PacINET 2006 Day 2

Yesterday evening's CROP-ICT meeting was perhaps the best attended in recent times. There is some talk about the direction this should take. Currently it is policy only. What I think it needs is some teeth to bite. The evening function was good with many merrily indulging in the local brew, and the obligatory unco-ordinated dancing (or attempts to dance), yours truly included. I also made the front page of the local newspaper with a picture of me and the Samoan PM (in full colour!) with the headline: "Bridging the Digital Divide". Hmmm.........

Today we had a parallel session with the mapserver maniacs being shut in a room with Franck.....scary :) The main session was themed around e-Pacific. Don's presentation of a day in the life of an ICT enabled Pacific village was interesting as usual, but I wonder when we will see that day. I hope it is in the very near future. Other presentations covered what was happening with various projects in the Pacific as well as Prof. Saga with his presentation on Japan's policies and activities on ICT and linkage to the Pacific Islands. Unfortunately Don had to leave the conference due to a family emergency. We will miss his input (as well as the several sessions he was involved with). The afternoon session saw the Utilities roundtable and it was great to have Phill Hardstaff back this year. This was followed by an interesting presentation from Katherine O'Callaghan on incident management. This is part of her PhD thesis and apparently PacINET 2006 was the first time it had been introduced outside of her research group. It was good to see some academics turn up this year and I hope this grows. The CROP ICT working group continued in the evening, but I had to go pick Vint Cerf.