Soca Broadway vs the residents of Woodbrook (or are they?)

Martin Dalye writes in the Trinidad Express:

"Take the Port of Spain Corporation. At a time when State discipline is meted out to Phase II, the Corporation is silent about the undisciplined operations of the nearby fete venue in the grounds adjacent to the National Stadium. These stadium grounds are totally unsuitable as a fete venue. They are adjacent to a major highway, which has intersections all around the stadium. The grounds are not properly fenced but the fete promoter is so favoured that the fence is actually being re-arranged to suit the temporary and unsuitable purpose for which the grounds are being used. There is a risk that revellers can gain entrance to the stadium

Every weekend is a horrific experience for the residents of Woodbrook -blasting noise until 4 or 5 a.m. and the disturbances created by revellers on their way home. One resident complained in a radio interview that at 6.45 a.m. on a Sunday he could not get his car out of his yard. His driveway, like all others in the area, was blocked by an indiscreetly parked vehicle. Ironically, he was trying to go to church and was cursed by drunks."

So - Martin Daly thinks that being next to a highway is a NEGATIVE for an entertainment venue? Duh!
One of the major problems with the entertainment venues in T&T to date has been lack of proper road access, lack of proper parking facilities, and a basic inability to get into or out of of the event for nearly 2 hours on each end, making a simple concert a whole-night affair.

The Woodbrook residents who complain (I am not one) abotu the noise must have bat-like hearing, because on most nights I do not hear a thing from that venue. I've heard it from the mariott hotel, but not from the Woodbrook side at all.
Also - most of us are cool with the venue - the "Woodbrook residents" who are marching and complainign are very few. We need to get hte rest of us marching in favor of Soca Broadway! How come Mr. Daly doesn't complain about the noise from the Little Carib that I hear every night? Or the pounding of the Invaders pan until the wee hours of the morning?
Is it that he likes pan so that's OK, but he don't like fetes?

Comeptition my a**!

As we get competition in cable, the one monopoly cable company gets taken over by the competition. So - not much competition there, eh? And then IMMEDIATELY my cable goes down. I get home from work at 9pm, and call. Customer service used to work until 10pm. And when they weren't there, the system took a message and they called me back.
Oh no! Not now - "The mailbox is full" GOODBYE! and the system hangs up! A full HOUR before customer service was supposed to close. WTH?
I now have to call from work, and then trustr they fixed it or run home in the middle of the day to ensure that my cable is working - and I came home early today to see Law and Order.
This is CRAP!

Caricom places focus on ICT development

Article from the Jamaica Observer re Jennifer Britton's speech at the UWI campus in Mona - she's talking about CARICOM's moves towards greater implementation of ICT in the region. She's very passionate - hope that the lack of funding and general lack of interest in the corridors of power in the Caribbean don't hold back this very very important activity!
Also - it was very cool that she acknowledged the efforts of the civil society in the region and expressed support for the multistakeholder appproach that was successfully implemented in the WGIG and moderately successful in the WSIS

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/html/20060101T210000-0500_95768_OBS_CARICOM_PLACES

_FOCUS_ON_ICT_DEVELOPMENT_.asp

Caricom places focus on ICT development

Observer Reporter

Monday, January 02, 2006

CARICOM is placing increased focus on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) as a critical part of human and social development in the region, and as such, has placed the ICT development agenda and its myriad of activities, directly under the portfolio of the deputy secretary-general. DUNN... second follow-up meeting will be held in February or March

According to senior project officer for ICT Development at Caricom, Jennifer Britton this move "of course gives the ICT for Development movement the profile and positioning it needs in the region to get all the work that is necessary done".

Britton was speaking at a recent post- Tunis public policy seminar on the outcomes and follow-up to the second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), held on the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI).

Britton, in presenting a synopsis of the Secretariat's efforts towards ICT for development and the implementation of the plan of action coming out of the WSIS Summit, which was held in the North African state of Tunisia from November 16 to 18, informed further, that an ICT for Development Unit had been established in the Secretariat.

"We formed the Caricom ICT steering committee in January, which is supposed to act as an advisory guiding body for all the activities in the region. The first meeting will be May 2006," she said.

She also noted that because of the cross-cutting nature of ICT for Development, it had been placed more comprehensively on the work programmes of the major units in the Secretariat, which include: Human and Social Development, Regional Trade and Economic Intelligence, and the Office of the Secretary-General.

"We are in the process of creating a Caricom ICT for Development website, which we hope will help us do a lot of the coordinating that we need to do at the Secretariat level, in terms of contacts and getting feed-back from stakeholders. We have started work with regard to the development of a regional ICT strategic plan," Britton told the gathering.

She pointed out that the seminar gave the Caricom Secretariat some guidelines to assist the other member states in jump-starting their own activities towards the implementation of the WSIS Plan of Action.

In October 2004, the Secretariat was mandated by the ICT ministers to coordinate all the ICT activities in the region and to implement, at the Secretariat level, the WSIS Plan of Action across the region.

"This is new ground for the Secretariat. We have spent the last year devising ways and means as to how we would go about implementing the plan of action in conjunction with the member states," the senior project officer said.
Pointing to challenges that faced the region's communications sector and which needed to be given immediate focus, she mentioned human capacity development, legal issues surrounding ICT for development, the telecoms regime, broadband access, e-government and e-governance, disaster management, Internet governance, financing, and the maintenance of the region's cultural identity.
"increasing coordination to reduce duplication of effort across the region.

