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I just ran into Pavel Antonov from APC-member organisation BlueLink in Bulgaria. He just flew into Athens from Riga where he was giving a training to leading Latvian state-TV and national newspaper journalists in how to report on sustainable energy. Pavel is the chair of a workshop here at the IGF in Athens. It’s called “Greening Development through ICT and Civic Engagement” and includes a brochette of five speakers. One them is Julian Casasbuenas, the director of APC-member in Colombia, Colnodo.
I just ran into Pavel Antonov from APC-member organisation BlueLink in Bulgaria. He just flew into Athens from Riga where he was giving a training to leading Latvian state-TV and national newspaper journalists in how to report on sustainable energy. Entitled "journalism training for journalists covering sustainable energy", this three-day activity can be visited on http://media.rec.org. Pavel is all fired-up about that training and would like to get an additional one going in Riga. "I think it was my best training so far. I got so much interest that I had to make a selection and had to leave really good candidates out," he explained.
Pavel is the chair of a workshop here at the IGF in Athens. It’s called "Greening Development through ICT and Civic Engagement" and includes a brochette of five speakers. One them is Julian Casasbuenas, the director of APC-member in Colombia, Colnodo. Julian, whom I happen to share my room with, will talk about a practical application of the internet for a social and environmental purpose. He’ll most probably expand on SISBIM, a municipal information system that his dedicated team at NGO Colnodo have been investing time in for the last couple of months. SISBIM and it’s Corpoguavio monitoring project is notably innovative in the way it gives thousands of Colombians a chance to track their municipality’s environmental record over the last years. It’s all about accountability. But for that, you need expertise and technique. Colnodo makes use of a fine piece of free and open source software called MAPAS and which is used to get an overview of a regions’ different environmental characteristics. More on that tomorrow, when Pavel’s workshop gets underway.
That workshop also includes Hans Mansell (UNECE ICT group for developement), Michael Stanley-Jones (Aarhus convention sevretariat), Heather Creech (IISD) and Misi Bako of APC-member StrawberryNet. Misi will talk about the support of environmental defense groups in Romania and specifically, those opposed to the Rosia Montana gold mine project. He will insist on the usefulness of providing strong and consistent technical support to community groups in order for them to play on a level-playing field with orporations and governments when talking environment. Shazhad Amhad from APC-member BytesforAll was supposed to also take part in this workshop but he was denied a visa.
Totally unrelated to the above, Pavel also mentioned this article by Victoria Shannon in today’s International Herald Tribune that might help you understand certain issues around language in domain names. Although a little one-sided in my opinion, "‘Gambits’ are a risk to Internet domain system" amplifies the voice of ICANN head Vinton Cerf (who also happens to be some higher-up guru in the Google empire…). It’s definitely an article worth checking out.
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