Preparations for UN information summit continue in Geneva

The third in a series of United Nations-backed preparatory conferences laying the groundwork for the first-ever global summit on communication technology opened today to continue work on an international action plan to close the gap between the information "haves" and "have nots."

Some 1,500 delegates from UN Member States, intergovernmental organizations, civil society, the private sector and the media are expected to attend the preparatory committee meeting for the two-phase World Summit on the Information Society - to be held in Geneva from 10 to 12 December and in Tunisia in 2005.

Delegations will continue work on a draft Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action in order to harness the power of information and communication technologies as a tool for development and to create an information society that benefits all of humanity. Those two texts will be submitted for the approval of Heads of State attending the Summit in December.

Issues under discussion during the preparatory process and at the Summit include global cyber-security, spam, universal and affordable access to new technologies, open source software, and information and communication technologies applications for e-health, e-learning, e-business, e-employment, e-environment and e-government.

Meanwhile, delegations at the fifth meeting of the UN Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Task Force recognized that education is key to achieving development, and endorsed its Global e-School and Community Initiative, aimed at bringing ICT solutions to secondary schools, as well as communities in the developing world.

The UN's key task force on technology and development ended its two-day session on Saturday at the Geneva headquarters of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Sarbuland Khan, the head of the Task Force secretariat, said "education unlocks the door to development, and is a prerequisite for achieving the other Millennium Development Goals."