"That is a tremendous challenge, and we hope that continuous meetings and feedback and reporting will assist with regard to coordination of effort across the region," she said.

Britton further pointed to the need to mobilise the private sector and civil society. "We need to pay particular attention to civil society
involvement. Civil society has taken on a life of its own and it is in fact driving a lot of the issues that have to deal with the World Summit and the Information Society and ICT for Development, so we need to find creative, all encompassing methods and mechanisms for embracing and utilising the skills resident in civil society," she said.
"If we don't bring those people on board, (education, social workers, etc), we will perhaps miss the boat with regard to both the development and implementation of the WSIS plan of action and the Millennium Development Goals," she added.

She urged all stakeholders to work together to meet the challenges presented by the WSIS plan of action and the Millennium Development Goals. "I'd therefore like to renew the challenge to all of us to commit to continue the work started here today," she said.

The objective of the forum was to identify specific policy initiatives locally and regionally that could be pursued to the benefit of national and regional institutions.

Director, Telecommunications Policy and Management Programme, Dr Hopeton Dunn who chaired the event, indicated that a second follow-up meeting would be held in February or March, following consultations with the Central Information Technology Office.

The WSIS was a two-part United Nations (UN) conference managed by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) aimed at developing a global framework to tackle the challenges presented by the Information Society. The first world summit took place in Geneva, from December 10 to 12, 2003.
The objectives of the WSIS Plan of Action are to build an inclusive Information Society; to put the potential of knowledge and ICTs at the service of development; to promote the use of information and knowledge for the achievement of internationally agreed development goals, including those contained in the Millennium Declaration; and to address new challenges of the information society, at the national, regional and international levels.

Linking T&T to the World Jacqueline Morris - Linking T&T to the world - Trinidad Express Article

Jacqueline Morris - Linking T&T to the world
I was profiled in the local newspaper as a result of getting involved in ICANN. That's good, casue it raises the pro9file and interet level in ICANN and INternet Governance issues in the CAribbean. I hope that we can do more to get local Caribbean participation in the global governance forums. That's important - to be able to have a say in the decisions being made about the Internet, and how it's going to be run. As the Internet is going to be vital to the economies of small island states, it's VITAL that we participate. To date we haven't done much. Lets hope this is starting to change.
If you're interested in the activity, check out www.icann.org

The Ghosts of Internet Time

This came from David Farber's list - -it's a very interesting piece. Originallly written 6 years ago, it still resonates. Especially the bit about Internet Present and Future... we haven't moved from that mind space yet.
Jacqueline

http://www.praxagora.com/andyo/wr/ghost.html

Are digital natives analog immigrants?

Interesting.
First, the digital natives are really children born after 1990 or thereabouts... that's really young. So this major problem will not show its real face until 2010 or 2020. But then that's quite close really.
But then, will it be too late? Or should we even bother? Maybe in the world we are moving to we won't need long focus to survive, and we are adapting to a fit in a world in which multitasking is the vital skill, and those who can't will lose out.
Jacqueline

A growing body of literature argues that, in Steven Jones' words, EVERYTHING
BAD IS GOOD FOR US. Television is good for us: makes us smarter. James Paul
Gee studies WHAT VIDEO GAMES HAVE TO TEACH US ABOUT LEARNING AND LITERACY,
and concludes that they have a lot to teach us.
And yet...
And yet there is the possibility that the ability of college graduates to
read complex materials is declining sharply. Or so says the recent National
Assessment of Adult Literacy.
If the Assessment's findings hold up, the remaining question is, of course:
Is the ability to read complex texts important in the 21st century? And if
it is, are the digital natives well equipped for survival, much less
leadership, in the 21st century?
One popular and increasingly influential retailer of the thesis that the new
generation of cell phone and iPod and computer communicators is a new breed
of human with facilities adapted to work and citizenship in the 21st century
is Mark Prensky

"Multitasking" means to Prensky the ability to IM with friends while
attending to a college lecture or reading a book. Or getting all that a
television documentary has to offer while attending to the captions
scrolling below.
College faculty throughout the US, and perhaps elsewhere where the new media
are ubiquitous, will testify to the difficulty the digital natives have with
the printed word. They resist reading even moderately difficult texts, and
often refuse to buy textbooks, sometimes acknowledging that the words on the
pages make little or no sense to them.
The digital natives may be analog immigrants
If this is so, if there are several grains of truth here, what should our
colleges and universities do about the New Illiteracy?
Two possibilities quickly suggest themselves.
The first: acknowledge that print literacy is dissolving and eroding and
morphing into something else, and convert instruction and instructional
media to that something else.
The second: acknowledge that print literacy is the central literacy needed
by those who function in the 21st century, and turn the attention of our
best minds to the problem of how to save and enhance it.

UNICT TaskForce book on WGIG available online

"Reforming Internet Governance: Perspectives from the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG)", edited by Bill Drake, with chapters from many WGIG members/list members is now online.
http://www.unicttaskforce.org/perl/documents.pl?id=1572
The WGIG-ians have published a book on IG from our perspective. It's quite good, even the bit I wrote.
Check it out.