Tuesday Dialogues

Well, Good Afternoon - Good Morning to all those back home.

I'm sending this in while waiting for the main session to start. It looks like it will be pretty interesting. Has anyone been in a session that was even half-full? It doesn't seem like there are all that many people here - oh well, at least we're here.

I attended the session "Coalition Dynamique pour la Diversité Linguistique" (Dynamic Coalition for Linguistic Diversity). Tatiana Ershova (Institute of the Information Society, Moscow, Russia) presented "Aspects multipartenarials et multilinguistiques de la gouvernance de l'Internet" or Multilingual Aspects of Internet Governance - the presentation that I found most interesting and robust out of all the presentations in this session.

Ms. Ershova covered some of the challenges that face us as we try to make the Internet truly multilingual. The number of non-english speaking Internet users has grown to 470 million since the 1990's which has highlighted the limited amount of non-english resources online - and spurred the need to take a really serious look at multilingual issues and possible solutions.

One area of the presentation pointed out that online communication is dependent on the ability and literacy to access information. This is something that I work with everyday in my community, and it's something that I find is overlooked far too often in greater society. For example, INAC (Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, FYI) touts their website where aboriginal peoples could access for information on various issues, programs, etc. Okay. Great.

Except.

Except there are not all that many people in my home community with Internet access.
Except that a lot of people in my home community don't have the technical literacy skill to access this information.
Except for the fact that the people who do have access are necessarily the people who make decisions or even care about the issues.

Huh. Great website though. Just - where is the training to enable people to attain the technical literacy skills to enable them to participate? Where's the Universal Access?

What really grabbed my attention was when she presented on the need for a lingua franca for the Internet. We do need one to ease communications between peoples - but this may result in more language "deaths" - especially indigenous languages. BUT, we can use the internet and related resources to preserve these languages - but do we need a lingua franca to communicate to do so? Kind of a tail-chasing argument.

Will type my fingers off later. Am in session now.