Recently I orga­nized the Brazil­ian del­e­ga­tion’s par­tic­i­pa­tion at the 6^th World Forum on e-Democracy, an event held by the French “high-tech Mayor” Andre San­tini, at Issy-Les-Moulineaux, near Paris.

Dur­ing the event, Monique Ciprut of Les Echos quoted me regard­ing the role of blogs in Brazil (pdf ver­sion note: copy­right Les Echos). We spoke about the impor­tance of par­tic­i­pa­tory jour­nal­ism in a democ­racy and how blog­gers in Brazil were con­tribut­ing to open up the debate. In par­tic­u­lar, she picked up my ref­er­ence to the pop­u­lar blog by the right-wing politi­cian Cesar Maia, who has been openly crit­i­cal of the Lula admin­is­tra­tion. How­ever, the blog has been ‘too” pop­u­lar and was recently dis­con­tin­ued (on 30÷9÷2005) because it took too much of Maia’s “men­tal time,” even though he had three assis­tants, each less than 25 years old. I expressed reser­va­tions about how open the con­ver­sa­tion can be in coun­tries were inter­net pen­e­tra­tion was rel­a­tively low, were there were high lev­els of illit­er­acy, and where access to com­put­ers and the inter­net were reserved to the mid­dle class and above. I believe the gov­ern­ment has an impor­tant role in pro­vid­ing con­di­tions for greater inter­net access, in pro­vid­ing lower-priced com­put­ers and in financ­ing local munic­i­pal­i­ties to sup­port them in e-government initiatives. 

The Brazil­ian del­e­ga­tion, pic­tured left included Min­is­ter Car­los Vel­loso, Pres­i­dent of Brazil’s Supe­rior Elec­toral Tri­bunal and in charge of the country’s elec­tions, Ana Cristina Hof­mann, Pres­i­dent of Petropolis-Tecnopolis and co-chair of the W2i (Wire­less Inter­net Insti­tute) Dig­i­tal Cities Con­ven­tion in Europe, held at the begin­ning of Novem­ber 2005 in Bil­bao, and Vagner Diniz, Pres­i­dent of Insti­tuto Conip and active pro­po­nent of mobile gov­ern­ment (m-gov) in Brazil.

Spe­cial thanks to my part­ner on this project, Philippe Luce, Founder of Agora-Consultants. Thanks also to Yann Mauchamp, France Coun­try Man­ager, OpenBC, who first saw the Les Echos arti­cle. Update: Thanks also to Jus­sara Nunes, Brazil­ian blog­ger in France, who lent us an impor­tant hand. We were glad to have you with us!

For more on the sig­nif­i­cance of the par­tic­i­pa­tory, read-write web (Web 2.0), see Al Gore’s speech at the We Media Con­fer­ence a cou­ple of days ago in New York.

“We
must ensure that the Inter­net remains open and acces­si­ble to all
cit­i­zens with­out any lim­i­ta­tion on the abil­ity of indi­vid­u­als to choose
the con­tent they wish regard­less of the Inter­net ser­vice provider they
use to con­nect to the World­wide Web.”

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