¯s time to move beyond broad discussions of the digital divide and get down to the specifics of implementation. Mr Kofi Annan stated that information and communications technologies must be used in new ways, which would bring new benefits to all social classes, to create a society where people are all free to create, use, utilize and share knowledge globally. He made a promise on the behalf of United Nation to continue to work hard to build capacity, and to use information technologies to boost all efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. (Statement)
Huang JU, Vice Primer of the state Council of the People¡¯s Republic of China, also delivered an excellent statement on Nov 17, 2005. His statement focused on accelerating the building of the global information society and ushering a better future for mankind¡¯s information society. He stated the great faith the Chinese Government placed in building the information society. Primer Huang¡¯s statement was highly praised by the Excellencies. (Statement)
Other Excellencies including Switzerland President Mr. Samuel Schmid, and International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Secretary General Mr. Yoshio Utsumi also made wonderful statements, expressing their wish to go beyond the digital divide using information and communications technologies. (List of speakers and their statements)
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the host country, Tunisia, provided premises to hold a number of parallel events, alongside the Summit and in the same premises. These parallel events included meetings, panels, discussions, workshops, an exhibition, and events of global nature relevant to the Summit theme.£¨Parallel events list£©
Parallel events took place in the Kram Centre and were organized by all governments and accredited entities, between 14 and 19 November 2005. Parallel panel entitled ¡°Widening access to knowledge through open sharing: the growing OpenCourseWare Movement.¡± was held on Nov 14, 15:00_19:00 in Saint Augustin Conference Room Kram Expo Centre. It was co-organized by United Nations University, MIT OpenCourseWare, WSIS Education, Academia and Research Thematic Caucus, and UNU online learning/media studio. There were 3 settings of the context: the world of open education resources, the growing international OpenCourseWare movement, benefits and challenges to using and adapting OpenCourseWare materials.
Chunyan Wang, Representative for CORE (China Open Resources for Education), professor of Renmin University of China, school of Law, delivered a report with the focus of CORE OCW and the challenges it¡¯s encountering in the discussion of benefits and challenges to using and adapting OpenCourseWare materials. Prof. Wang introduced comprehensively the model of CORE OCW in details and illustrated the great accomplishments of CORE since its establishment two years ago, using a large amount of statistics. She also discussed the challenges OCW movement was facing in the wave of information society. The great accomplishment of CORE attracted all the attendees. They highly praised the endeavors CORE made in sharing the education resources in China and ushering international cultural communication. And they expressed their will to help CORE fulfill its mission.
This profound report also gave important information that when the idea of OCW was transmitted to other countries from the US, CORE played a leading role in the organizations or institutes who immediately devoted themselves to OCW movement. Several reporters illustrated the development of OCW with the example of CORE in the discussion. For example, Marshall Smith, director of education program, Hewlett foundation in the US, showed the accomplishment of organizations promoting OCW in the field of culture and language, with CORE as one of the examples. Prof. Miyagawa from MIT especially mentioned the lead universities of CORE and the efforts CORE made in translating the content of MIT OCW into Chinese. Ms Karen Lynch from Development Gateway Foundation mentioned the cooperation between CORE and her foundation in special.
Attendees of other parallel events of the summit also showed their interest of CORE. The dissemination of introducing material for CORE was also warmly welcomed.
On Nov 18, World Summit on Information Society came to its perfect end, passing 2 important documents: Tunis commitment and Tunis Agenda for the Information Society. The two documents showed that although there was still diverges on issues of information society, we got significant agreements on issues about digital divide and the governance of internet and some other issues. The results of the meeting will exert an in-depth impact on realizing the UN Millennium Development Goals and the sustainable economic and social progress of countries in the world, and encourage the whole world working together to usher in a better future for mankind¡¯s information society.
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