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Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Staying in Berlin

So I stayed with the extremely generous Ralf, who runs this: http://www.worldsummit2005.de/en/nav/14.htm

Also there was Rik Panganiban, from CONGO (Conference of NGOs) in New York - talks a lot of sense and really gets civil society moving. he recognises the need for ever-greater inclusion, but also for substantive and procedural changes to make civil society punch above its weight in UN processes.

Good dinner Friday night with Markus Kummer - for the sake of completeness, I'll say that many WGIGs were there: Markus Kummer, Art O'Reilly, Peter from Siemens, Aysha from IIC, Vittorio Bertola, Avril, Bill Drake and his terrifically grounded wife and hangers-on including me, Bertrand de la Chapelle, Jeanette Hoffman (who runs the IG caucus). There was lots of Rubix cube matrixing going on, and lots of spam talk at my end of the table.

Friday and then Saturday over a beer at Heathrow met Denis Gilhooly - we're old friends from various places including Harvard 99-00, and we put the world to rights once more. Denis has stayed creative and relatively sane despite the lunacy of the process - he's one of the very few original thinkers, as well as shaking and moving!

Hope to see them all in Dublin! It was slightly sad not being able to stay more involved in the future - but my future is with Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and China - substantively about telecom regulation, the heavy lifting.

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