Focus on WSIS Forum 2018

This year’s World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum was held on the 19-23rd of March 2018 in Geneva, Switzerland under the theme “Leveraging ICTs to Build Information and Knowledge Societies for Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”.

While each WSIS Forum is different, each edition is preceded by the Open Consultation Process that enable members to come up with an agenda. The final WSIS meetings is comprised of, Best Practices, WSIS Prizes, Special Tracks and High level panels.

In 2018, the WSIS debate focused on how to achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs) through embracing latest technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data.

The discussion also focused on the impact of automation jobs (with AI in the lead threat) and how stakeholders can use new technologies to generate new economies, skillsets and jobs. The full summary report can be read here.

WSIS 2018 Outcomes

The full summaries to the High-Level Policy Sessions, High-Level Dialogues and Interactive Action Line Facilitation Meetings have already been published. These are some of the agriculture related events,

• #HackAgainstHunger.- The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and Impact Hub Geneva organized a Hackathon called, #HackAgainstHunger which saw more than 75 coders, food and agriculture experts and innovators to develop new ICT solutions to end world hunger. The hackathons aimed to promote competitions and projects to develop/prototype innovative applications and support the arising of start-ups and young developers and entrepreneurs.Read more here and here
• Action Line C7: E-Agriculture (FAO Event) - FAO also held a special session entitled, "Building a framework for Digital Innovation in Agriculture" which was a panel discussion with remote participation on ICTs and Agriculture. The focus of this discussion was how the ICTs can help in the challenge to feed the 9.6 billion people who will inhabit the planet by 2050, and food production must increase by 70% by 2050. Read more here 
• Action Line C7: E-Agriculture (Action Line Facilitators meeting and interview)  - Since FAO is the Action Line E-Agriculture co-facilitator, participated in the WSIS Action Line Facilitators Meetings and also an interview was held with James, AzevedoGorgen. 
• WSIS Prizes 2018 - WSIS Prizes 2018 were announced and in the E-Agriculture category 27 projects were nominated. From the 27 projects, 5 were nominated as Champions in the E-Agriculture Category. Read more here

To read the full report click the image below and for summaries here