There was a press conference yesterday afternoon at the World Computer Congress to announce the new IFIP-UNESCO Declaration on Youth and ICTs. It is built upon earlier declarations that came from youth at earlier UNESCO forums. UNESCO is looking to bring it forward to the WSIS process to ensure that the interests of youth are included. In order to bring greater media attention to this issue, Justin Trudeau agreed to participate in the press conference and today's day-long IFIP-UNESCO session at the conference. It's wonderful that he has agreed to add his media-leveraging ability to this issue in Canada. As a high school teacher, he is very concerned about the apparent decreasing interest in technical subjects in this country and around the world.

I had a great series of meeting yesterday here at the World Computer Congress with people from IFIP, CIPS, and UNESCO. A couple of things I have to do in the next week to follow up:

* Write a short proposal to go forward between TIG, IISD, CIPS, and (probably) Netcorps and UNESCO CDN Commission to have a youth pre-conference to the CIPS annual meeting in PEI in May 2003. The theme of the pre-conference would be "The Role of Young Canadians in Building Knowledge Societies". Very excited about this. I'm aiming for funds to bring about 100 young Canadians to this.
* Develop a MOU for the YCDO coalition of organizations. I met with Boyan from InfoYouth at UNESCO yesterday afternoon and we had a meeting of the minds on the need to bring together a coalition of organizations supporting young people's leadership in ICTs for Development. It's time we start working better together. He may have funds to bring these organizations together for a planning meeting. He favours sooner rather than later. I may see if we can schedule it in Montreal prior to the Global Community Networking Congress in October since Rinalia is already coming up from Malaysia for that one.

In other news, the press conference went very well yesterday afternoon on youth and ICTs. There is an article this morning on Justin Trudeau's involvement and some nice quotes from Boyan. I'll post it in a public update shortly.

Over the last few weeks, a story has been bubbling to the top of the news in the Canadian prairies... Apparently, the only North American manufacturer of lids for home canning has decided to stop making them. They claim there wasn't enough demand to make it cost effective to create the little metal disks. What they seem to have forgotten is that there are many people in rural areas who rely on their ability to grow and can their own food to eat through the winter. Many people aren't wealthy. Canning gives them access to safe, nutrious, inexpensive foods. And, it's WAY more environmentally friendly than buying commercially canned foods in which you throw away the packaging after one use. Grrr.... Anyone want to start a small manufacturing business?

I've always been a bit of a theology and philosophy junky. Call me crazy, but when taught well, those sorts of classes push people to think about how they believe the universe functions and whether there is a meaning to life.

So... I was kind of happy to see that the Lilly Foundation has pumped out 57.3 million in grants to 49 seminaries to design programs for high school youth. I do get twitchy, though.... it's way easier to teach theology badly than it is to teach it well. Bad programs are easy to recognize - they try to convince people that there is only one answer, to hide the fact that religion and theology constantly evolve, and that politics and belief are frequently intertwined.

Then again... maybe I'm just one of the "edgier students who have very serious theological issues, such as whether the Scriptures are historically true" mentioned in the article.

Ew! I just fished a dead fruit fly outta a cup of cold coffee on my desk so I could drink it! Caffeine addictions are nasty evil things.... Gotta break this habit soon.