Welcome by Tracey Naughton who is the chair of this opening session. She is announced as a WSIS media critic and presents herself as a free lance development worker which specializes in communication from development.

Partha Pratim Sarker unfortunately could not be here tonight.

Geert Lovink:

Geert started with the introduction of the crew (Sabine and Mathijs, the runners, the blog team organised by Timi,…) There also is a team conducting interviews which is produced by Barbara De Preeter. These interviews will be put on DVD which will be available in mid September on the press conference and distributed from Amsterdam. The conference will be streamed live. There also is a live stream.
Incommunicado is an organisation by the Institute of Networkcultures, which is part of Hogeschool Amsterdam. The partners are Waag Sociey and Sarai from New Delhi.

The pre-history of the conference goes back to 2000 when Sarai centre was founded. The collaboration with Sarai is an ongoing exchange between institutions. The conference came into being out of this dialogue and thanks to the inspiration from working together with Sarai who have a big expertise in Development and new technologies.
This dialogue between classic development studies, the critique of development and new engagement in new media and ICT is the core of incommunicado project and this conference. How are these critical discourses being developed?

The aim is a stimulation of critical thinking. Main motivation was lack of this at WSIS and Incommunicado is a result of the discontent about this.

Soenkhe Zehle:

Why incommunicado.info?

.info is pointing to what it means to do research from an “open acces” angle.
Incommunicado: refers to the anger about the ways thigs are. It is about infodevelopment. Incommunicado describes a state of being, of incommunication. It also describes a space. A space for critique starting from a new vocabulary. It is a non-space, non-political. What do we want to do with this space. To pull it out of the atmosphere of an academic conference. The ethics of hospitality is central.