By Tuesday of the second week, much of the content is now pushed out to Ad Hoc drafting groups to negotiate issues in smaller groups, sometimes working until late at night.
Some of the less controversial proposals are getting their final approval, often with small or easily coordinated changes done on the run or during breaks with small groups of proposers collaborating quickly to put together agreed text. These approved documents are then passed to the Editorial Committee to be translated and prepared for their run back up through the Committees for approval and then finally, next week to the Plenary to get their final okay from the whole conference.
Those are the easy issues. The more difficult issues are mired in Ad Hoc groups, smaller informal groups or haven’t even been addressed yet. A good example of this is Resolution 130 “Strengthening the role of ITU in building confidence and security”. Many hours of work have already been dedicated to this document with a half-day session on Saturday and a further four hours last night until 10:30pm. This document will be revisited on Wednesday afternoon and is likely to require another session after that to reach a conclusion.
A proposal requesting the World Radio Conference 2015 to put the issue of satellite spectrum for flight tracking on its agenda has taken a great deal of time, but after a great deal of discussion that something should be done, seemed to have reached an agreement by the end of Tuesday. Exactly how this should be worded was another matter.
The discussion on resolutions related to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) began Tuesday and will continue on Wednesday. You can refer to the document links below to get a sense of what changes are proposed here. The real work on these resolutions will take place on Wednesday morning and are likely to take several sessions.
Tuesday was a big day for Women in ICT with the Gemtech awards. The Gender Equality and Mainstreaming is a series of special achievement awards for outstanding performers and role models in technology area.
You can read more about the awards and see the list of the Gemtech winners from this page. There was a gala dinner held in the evening for this program that was very well attended.
Meanwhile, a number of issues including the review of the ITRs and balancing the budget continue to simmer in the background.
The hardest work of the conference is still yet to come.
RESOLUTION 140: ITU’s role in implementing the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society
Documents:
RESOLUTION 172: Overall review of implementation of the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society
Documents:
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