International Relations News WSIS Forum 2009 WSIS Forum 2009
- 22/05/2009
The WSIS Forum 2009 was held on 18-22 May 2009, in Geneva. It was organised by the UIT – International Telecommunications Union, UNESCO – United Nations Organisation for Education, Science and Culture, UNCTAD – United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and the UNDP – United Nations Development Programme. This year, it replaced the series of thematic sessions usually held over a fortnight in May every year around the topic of Internet Governance, in the scope of the Tunis Agenda of the World Summit on the Information Society (see Portugal participates in the World Summit on the Information Society).
The Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) was represented at the WSIS Forum 2009 by UMIC’s Head of International Relations, Ana Cristina Neves.
A meeting was organised by the OECD on 19 May, at the behest of the UIT and UNCTAD – United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, entitled "Measuring the Impact of ICTs". This meeting was dedicated to the use of statistics in political decision-making, particularly as regards development policies. The OECD invited Portugal, via UMIC, to take part as a speaker to present its ideas on the current limitations that assessing ICT use raise in measuring the impact of ICT on the economy and society. Ana Cristina Neves acted as the UMIC speaker on this panel with the following intervention Measure ICT 4 development. This meeting was chaired by Torbjörn Fredriksson, Officer-in-Charge, ICT Analysis Section, UNCTAD. Other participants included Susan Teltscher, Head, Market Information and Statistics Division, ITU, Vincenzo Spiezia, Head, Information and Communication Technologies Unit, OECD and Mario Cimoli, Officer-in-Charge, Innovation and ICT Unit, Division of Production, Productivity and Management, UN-ECLAC.
UMIC mandated the MIT - Portugal Programme to take part at the WSIS Forum 2009, represented by Carlos Augusto Santos Silva, with particular focus on monitoring the following meetings:
- “The role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in fighting climate change”, where optimising energy consumption by equipment and infrastructures (mobile phones, televisions, computers, data centres) was examined. These infrastructures and equipment themselves represent a considerable chunk of global energy consumption (estimated at between 2% and 3%) and the use and mass inclusion of ICT in the transport and logistics sectors, buildings and energy distribution networks (smart-grids) so as to optimise energy consumption through these activities.
- “The role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in countries' economic, social and cultural development”, particularly the contribution of e-learning and e-governance to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), and the usefulness of Public-Private partnerships in these areas.