My experience with two UN forums within the past week seems to indicate that we have some work to do before we can totally rely on conference technology in large venues. In both cases, one at an Internet governance conference in India and one at an e-government conference in Egypt, person to person technology worked fine. I was able to use Skype and WebEx to talk and work with the other conference speakers, but in both cases, getting the signal from a laptop to the AV system in the conference rooms was not possible. In both cases my presentation was able to go forward (in one case with a colleague narrating my power point slides and in the other case by using a podcast I sent ahead of time).

One very good thing that has come from the meetings is the creation of a new "Dynamic Coalition" associated with the UN Internet Governance Forum that will push for online dispute resolution as governance of the Internet develops.

We (InternetBar.Org) just found out from Kurt Shaw, the Director Ejecutivo of Shine A Light (www.shinealight.org), that the young people we are working with in Brazil to produce one of the first PeaceTones collections has just won the Freedom to Create award, naming them the best young artists in the world working for human rights. This is very exciting, particularly since, as Kurt said, "two years ago these kids were begging for change at stop lights." Now all we have to do is get their music up on PeaceTones for distribution.