Spoke to Janine earlier today. She is excited after the summit last week in NY. They found out that a) they need to be more proactive in developing “the solutiton” instead of waiting for the industry to come up with one; and b) they are glad to report that Mckinsey will become a full partner soon as they committed two full staff to the previous week and hired a web designer to work on the web site which they will probably end up hosting.
They are planning a meeting in DC in early December with a small group of experts to work on “the solution”. She was also interested in discussing the best way to reach stakeholders in developing countries for getting feedback on their work. I suggested email lists (of course!) instead of web-based solutions that are totally inaccesible and even unaffordable in most developing countries. We will probably end up having a cluster of mailing lists with a few moderators including UNDP. She is supposed to get back to us sometime next week.
She also mentioned the meetings with ICTD and UNCDF. She is working on a proposal for funding as was agreed with Denis et. al. (this I find disconcerting: we cannot fund one of the largest computer companies in the world!). But in any case we should quantify our current inputs at market rates to show real resource commitment.
Ra�l
