Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at UN
www.innercitypress.com/unop1i2i060809.html
UNITED NATIONS, June 8 -- There is a two day event held in the UN's basement for which $1850 is being charged. It is called Incentive2Innovate. At the UN's June 8 noon media briefing, UN Associate Spokesman Farhan Haq plugged the event, implying it was about how to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Video here, from Minute 12:01.
Inner City Press asked why it costs $1850, and where the money goes. Faq said he wasn't aware of the charge. Video here, from Minute 18:54. But it is right on the online registration form, click here.
To learn more, Inner City Press went down to the basement and stood in the back while a panel of five, including Marthin de Beer from Cisco and Filippo Passerini from Procter & Gamble, Arianna Huffington and a gold miner spoke, in essence, about how to make more money.
In the brochure, they call it "revenue generation." There is scant mention of any of the MDGs, unlike in the UN News Services' plug for the conference under the Millennium Development Goals rubric. In the Updated Conference Program, the only Millennium of any kind mentioned is the Millennium Plaza Hotel, where breakfast will be served on June 9. One wag said, it better be caviar."
Again the question: why is this being held at the UN? As one wag put it, they are people seeking to make more money -- but it is at the UN, it has the veneer of public spiritedness. Keynote speaker and Wikinomist Don Tapscott, after screening two television ads for Doritos corn chips, praised a financial services firm, VenCorps, in which to his credit he disclosed he has a stake.
The only UN department that links to the event is the UN Office of Partnerships, set up with money from another innovator, Ted Turner. Its one page in the inches of material given out or sold at the conference quotes Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that in "addressing global challenges... through partnerships... we increase our chances of success."
But will the UN partner with just anyone? What other than $1850 are the criteria? Other companies listed in the brochure range from WellPoint to the BT Group, insurance companies to Google, which is sponsoring a prize for a team that lands a robot on the moon. It's part of the X-Prize Foundation, a sponsor of the event.
They call it, "the confererence you cannot afford to miss this year!". But for most, they can't afford the $1850 conference at all.
While Don Tapscott took some questions, he only called on those sitting in the front of Conference Room 2, with name plates in front of them. Perhaps that was part of the $1850 charge -- the name plate, and the ability to ask questions.
Perhaps a more productive question, with these executives in the House, would be how these innovative "Web 2.0 ideas" might be applied to the UN itself, or at least to the Security Council, where for example the Permanent Five members along with Japan and South Korea have for two weeks like dinosaurs been negotiating a response to North Korea's second underground test of nuclear bomb.
On June 5, Inner City Press obtained and put online the most recent draft resolution, for all the world to see. This seemed very Web 2.0. Since then, Inner City Press has received push back from various quarters. Certain Western P-5 Permanent Representatives are described as being incensed, starting a witch hunt to find who, from what Mission to the UN, leaked the draft to the Press.
Even one non-Permanent Five member of the Council opined what it would have been better, as he said, to described the draft without actually uploading it. He considered this too graphic.
Might one call it diplomatic pornography? But why as an Internet publication would one describe a document without putting it online, as PDF or otherwise? "By now, you'll be believed that you have it if you say you have it," the Ambassador said. But still: why not put it online?
A Permanent Five Ambassador explained that once the actual draft is out, it is hard for the negotiating countries to go backwards. So "you are slowing things down," was the accusation. But that can't be the Press' criterion to publish or upload such a document.
And see, www.innercitypress.com/unop1i2i060809.html
